Great news for Minnesota and the Great Lakes! The Great Lakes Compact has nearly passed its last hurdle. The eighth and final state legislature approved the Compact last Thursday. Signatures by Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s Governors will complete the ratification process by all participating states and Canadian provinces. Now the next move is for Congress to enact the Compact into law. (more…)

Conservation Minnesota’s new website Check My Lake continues to shine a light on the state of Minnesota’s water quality. (more…)

Conservation Minnesota has launched a new web page dedicated to reporting the condition of the state’s beaches just in time for summer beach going season.

State law does not require swimming beaches to be regularly tested – or posted when there is pollution – but some counties, districts, and cities choose to do so. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency also monitors Lake Superior beaches during the summer. The beach data page pulls data from these different sources and compiles it in one easy-to-use page. The report is available here.

This new tool follows the spring launch of Check My Lake, a site that allows people to easily look up whether their local lake is too polluted for swimming or fishing

A new report from the Healing Our Waters coalition summarizes potential impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes region. It also details how proposed Great Lakes restoration legislation in Congress could help the Lakes buffer themselves from some of these effects.

This summer, Minnesota families who want to know if their favorite Minnesota lake is clean enough for swimming and eating fish caught in that lake have an easy way to find out – www.CheckMyLake.org.

Powered by Conservation Minnesota, the new website is a user-friendly way that Minnesotans can find out whether their favorite lakes are clean or polluted – or haven’t been tested yet. The site relies on the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA)’s database but makes the information easy to access and comprehend.

By going to http://www.checkmylake.org, the website’s users can either type in the name of a favorite lake or type in a county name and choose from among a list to find out whether lakes have been tested and what the results show.

According to the MPCA, nearly half of lakes tested are polluted. More troubling, for every lake MPCA has tested, there are 4 more that the agency hasn’t tested.

Groundwater—that stuff that trickles through sand, gravel and cracks beneath our feet, that provides 70 percent of the drinking water in this state but is often out-shined by all those beautiful lakes and rivers—is in the news these days. People are not only starting to worry about what’s in it, but how much of it is left. This attention to water is important because of one simple, hard truth: they ain’t making any more of it. Basically water is the ultimate recyclable product, and what we do to it now—quantity and quality wise—will show up centuries from now. That’s why it’s good to see the Minnesota Environmental Quality Board is convening an interagency working group to examine how the booming ethanol industry, among other things, is affecting groundwater. While working on a groundwater article for the current issue of the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, I talked to rural residents and hydrologists who already know what impact ethanol plants can have on water in a localized region. One problem is most of those plants are being built in parts of the state that are corn rich, but water poor. But one bit of good news related to groundwater that I stumbled across while researching the story came out of Rochester. There, officials have figured out how to remove dangerous levels of one common pollutant from water without breaking the bank. A bonus of this system is that it relies on protecting natural landscapes in the area—one of those win-win situations people like so much. Once the EQB gets done looking at what thirsty industries like ethanol are doing to our groundwater, they and others concerned about the future of the wet stuff would do well to examine Rochester’s experience. It’s a lesson in learning from history and using that education to ensure a better future. (more…)

Tyrone Hayes, the Berkeley researcher whose atrazine research made him persona non grata at an MPCA meeting a few years ago, will be on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning program (91.1 FM in the Twin Cities) Wednesday, Oct. 10, beginning at 10:06 a.m. The interview should be a good warm-up for the Senate hearing at 1 p.m. that day on pesticides and attempts by government and corporations to intimidate scientists who study the environmental impacts of agrichemicals. A recent article on the Twin Cities Daily Planet website provides nice background on how pesticide research conducted by former MPCA hydrologist Paul Wotzka led to his current role as government whistleblower.

I was talking to a hydrologist the other day when he mentioned he was investigating the development of a sinkhole adjacent to a large dairy manure lagoon in Winona County. Southeast Minnesota’s fractured limestone geology, otherwise known as karst, has always offered a handy way for pollutants such as liquid manure to find their way into our groundwater. Sinkholes can appear literally overnight in that part of the country under even normal meteorological conditions. And when you have an unprecedented flooding event like the one that occurred in August, the combination of fast-moving water, liquid crap-fueled hydraulics and Swiss cheese-like rock formations has the makings of a manure meltdown. Well, the Aug. 31 Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Southeastern Minnesota Flash Flooding Situation Report confirms that in localized areas, this is exactly what happened. Read it and weep: (more…)

It would be a wise for members of the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee to keep farmers like Brad and Leslea Hodgson in mind as they hammer out the final version of the 2007 Farm Bill during the next several weeks. A certain program called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program was tailor-made for farmers like the Hodgsons. Unfortunately, the program, called EQIP for short, has been perverted to the point where it’s become a cash cow for environmentally disastrous factory livestock operations. It doesn’t have to be that way, and calls to two Minnesota members of the Senate Ag Committee during the next month could make EQIP live up to its name as an “environmental” program. (more…)

Clean Up the River Environment has a new clip up on mercury and the proposed Big Stone II coal plant just across the border.

You can learn more at http://www.beyondbigstone2.com/