In divining the essence of “The Good Life in Minnesota,” the authors of the 1973 Time magazine cover story steadily alluded to a remarkable reverence among the many state’s people for his or her well-watered and richly diverse natural landscape.
“Many of the mood in Minnesota has to do with comparatively unspoiled land. Such an abundance and accessibility of nature has much to do with the Minnesotans’ sense of place and roots,” Time observed. “Greater than almost some other American people, they’re outdoor people, and not less than 50 percent of them customarily vacation inside their very own state.”
Time also suggested Minnesota was out front in what was then a still nascent environmental movement. Activists on the time were fighting to stop the dumping of asbestos-laden taconite tailings into Lake Superior and to preserve as pristine wilderness an unlimited expanse of lakes, rock and forest on the boundary with Canada.
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Minnesota (meaning “sky-colored water” within the language of our original inhabitants) comprises a very magical mosaic of biodiversity: sparkling clear lakes, wetlands and mighty rivers, deep woods, rolling hills, wide-open prairies and farmscapes and more parks and guarded public lands than most other states. Then and now, a robust environmentalist ethic and a vigorous outdoorsy culture prevail. As climate change and environmental injustice for a more racially diverse community escalate to the extent of existential challenges, these nature-loving traits are being reinforced.
On almost any rating that pertains to environmentalism, conservation or outdoor activity, Minnesota ranks near the highest or above the median among the many states. Key comparisons by national organizations include these: The state ranks third in per capita investment in parks and recreation; fifth amongst bicycle-friendly states; seventh on overall environmental protections and “greenest” states; seventh on recycling; 12th in air and water quality, and 13th least polluted. (See rankings summaries attached to the tip of this commentary.)
Along with multiple state agencies and native government offices now dedicated to environmental stewardship, Minnesota’s culture is formed by scores of effective nonprofit organizations that wield influence through research and advocacy. They reveal problems and publish reports, attract media attention and sometimes file lawsuits. The Minnesota Environmental Partnership’s website lists about 100 environmental groups and nonprofits, with the advisory that the list shouldn’t be exhaustive.
Despite this legacy and a historic breakthrough on environmental protection within the 2023 legislative session, progress often has been delayed lately by an increasingly intransigent political faction within the state and nation. Although early environmental motion before 1973 often was achieved under moderate Republican leadership, cooperation from that party has evaporated in recent many years. A much more conservative GOP has aligned itself ever more closely with fossil fuel corporations and other polluting industries and with anti-government ideology that opposes further environmental regulation. MAGA Republicans, loyal to former president Donald Trump relatively than traditional GOP values, often describe climate change as a hoax and climate motion as a socialist plot.
Furthermore, some environmental leaders in Minnesota, in addition to agency employees, worry not only about fierce obstruction from MAGA conservatives but in addition about state agencies they contend have turn into too complacent and accommodating. DFL leaders acknowledge they fear that more aggressive motion will result in further defection from conservative rural voters who often are influenced by agribusiness and extractive industries of their communities and by conservative media.
Loving the land, counting the ways
In a transient aside in regards to the state’s drawbacks, as a counterpoint to all of the natural wonders, Time flagged the indisputable fact of “winters as hard because the Ice Age.’’ There isn’t any major metropolitan area in the USA with colder winters than the Twin Cities. Average lows in January within the Twin Cities are barely colder than Moscow and Anchorage, and naturally the lows in International Falls and Ely are on a par with Siberia.
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Except for winter, which has been so reliably cold and snowy that it has created considered one of the nation’s larger winter tourism industries, there may be every thing to like about this geography. (A disclaimer is so as here in regards to the writer’s pre-existing condition, namely, a prideful affection for this particular a part of the earth. I grew up in Alaska and perversely relish coming back from winter Sun Belt getaways and inhaling a draft of cold, crisp air on stepping out of the airport. I do try to withstand the temptation to denigrate those that can’t stand the extremes as “riffraff.”)
Superlatives about this place are infinite, starting with the “minne,” the water prefix that’s attached to dozens of place names. This land is the burbling, gurgling fountainhead for the eastern two-thirds of the continent, the headwaters for the drainage area between the Appalachians and the Rockies. Almost no water flows into Minnesota from someplace else. Water that falls here flows north to Hudson Bay, south to the Gulf of Mexico and east through the Great Lakes to the North Atlantic. This provides the state ocean-like frontage of the most important freshwater lake on the planet and we own a bigger stretch of the Mississippi River than some other state. These facts allow ship-sized vessels through each the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Mississippi River, and the precise to assert status as the North Coast of the USA.
Minnesota also has a more varied and sharply contrasting set of biomes than most states between the Appalachians and the Rockies. These include prairie grassland in an L-shaped area to the west and south, a belt of aspen parkland within the northwest, evergreen boreal forests on the rocky Canadian Shield within the northeast and rolling hills and deciduous forest within the southeast and up through the Twin Cities and central Minnesota.
Minnesota overflows not only with H2O, the compound that’s basic to all types of life, nevertheless it is off-the-charts wealthy in other vital stuff that humans value. Deep, wealthy black earth within the southern and western counties produces crop yields which can be among the many world’s highest and puts the state perennially at about fifth in total value of farm products. Iron is the mineral substance on which the Industrial Revolution was built, and Minnesota was blessed (or cursed) with the most important deposits in the USA, still accounting for 70% of U.S. production. Add to those resources the vast tree-covered acreage, and although the magnificent virgin white pine was obliterated almost a century ago, Minnesota still ranks 14th in the full value of forestry products.
From exploitation to conservation
When European traders and explorers first saw this terrain, in addition they saw dollar signs. And people with essentially the most money and power took early advantage, quickly seizing these abundant resources from the Ojibwe and Dakota people and exploiting human labor to construct enormous personal fortunes and grand mansions along Summit Avenue and palatial homes on Lake Minnetonka.
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MNOpedia, the Minnesota Historical Society’s online encyclopedia that runs every Monday in MinnPost, offers a concise overview of how all this activity had turned Minnesota by the late 1800s into “a humming cauldron of agricultural and industrial activity. It also profoundly disrupted the state’s existing ecosystems. Busting prairie sod, denuding woodlands, and tunneling deep beneath the earth destroyed forests and grasslands, increased soil erosion and decimated wildlife populations.”
Amongst essentially the most immediate disastrous results were devastating fires that swept across the dry slash left by clear-cutting, killing lots of of individuals in 4 horrific fires between 1894 and 1918. As rivers became open sewers and farming methods depleted the soil, Minnesotans rose to the occasion and joined national efforts to challenge corporate exploitation of places and their people.
Minnesota led the best way with the creation of the primary congressionally mandated national forest. Hunters and anglers won battles to control fishing and hunting in order that populations wouldn’t be worn out and created a Department of Conservation in 1931 (now the Department of Natural Resources). Minnesotans also built considered one of the nation’s earliest and eventually one the most important state park systems, with greater than 75 parks or recreation areas, strategically distributed in order that no resident is greater than 50 miles away from a park unit.
The transition from a society based on extracting natural resources to a tourism economy more focused on appreciating the land began to essentially take hold within the Nineteen Thirties, with the marketing of Minnesota as “The Land of 10,000 Lakes’’ and the nation’s premier summer destination. (After I first laid eyes on Minnesota as I crossed the St. Croix River on Interstate 94 in 1971, the very first thing I noticed was an enormous billboard that said “Welcome to Minnesota. Have Fun!” I did.)
Countless hundreds of abnormal Minnesotans played their part in these efforts to guard their precious a part of the Earth and a number of became nationally outstanding. These include Sigurd Olson, writer and activist who helped write the federal Wilderness Act of 1964; Winona La Duke, an Ojibwe tribal member and fighter for Indigenous and environmental causes who was twice a vice-presidential candidate for the national Green Party; and Ann Bancroft and Will Steger, polar explorers and leading voices for climate motion.
Accelerating activism since 1973
Since 1973, environmental concerns have risen steadily as a top policy priority. Early success in reducing the flow of sewage and industrial effluents into our rivers led to greater vigilance by communities and public agencies, discovery of further degradation, and efforts to deal with the issues.
A listing of major initiatives would come with statewide recycling and solid waste reduction, lots of of hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in storm sewer separation and improved water systems, discovery and remediation for impaired surface water in all forms, challenges to further growth of nuclear power and waste storage, expanded mass transit systems including light-rail for the Twin Cities, restoration of habitat for threatened bees and pollinators, sustainable agriculture and native food movements, legal motion against dozens of business polluters and the introduction of “smart growth’’ plans that discourage suburban sprawl and automobile emissions while encouraging housing density and healthier lifestyles.
Twice over that period in voting for ballot initiatives, Minnesota voters made decisive statements of support for environmental investment. A constitutional amendment making a state lottery in 1988 provided for 40% of the proceeds to go toward an Environmental Trust Fund. In one of the vital extraordinary displays of popular support for the cause, Minnesota voters in 2008 approved a statewide ballot initiative – the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment – that raised their very own sales taxes for environmental projects and humanities and cultural investment.
Lately, the push for racial equity has dovetailed more closely than ever with environmental movements. Because the state’s racial diversity increased from 2% to 25% from 1973 to 2023, policymakers became increasingly conscious of research showing how environmental damage disproportionately affects marginalized communities of color. Examples include the inevitable proximity of polluters and low-income neighborhoods of color and rural communities; Latino farm staff exposed to toxic chemicals; and indigenous tribal lands threatened by spills from pipelines. An environmental activist base that had been primarily white for a lot of many years is now strongly reinforced by younger people of color.
Minnesota’s environmental ethic has been so strong for therefore long that even its most conservative leaders have felt compelled to not less than pay lip service to the ideals. Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty departed from right-wing orthodoxy to push for renewable energy goals greater than 20 years ago. But further progress lately was stymied by gridlock within the Legislature when conservative Republicans held narrow control over one or each chambers.
The 2022 election cleared the obstruction, not less than temporarily. A DFL trifecta and essentially the most racially diverse Legislature in history immediately pushed through essentially the most ambitious green agenda for the reason that Seventies. The centerpiece of the $2 billion package was a requirement that the state’s electric power grid be carbon-free by 2040. As well as, a $115 million fund was created to match federal dollars for climate and energy projects. Along with increased funding for existing public agencies charged with environmental oversights, dozens of other appropriations and laws were approved. Amongst them: funding for solar panels on schools and public buildings, rebates for electric vehicles, creation of a “green bank” to finance clean energy projects, tough latest regulation on “ceaselessly chemicals” like those involved within the 3M Company’s contamination of groundwater in Washington County, and latest protections for “environmental justice areas’’ which have been subject to pollution up to now. Funding also was increased sharply for traditional outdoors pursuits, for hunters and anglers and campers, from planting trees and restoring wetlands to constructing latest boat ramps and fish hatcheries and campground facilities.
Many more battles lie ahead and pushback against implementation of 2023 laws is inevitable. Opposition to greener policies stays fierce, entrenched and well-funded. Internal conflicts are developing within the broad center-left pro-environment side of the spectrum, over issues akin to returning to nuclear power for carbon reduction or reversing smart growth policies for the Twin Cities. Some activists, including former Republican Gov. Arne Carlson, are openly and bitterly critical of DFL Gov. Tim Walz for not doing more to stop any latest mining projects in northeast Minnesota. Public enthusiasm for environmental policy could be hard to sustain, and polling shows that many voters and consumers turn against green policies if it involves even minimal cost or inconvenience. Optimism in regards to the world’s ability to reverse climate change runs up against indifference and pessimism about an apocalyptic global climate collapse
But in Minnesota not less than, the case for optimism could be present in that basic instinct that Time identified in Minnesota’s culture 50 years ago: a reverence for the natural world and a desire to live in sustainable harmony with it. This guiding ethic could be heard in ancient indigenous prayers asking for the Great Spirit to assist humans “walk softly” on the land. Beloved Minnesota naturalist Sigurd Olson’s poetic pleas for shielding our blessed piece of the earth echoed that hopeful refrain:
Minnesota rankings on environmental metrics
#2 Best City Park Systems (St. Paul)2021 Best Park Systems: See Where Parks In Your City Rank | Across America, US Patch
#3 Best City Park Systems (Minneapolis) 2021 Best Park Systems: See Where Parks In Your City Rank | Across America, US Patch
#3 Annual Per Capita Investment in Parks & Recreation15 States Spending the Most on Parks and Recreation (moneytalksnews.com)
#4 Lowest Overall Risk from Climate Change Best & Worst States for Climate Change | SafeHome.org
#4 Best Tap Water Best & Worst Tap Water within the US: State-by-State Evaluation (waterdefense.org)
#5 Bicycle Friendly States: BFS_2022_Overall_Rankings_Chart_v2.pdf (bikeleague.org)
#7 Best for Natural Environment (describe) The ten Best States for Natural Environment | Best States | U.S. News (usnews.com)
#7 “Greenest” States Which States Are the Most Environmentally Friendly? – Earth911
#7Recycling Rate Latest Report Ranks U.S. States Based on Recycling Performance (waste360.com)
#12 Air & Water Quality Rankings: Air and Water Quality – Best States (usnews.com)
#13 Least Pollution Rankings: Pollution – Best and Worst States (usnews.com)
#16 State Outdoor Recreation as a Percent of Economy orsa1122.png (2070×1355) (bea.gov)
#16 Percent of Land Protected States That Are Conserving the Most Land | Stacker
#17 Trees Per Capita Most Forested States [Updated May 2023] (worldpopulationreview.com)
#22 Lowest Population Density US Population Density by States [Report 2023] (usabynumbers.com)
Other sources and links:
From Sustenance to Leisure on Minnesota Land | MNopedia
Harold LeVander Launches Pollution Control Agency- Wikipedia
Environmental Justice Explainer| Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (mncenter.org)
Environmental Racism within the Twin Cities (arcgis.com)
Logging Industry | Minnesota Historical Society (mnhs.org)
Minneapolis man amongst small group who began Earth Day 50 years ago (startribune.com)
6 Black Environmental Activists Who Modified History | Sierra Club
Climate of Minneapolis–Saint Paul – Wikipedia
Tourism in Minnesota, 1835–1940 | MNopedia
Fact Sheet on Pawlenty Renewable Goals 2017_02_27_renewable_energy_standard_fact_sheet.pdf (mn.gov)
Pawlenty can’t outrun climate past – POLITICO
Nuclear at a Crossroads: Does nuclear power stand a likelihood in Minnesota amid a moratorium and carbon-free mandate? | MinnPost
State lawmakers conform to ‘historic’ environment and climate bill | MPR News