Part 1: Minnesota's lifeblood

When these big lakes are still – do you remember, when you were small, they filled a glass of water full for you, and then put on one more drop, so that the water stood up over the edge of the glass? These lakes seem overfull of beauty, like that, and sometimes I can hardly bear it. – Florence Page Jaques, 1927.

Water flows through everything Minnesotan: landscapes, lifestyles, history, humor, politics, art, literature, commerce -- culture. Our souls, some would say.

People born here take plentiful lakes and streams as a birthright, and they quickly become the equivalent for immigrants like Mrs. Jaques, an Illinois-born New Yorker who married, in her late 30s, an Aitkin man who would become Sigurd Olson's illustrator. Within months, the newlyweds were off on a three-week canoe trip near the Canadian border. Her travel journal records an overnight conversion experienced by countless newcomers from places less blessed with water, which is most places.

Water images are prominent in the state seal and state song, and it was no surprise when Minnesota's commemorative quarter was struck with a fishing boat and lake-dwelling loon on the reverse. Blue waterscapes are home not only to the state bird but also the state grain (wild rice) and state gemstone (Lake Superior agate). Water is essential to an economy so reliant on tourism, timber, agriculture and myriad recreational pursuits. The Minnesota town that has no lake or river is considered an unfortunate rarity.

Why, then, do we treat this resource so shabbily?

Perhaps precisely because, as Florence Jaques observed, our cup seems so perpetually overfull. Also because water's resilience is easy to overestimate: A lake in serious decline can still look pretty good from the road. Also because we learn as schoolchildren that all the water ever present on the earth is here still, cycling as arrows of evaporation and rain. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot.

One simple measure: When the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency tests a lake or stream against federal water-quality standards -- and these fall well short of pristine -- the odds are nearly even that it will flunk. Virtually every lake in the state carries a warning against eating too much mercury-tainted fish, and each summer a few more beaches are closed to swimming.

In Africa, where droughts are common and lakes are rare, schoolchildren learn a proverb: You can't wash dirty water.

Pollutants from cities and industries kill the fish in our streams. Many waterways are covered with oil slicks and contain growths of algae that destroy productive life and make the water unfit for recreation. ... A lake that has served many generations of men now can be destroyed by man in less than one generation.

President Lyndon Johnson in a special message to Congress, 1968.

In some places, in some ways, water quality has greatly improved during 30-some years of effort driven by federal law. The Mississippi River, especially, and many other large streams and lakes are notably cleaner because industrial and sewage discharges have declined dramatically. But this visible progress makes it too easy to overlook what's gotten worse.

Agricultural runoff is now the single biggest pollution source, and the problem is growing for two main reasons: First, the bad stuff doesn't come out of a pipe, so it's harder to pinpoint; second, farming has always enjoyed broad exemption from the regulatory regimes applied to other industries. It's illegal for a soybean grower to pour a pint of leftover pesticide into a creek, but to let gallons of it wash into the creek with the rain -- or to flush it through drain tile -- is OK.

Indeed, farm policies firmly encourage more production and, therefore, more runoff of pesticides, fertilizers and silt. After degrading local lakes and streams, these pollutants make their way to the "Dead Zone," a vast portion of the Gulf of Mexico where there is too little oxygen for much of anything to live. It has been calculated that our Minnesota River -- draining one-third of the state, and a prime focus of voluntary runoff-reduction efforts -- contributes 6 to 8 percent of the Dead Zone's nitrates load, all on its own.

Another way of looking at agricultural pollution in the Minnesota River is to get close to its waters -- say, in a boat. A few summers back I paddled a kayak upstream from the Minnesota's confluence with the Mississippi. I saw many dead, bloated fish but few birds until I beached for lunch and admired four soaring eagles, which, coming closer, turned out to be buzzards. The river reeked.

It also stinks in the middle of winter, as I found one February morning, paddling past the same confluence. Thick ice sheets were beginning to break up, and the water flowing out from underneath carried fecal-looking blobs. Can't say for sure what they were, but I have paddled amid unmistakable poop in the channel between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, in the heart of Minneapolis, in waters that are the city's leading icon and point of pride.

My lake is my backyard, it has always been there for me, and always will be. The ducks and the fish, the plants, all are perfectly intertwined; all are at peace with themselves. I can find peace in these waters, every stress and pressure of life melts away as I coast aimlessly about. I am two minutes from my house, but I am a million miles to sea.

Jeff Hughes of Andover High School, in a winning essay for a contest sponsored last year by the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness.

It seems unmannerly to say that a lot of Minnesotans treat public waters like a toilet, but consider: More than 60,000 Minnesota households flush their toilets and drain their kitchen sinks through "straight-pipe" systems that carry the untreated waste into public waterways. Perhaps 140,000 others have septic systems so deficient they wouldn't pass inspection, if periodic inspections were required (for the most part, they are not). State Sen. Mike Jungbauer of East Bethel, who also happens to be in the septic business, recalls visiting a household whose holding tank for sewage was a buried 1949 Cadillac. In scores of small communities, municipally operated treatment plants are grossly defective.

Sounds like Appalachia, doesn't it? But this is what's happening in the land of sky-blue waters, and the excuse is always the same: We can't afford to do better. Give us a grant.

There are signs at the entrances to the canoe country these days warning you against eating too many fish. ... One once went, like Thoreau, to the wilderness to be freed and purified. Freedoms and purifications of the soul are still to be found there, but the body cannot now escape the transgressions of our industrial labors.

Paul Gruchow in "Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild," 1997.

Minnesota got a wake-up call on water quality last summer, when the state Court of Appeals issued a decision essentially blocking any industrial or municipal growth that would increase wastewater discharges into waters flowing to Lake Pepin. The Pepin watershed is 48 percent of Minnesota.

The problem is that this majestic, wide swath of the Mississippi below Lake City, beloved by sailors and boaters of all kinds, worshiped by waterskiers as the birthplace of their sport, flunks federal standards for silt and phosphorus.

The MPCA tried to get around the law by saying the cities of Maple Lake and Annandale could have a permit for new wastewater discharges because offsetting reductions had been achieved elsewhere. But under the Clean Water Act, an "impaired water" like Pepin can't be burdened with new pollution until the state has developed a clear, comprehensive and necessarily sweeping plan for bringing it back to health. The MPCA is working on such a plan, but won't complete it before 2009; dozens of projects are held up till then.

Even after that plan is in place, countless Minnesota communities will find their ambitions blocked. Within the vast Pepin watershed are scores of smaller ones, and nearly half of these are likely to require their own cleanup plans.

Elsewhere in Minnesota, some two dozen other watersheds have already been identified as requiring such plans before new permits can be granted. The list is certain to grow; MPCA has completed pollution assessments for only 16 percent of the state's lakes and 10 percent of its streams and river segments. So far, a consistent 40 percent have flunked federal standards. More than 1,000 lakes and 700 river sections are now listed as impaired; we are on track to be the Land of 10,000 Impaired Waters by decade's end.

Though the point was only a small part of the vastness reaching to the arctic, from it I could survey the whole. While it would be mine for only a short time, this glaciated shore with its twisted trees and caribou moss would grow into my life and the lives of all who shared it with me.

Sigurd Olson in "Listening Point," 1958.

A bold plan for restoring Minnesota's waters was put before the Legislature in 2005 (and, more modestly, in this year's short session). It had the backing of virtually every interest group active on water-quality issues, from environmentalists to sportsmen to business groups to municipal associations.

The idea was simplicity itself: We all rely on clean water, and we all ought to pay a little more to reverse its decline in quality. If each household on a sewer line paid $3 a month on its water bill, and each using a well and septic system paid the same on its property-tax bill, most problems could be remedied in about 10 years.

There was extended quibbling over the details, and then the whole package died a quiet death. The consensus explanation: Legislators were afraid to stand for reelection after approving a $36-a-year bump to clean up the water in this land of 10,000 lakes.

Maybe next year.

Ron Meador is a Star Tribune editorial writer.