Farewell to Voices for the Land

By Brian Peterson, Star Tribune

Last update: September 1, 2001 - 11:00 PM

Voices for the Land encouraged Minnesotans to write about the land they love, defend its existence, fight for its preservation or just eulogize their favorite place. For the past year we have featured one essay and one photograph weekly in Sunday's Variety section, 54 essays in all, from every corner of the state. Howard Schaaps contributed a moving essay from Buffalo Ridge in the southwest, while Joanne Hart described one of the state's most beautiful rivers, the Pigeon River in northeastern Minnesota. We have visited the 20-by 30-foot backyard of Margaret Miles in south Minneapolis, and sat with 12-year-old Thuy Nguyen on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul. We have walked with Jeri Niedenfuer on the dirt roads of the Cuyuna Iron Range, seeking what urbanized bodies and souls crave: nature left alone, untended and undisturbed.

It has been a thrill to meet the authors, on their own turf, and to experience firsthand the landscapes that move them. It has been a challenge to translate their words into photographs that capture the essence of their feelings about those places.

After traveling more than 15,000 miles in the past year, the Voices for the Land feature will end today with a walk through the bog with Lewann Sotnak and her sister, Beatrice Martinson.

If you missed any of the essays, the full collection of essays and photographs are featured online, indexed by season at: http://www.star tribune.com/voices.

A nonprofit organization called 1000 Friends of Minnesota, working on behalf of citizens to protect the state's environment, has adopted the Voices for the Land essay project and recently completed its second round of competition, with winners posted on its Web site: http://www.1000fom.org. Future projects include Voices for the City, planned for early 2002.

I would like to end this project as we began, with the words of Minnesota author Paul Gruchow: "A place is not a thing, it is a relationship. A location becomes a place only in the context of time, of history. Beauty has little to do with it, or rarity, or purity. It is quite possible to love an urban alley, or an old swamp, or an abandoned farmhouse, or a dirt road, as it is to love the Mississippi, or the North Shore or the Boundary Waters. Beauty in nature is like beauty among human beings: It lies in the eyes of its beholders. So it is to be expected that the places here described so affectionately are not, in the main, those one would first think of as the best Minnesota has to offer, nor those one would think first to try and save. But we should think of them and try to save them. Ordinary places are as necessary for a good community as are ordinary people. Let us celebrate them, places and people both, every one."

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