Is the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources relevant to conservation progress in the state? Or is it largely a bureaucracy that operates state parks, dishes out timber sales, issues millions of licenses and permits, and provides employment to nearly 3,000 people?
History would argue the DNR is not so much a conserver of resources in Minnesota as it is a broker of those resources among interests and people wanting to use or exploit them for their benefit.
Conservation, meanwhile, true conservation in Minnesota, has been left to citizens who over the years have formed themselves into organizations such as the Minnesota Conservation Federation, Muskies Inc., the Minnesota Waterfowl Association, the Minnesota Environmental Partnership, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and Pheasants Forever, among others.
That must change if Minnesota is going to save itself from the ill effects of urban sprawl, rampant development and industrial agriculture.
What must the DNR do?
It must join in a growing effort to change the way it and other state conservation agencies do business. It must also pinpoint the state's greatest conservation challenges, and under new DNR Commissioner Mark Holsten, address those challenges effectively in the near term.
Either that or the quality of Minnesota's lakes, rivers, fields and forests will continue to diminish, as private conservation interests look to the DNR for leadership, or at least partnership, and find none.
Should that happen, over a very short time the DNR will relegate itself to a place of even more irrelevancy, with little expected of the agency in terms of conservation.
And less delivered.
Here, then, are six conservation priorities the DNR -- together with individuals and private conservation groups -- must address.
Improve water quality
As badly needed as more money is to address the state's many water problems, the DNR -- together with BWSR, the MPCA and other state, federal and regional agencies -- must intensify efforts to monitor, conserve and clean up the state's many impaired waters.
It seems only a few short years ago when the "Land of Sky Blue Waters" was just that. No more. Tens of thousands of rural homeowners "straight pipe" sewage directly into the nearest lake or river. Some cities only minimally clean up municipal discharges before sending them downstream. And ditch and stream buffers are virtually non-existent in entire townships, ensuring the further siltation of streams and rivers, and the fouling of those waters with farmland runoff.
A big job? The biggest. But it won't resolve itself. More money is needed, yes. But willpower and leadership are in shorter supply than cash, and if mustered, would have a greater positive effect on the state's greatest resource.
Preserve, restore wetlands
Creative thinking is needed here, as it is to resolve other of the state's major conservation problems.
Embarrassing but true, the state has resigned itself to the loss of about 90 percent of its farmland wetlands -- with little hope of preserving many of those that remain.
What to do? Begin, where appropriate, by assigning a public value to private assets that have great societal benefit. Wetlands are chief among these. Yet private landowners -- on whose property most remaining wetlands exist -- are in many cases taxed on non-productive lands such as wetlands as much as they are on prime cropland.
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