Dennis Anderson: For better future, we need money now

Wednesday, Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller took the lead on a Senate bill that -- clearing its first legislative hurdle -- raises the state sales tax to fund intensified natural resource conservation. The bill would also pay for additional parks, cleaner water and more arts. Various constituencies have responded by decamping into tribes combative enough to suggest anarchy. Think Iraq.

But legislators who can rise above the question of how much the sales tax should be raised for conservation, or whether the arts should be funded, can join this session in an exercise not nearly so divisive, and every bit as important.

Namely, how the business of conservation is managed, or organized, in Minnesota, and -- a corollary -- how conservation is delivered in the state.

Thursday at the Capitol, the governor's 15-member Conservation Legacy Council held another in a series of nearly daylong meetings to study those questions. Money also was discussed. But everyone knows too little money is spent in the state to keep our waters clean, to preserve our uplands, and to protect and manage our forests.

Under the direction of U professor Mike Kilgore, the council is still in its "listening" phase, and has entertained the reports, notions and ideas of various state agencies, conservation groups and, Thursday, farm groups.

Again, while everyone acknowledges more money is needed, the question of more money suggests other questions, and other questions still.

Such as:

If we pour more money into the state's present conservation management system by increasing inflows to the Department of Natural Resources, the Pollution Control Agency (PCA) and the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR), what assurances do we have that positive, measurable outcomes will result?

Meaning, what bang will we get for our buck?

Unfortunately, that question is not easily answered.

Let's look at some of what we know.

• Minnesota's current conservation management system is broken. We can prove this empirically, meaning our losses (in wetlands, prairies, water quality, species diversity, etc.) can be measured -- and indeed those losses might warrant more exact measuring if they weren't so obvious. And if time weren't so short.

• People most likely to defend the current system are employed by it, products of it or benefit by it (with exceptions).

• Contradicting, in part, the above points, Minnesota employs some of the best natural resource professionals in the world.

• The DNR never was intended to be a proactive, dirt-beneath-the-fingernails, resource preservation and management agency. Rather, generally, it manages by fiat, and even then at the direction of the Legislature and the governor.

• Conservation in Minnesota never has been given a chance to compete on equal footing with development, agriculture or, really, any for-profit venture. This is no one's fault in particular, but, rather, everyone's fault. It's who we are.

• The "vertical" nature of Minnesota -- meaning that it extends north to south over many different landscapes and ecosystems -- poses a vexing problem for developing a one-size-fits-all conservation management and delivery system. Case in point: The state's southeast hardwoods and northwest flatlands are so different from one another they could be on opposite sides of the planet.

• Management schemes for the DNR, the PCA and BWSR are different from one another, and none shows a clear advantage over the other.

• No state in the nation has a citizenry as attuned to the outdoors and conservation as Minnesota.

What to do? Some thoughts:

• Absent more money, there's no hope. Minnesota will continue to devolve, with its waters becoming murkier, its wetland losses accelerating, and its fish and wildlife free-falling to one declination or another. And we will become another Indiana, albeit a watery one.

• A new, comprehensive conservation management and delivery system must be developed that, yes, is better funded, but that also incorporates local involvement and decision-making while institutionalizing an operating structure that ensures (more-or-less) uniform outcomes, no matter the region of the state it's applied.

• Any new, successful, conservation management system that is developed necessarily will be the result of big, bold, informed thinking. And big, bold, informed risk-taking.

The first step toward developing such a solution has been taken with formation of the CLC.

But Pogemiller and House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher must also find more money for conservation management and delivery this session, preferably in the form of a proposed constitutional amendment proposal.

We'll know by May, when legislators adjourn, whether their money and the CLC's new ideas have combined to produce new hope for Minnesota and its natural resources.

Coming Sunday: How others envision Minnesota's conservation-management future.