outdoors

With about a month remaining in the legislative session, dedicated funding for conservation seems perched on a precipice, its future unknown -- the ninth such recurring predicament. The proposal faces a key challenge Tuesday in the Senate, when it comes before the Taxes Committee, while in the House, inertia reigns.

Supported, she says, by Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, and carried by Majority Leader Tony Sertich, DFL-Chisholm, the House's dedicated funding plan hasn't really left the starting blocks. One story is that the chamber's freshmen are to blame, that they are not yet up to speed on how the state got itself into such an environmental pickle, and what needs to be done to fix it.

Consider this a primer:

• In the state's first years, in the mid-1800s, manifest destiny was the prevailing justification for the cutting of the tall pines that grew from the Twin Cities north -- so thick, by one account, the sun barely reached the forest floor between what are now Anoka and Lake Mille Lacs. Lumber was needed, lots of it, and axes swung.

• The federal and state governments needed land for settlers who were headed west. Some land was taken from the Sioux and Chippewa by treaties and other, less formal means. Washington also gave millions of acres of swamplands to the states, with the provision it be converted to farmland. Well underway by the late 1800s, the draining of vast acreages of wetlands in southern and western Minnesota opened lands for crops.

• The state's new farmers needed to get their goods to market. So the state gave land to railways to further the building of a shipping network leading to and from the Twin Cities.

• Decades into the 1900s, the federal and state governments induced still more wetland drainage, and often paid outright to have land converted from moist to dry. About the same time, conservation took hold in Minnesota and across the nation, fueled in large part by the thinking and writings of Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries, including, in Minnesota, James Ford Bell among others. The belief was that too much land had been drained and too many trees had been cut. As a result, topsoil was being washed away, rivers were being silted in, good drinking water was being lost, and ducks, muskrats and other wildlife were being lost.

• By about 1950, the Minnesota Conservation Department, forerunner to the DNR, begin its "Save the Wetlands" program. Noble though the program's effort, and despite occasional successes, the drive to expand, develop and produce never abated. More wetlands were drained. More water spoiled. More wildlife lost.

• In the second half of the last century, the convergence of three trends accelerated the diminishment and loss of Minnesota's natural resources. One was the collapse of the state's rural population. Technology advances led to bigger and bigger farms, less wildlife on those farms, fewer and fewer people, and the loss of countless small towns. Simultaneously, the Twin Cities experienced rapid growth and ever-outward expansion. Finally, a booming economy in recent decades gave more and more people enough money to buy a cabin -- and later, often, houses -- on the state's lakes, rivers and now even wetlands.

• The problem has been threefold: lack of leadership, lack of political will and lack of money. The deck always has been stacked so that conservation of natural resources plays second fiddle to exploitation of those resources. That, after all, is where the money is.

• Matters now are critical in many respects. Ground water in some parts of the state carries harmful chemicals, 40 percent of tested rivers and lakes in the state are polluted, northern forests are being sliced, diced and traded as commodities, wildlife and their habitats are being lost, and open spaces, particularly in the growing suburbs, are going the way of the passenger pigeon.

Should it receive legislative and voter approval, a constitutionally dedicated source of conservation funding, through a fractional increase in the sales tax, won't reverse these trends overnight.

But it could go a long way toward conserving, and preserving, much of what's left, and in the process preserve the reasons, through the years, most of us have chosen to live here: our water, our forests, our prairies.

Inexplicably, that concept has been difficult through the years for many Minnesota legislators to support.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com