If politicians coached the Vikings, fans would learn why Minnesota conservation loses so often

The Vikings might or might not have a winning season in a given year, but by all accounts, the organization is run professionally. The players wear snazzy uniforms, show up for games on time and most weeks, victorious or not, entertain millions of fans while playing in a state-of-the-art stadium.

Such operational successes are no accident. Vikings owners organize their football enterprise according to a proven management model, hiring capable people who share their vision while arranging employees in a hierarchy of responsibility and holding them accountable.

Now compare that model to one with far greater responsibility: ensuring that Minnesota lakes and rivers are clean; its wild lands and the critters they support are conserved; its state parks and similar areas are established and maintained, and its forests are sustained in ways that support loggers, loggerhead shrikes and everything in between.

Here's that model:

A couple hundred people — 201 to be exact — show up in St. Paul, as they will Monday when the Legislature convenes, to begin elbowing and jostling their way to what they consider victory.

For some, "victory'' is defined as ensuring that many of the state's lakes and rivers are not managed as pristine natural resources, but as wastewater and farm-runoff ditches.

Other legislators consider the further weakening of wetland- protection laws as wins, while still others reign triumphant when they convert public resources to private use for financial gain.

Amid such horse trading, a few legislators — too few — consider the continued welfare of the state's natural resources foremost among their sworn duties and push back against the clamoring hordes who seek their conversion to subdivisions, shopping centers or endless fields of corn and soybeans.

So it has forever been with the welfare of Minnesota's woods, waters and fields.

When in 1849 the federal government passed its first Swampland Act, transferring 65 million acres of wetlands to Midwest states, including 5 million acres in Minnesota, manifest destiny was in full blossom.

Immigrants eager to establish farms streamed into what in 1858 became the state of Minnesota, and with it a Legislature whose members accommodated not only its fast-growing citizenry, but its profiteers.

Today Minnesota barely resembles the wild land and wildlife mecca it once was. In 1836, Joseph Laframboise, a French-Indian trader, told a visitor to his southwest Minnesota trading post, "We can give you plenty of buffalo meat and tongues, wild geese, and ducks, prairie hens, young swan, beaver tails, pigeons ... there is plenty of sport here and in a short distance you will find buffalo."

No one is talking like that anymore.

Yet the same resource-peddling structure that since statehood has greased the political skids, enabling 90% of the state's wetlands to be drained, its pine forests to be cut and its wildlife reduced to remnants, remains in place. The Minnesota governor still appoints and has at his beck and call the state's natural resource kingpins, and many of the state's 201 legislators remain in attitude and intent the loyal progeny of their Capitol-inhabiting forebears — still largely unsympathetic, at best, to the welfare of the state's resources.

Faced with the same threats to their lands and waters, Missourians fought back.

In 1937, they demanded establishment of the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDOC) to restore, conserve and regulate Missouri's natural resources. In 1976 they further demanded constitutionally dedicated funding for the MDOC and formation of a four-member, volunteer citizens commission to appoint the department's director, set its policies, approve fish and wildlife laws, undertake strategic conservation planning and approve the MDOC budget.

Commission members are appointed by the Missouri governor. No more than two can be from the same political party. Their six-year staggered terms ensure no single governor can stack appointments.

To the greatest degree possible this setup ensures that when conservation meets politics, as it does every year in every state, conservation wins.

The irony is that Missouri's conservation professionals are no more qualified than the thousands of fish and wildlife managers, and others, employed by the Minnesota DNR. In fact, Minnesota DNR staff, along with those employed by the state Board of Water and Soil Resources and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, are among the nation's most qualified and respected.

The difference is that in Missouri, resource stewards are allowed to do their jobs without 201 legislators and a governor pulling their strings.

Missourians leveraged that state's initiative and referendum petition process to establish and fund the MDOC. Lacking the same opportunity, Minnesotans would need the blessing of the Legislature and the governor to transfer conservation power from them to an independent citizens commission.

Fat chance.

Then again, you never know.

Someday, Minnesotans might rise up and demand the necessary changes, like they did in 2008, when they forced the Legislature to place the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment on the ballot and voters passed it overwhelmingly.

For now, unfortunately, too many people remain indifferent to Minnesota's conservation crises, or are distracted by matters they deem more important.

Like selection of the next Vikings coach.

Maybe it'll be this guy, maybe it'll be that guy.

Whoever gets the nod, it's unlikely that 201 legislators and Gov. Tim Walz will run the show on Sundays next fall when the Purple take the field at U.S. Bank Stadium.

If they did, Vikings fans would learn in a hurry why in Minnesota, conservation loses far more often than it wins.