Robert G. Dunn, a Minnesota small-business owner, conservationist and Republican legislator from Princeton in the 1960s and '70s, was an architect of landmark environmental legislation that won bipartisan support and national recognition. Dunn died March 15 at his Princeton home at age 94.
He was a friendly man, whose smile belied his imposing 6-foot-4, 220-pound stature. As a legislator, he was known for his calm, studied approach and was respected by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Dunn's son George, a St. Paul attorney, said it was fitting that his father was eulogized by former U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger, a Republican, and Peter Gove, a retired businessman and Democrat who was the first executive director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in the 1970s. Gove started as an environmental aide to the late Gov. Wendell Anderson.
"Of the 15-plus major environmental statutes passed in that landmark 1973 session, Sen. Bob Dunn co-authored most of them," Gove said at the funeral at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Princeton.
"When I remember those legislators who were the key allies of the Anderson administration on conservation and environmental legislation, Bob was always there for the good of his constituents, our state and our natural heritage."
Dunn also served DFL and GOP governors on environmental and waste-management boards after he retired from the Legislature in 1980. He always said being an environmental steward was a "conservative" act in the long-term interests of nature and the economy.
The former retail-lumber company owner was an authority on complex environmental issues. He spent 15 years, until retirement in 1995, on state commissions that dealt with tough problems involving hazardous waste disposal, pipeline safety, nuclear waste disposal, timber cutting and others.
He loved walking the woods, and planted an estimated 20,000 tree seedlings with his children on family land on Caribou Lake in northeastern Minnesota.
