The State We're In, Part 3: 'Ecological disaster': Building boom threatens lakes

Tossing a holstered .40-caliber Glock into the baggage hold of a Cessna, Dick Stoltman scrambles into the plane's left front seat, cranks the key and angles the craft onto a ribbon of asphalt.

There he pauses a long moment before pouring fuel to the airplane's lone engine, catapulting it -- and him -- into the crisp autumn morning.

Sparkling below are broad expanses of water separated by towering pines, leafy oaks and gangling, bare-limbed aspens.

Chromatic as a postcard, the panorama inspires an amalgam of sentiments, each in high demand these days: bliss and tranquillity, joy and inspiration.

Yet Stoltman, a conservation officer-pilot for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, sees something else.

"It's an ecological disaster," he says. "And no one seems to know -- or care."

Making his point, Stoltman draws the Cessna into a long arc over Gilbert Lake, which lies at the foot of the Brainerd airport.

"The vegetation also holds the lake bottom and shoreline together. Some days from up here, when the wind is blowing, I can see silt stirred up by waves being pushed along the shoreline until it's drawn out into the lake in a plume, where it kills more vegetation.

"If it covers fish eggs, it kills those, too."

Leveling the plane at 800 feet, and bearing north-northwest, Stoltman casts an eye below, where on this day a hunter sits in a tree, clad in blaze orange.

Farther in the distance, a few hundred ducks, mostly bluebills, squat contentedly on a small lake.

Stoltman, an Army vet, flew a similar-size Cessna, an O-1 Bird Dog, in Vietnam.

"From my training in the military, I learned how planes could be used for observation," he says. "It all comes down to being able to see the big picture."

These days, the big picture isn't very pretty, Stoltman says, not in the Brainerd lakes area, where about 25 percent more people live now than a decade ago, and where cabins and homes are being built almost daily on lakes and wetlands.

In many cases, the cabins are squeezed onto lots only 100 feet across, one after another.

The development is a byproduct, in part, of the strong economy and rising stock market of the 1990s and by a rush among people with money to snap up property in Minnesota's prettiest areas -- which many define as the state's northern lake-and-forest regions.

The development is occurring not only near Brainerd, but also across much of the rest of north-central Minnesota.

The vegetation is being wiped out intentionally, Stoltman and other experts say.

And unless something changes, the future of many resources in north-central Minnesota -- not just fish, but also frogs, wading birds, shorebirds, songbirds and other wildlife, as well as clean water -- is at risk.

No one knows exactly when on Aug. 21 Marie Malskeit died.

What is known is that she died alone, and that wild animals near her home might have sensed something was amiss.

Malskeit regularly spread corn in a feeder, attracting as many as 20 deer to within a few feet of her, while jays, cardinals and chickadees flitted nearby.

But among a handful of scientists, she is well known.

Malskeit is believed to be the only individual property owner in Crow Wing County, and perhaps one of the few in Minnesota, to leave an entire lake intact, in its natural condition -- its shorelines flush with hard-stem bulrushes, three-way sedge, wild rice, cattails and other native vegetation.

She inherited the 43-acre clear-water lake, called Moody Lake, and the 150 acres of land that surround it from her mother, who inherited it from her parents, who homesteaded there.

Before her death, she sold the property to the DNR in a deal that would keep it from ever being developed.

Now classified as an aquatic management area, the lake is being studied by DNR ecologists and fisheries biologists, as well as by University of Minnesota groundwater experts.

Saddened by changes to other Brainerd-area lakes in her lifetime, Malskeit wanted Moody Lake encircled indefinitely by willows and dogwoods, oaks and aspens.

Keeping the lake's shoreline intact has minimized erosion and runoff, Brastrup says, and has nurtured large-leaf pondweed, Robbins' pondweed and other aquatic plants.

These plants, in turn, support dragonflies, snails and other invertebrates critical to fish, amphibians and reptiles. Many birds also nest in the plants.

But what Malskeit saw as beautiful and natural, many other Minnesota lakefront owners see as cluttered and troublesome. And in their efforts to project a suburban landscaping ethic on north country lakeshores, many home and cabin owners threaten the very things that drew them north, according to a recent study by DNR fisheries researchers Paul Radomski and Tim Goeman.

"We did the study because of the tremendous amount of home and cabin building that has occurred, especially in recent years, on northern Minnesota lakes," Radomski says.

"We also found positive correlations between the loss of vegetation and a decrease in the size of fish in lakes we studied, and the amount of fish the lakes produce.

"Our concern is that if this continues, and indications are it will, we will begin to see even more measurable effects on fish productivity in our lakes, and on lake water quality."

Already, Radomski and Goeman estimate, between 20 and 25 percent of Minnesota's aquatic vegetation has been lost.

Amid these changes, Marie Malskeit's property stands in stark relief.

"She was so proud that no one had ever put a house on Moody Lake, and she wanted our assurance that no one ever would," Brastrup says.

Dave Majkrzak says he sleeps better now that he no longer worries about "weeds" in front of the home he owns on Big Pelican Lake, near the city of Detroit Lakes.

"I used to lie awake at night, thinking of ways to remove them," Majkrzak says. "Like other people, I wanted to be able to swim, use my boat and ride my Jet Ski.

"I'll tell you something: In the time I've been on Big Pelican, I've given hundreds of boat tours of our lake to friends. Not once has anyone asked me to see weeds."

In 1989, Majkrzak, vice president of engineering for a company in West Fargo, N.D., that produces farm implements, invented and began testing the WeedRoller, a machine with a 21-foot arm that can continually sweep a patch of lake bottom.

The machine kills weeds and allows "silt and sediment to float away and valuable sand to settle back to the bottom," according to an advertisement.

A typical buyer is an individual lakeshore owner. But groups of property owners occasionally buy one and move it around -- sometimes legally, sometimes not.

And some real estate agents sometimes use WeedRollers to clean lakeshores of vegetation before putting homes or cabins on the market.

In each of these cases, the WeedRoller is used because property owners prefer beaches in front of their homes and cabins to, as Majkrzak puts it, "weeds."

Historically in Minnesota, those beaches -- where they haven't occurred naturally -- have been achieved in part through the use of herbicides, particularly 2,4-D.

Sometimes the use of chemicals is legal. But most times it's not, according to the DNR, which suspects that as much as 550,000 pounds of herbicides are used in Minnesota lakes each year.

"People don't want weeds," he says. "They're going to get rid of them one way or another, either at night by dumping illegal chemicals into their lakes, or by using the WeedRoller.

"If the WeedRoller is an evil at all, and we don't believe it is -- we don't think it hurts the environment -- then it may be the lesser evil."

Stoltman remembers the first time he saw Majkrzak's invention at work.

"I was flying over a lake," he says, "and when I looked down, I saw what I call a crop circle in the lake bottom, next to a dock. I thought, 'My gosh, they can't be doing that.'"

But more and more people do.

Terry Ebinger of Brainerd, a DNR aquatic plant management specialist, says he and his staff try to dissuade lakeshore owners from killing aquatic vegetation.

"But we have to work with people," he says, adding:

"A lot of bad things have happened in this part of the state with aquatic vegetation in the past 10 years. And while our water quality is still pretty good in the region, it's destined to get worse if aquatic vegetation continues to be lost."

Radomski, the DNR researcher, believes the "ticking time bomb" in the region is phosphorus.

"Already, thousands of septic tanks are saturating the soil with high nutrient levels," he says. "Historically, in part because the vegetation in these lakes has buffered the nutrients, the effect on water quality hasn't been that noticeable. But with the increasing development and the loss of vegetation, that's changing."

Many lake associations also address the issues.

"But my general observation is that, while there is more and more awareness about the detriment of lakeshore development, particularly the second tier of development and now the third tier that we're seeing, no one is willing to take the steps to stop it because of the property rights of these landowners," says Marybeth Block, a water planner with the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources.

Afew miles west of where Marie Malskeit spent most of her 90 years, and nearly beneath the flight path Dick Stoltman will follow in his Cessna, Marjorie Nolan waves her hand in the direction of a 3,640-square-foot home on Gull Lake.

Nolan, of Nisswa, is a real estate agent who specializes in lakeshore properties.

"This one sold for $710,000 last year," she says. "The asking price was $659,000. We had five offers."

Empty lots with 100 feet of frontage on Gull Lake can range from $280,000 to $350,000, she says.

"Interest in lakeshore in the area has always been high, but the market really took off in the early '90s," Nolan says. "We have both retirees and young people who buy. And, increasingly, a number of people who, thanks to technology, can work out of their homes. The median age of our buyers is 44."

Not far away from the $710,000 lakeshore home is another lakeshore property that recently changed hands.

This lot, with no home or cabin, has 364 feet of frontage on Roy Lake, part of the Gull Lake chain of lakes. Heavily wooded, with one building site, the property slopes moderately from back to front.

Its asking price was $149,000.

One reason for the property's relative low cost, Nolan says, is that the water in front of the lot is shallow, and flush with bulrushes and other aquatic vegetation.