A gutsy column from Dennis Anderson in the Strib today. What he is referring to, is the LCCMR Conservation Plan; This will be overall guidance document for conservation in Minnesota. Unless you are a policy geek or interested in resources, do not try to read it. As a guidance document, it will speak of targeting resources, etc...etc... All kinds of vague pronouncements. From this agency policies, proposals and grant dollars will be targeted. But as Dennis Anderson points out, it fails in concrete action, and maintains much of the status quo. Having been a partial participant in the process, I can state that amazingly obvious items are left out. One is energy, which ultimately rules our lives; the vast majority is often wasted on such things as left on appliances, light bulbs and a million automobiles stuck in traffic, or people commuting 50 miles. There is much about biofuel goals, but nothing about the fundamental problem: reducing the inefficient miles driven by individuals in 4000 pound vehicles. Instead, we will subsidize our way to a destroyed landscape and bare soils to keep the cars going. Politics can also play a role. Taxpayer funded subsidies to such things as Excelsior energy, when simple, proven conservation measures such as insulation, LED or fluorescent bulbs, public transport and community design would nullify the need for an unproven, expensive and dirty gift to certain local elites via the public coffers. Forcing developers and planners to account for energy and transportation impacts ( oh my, the end of rampant subsidized suburbanization and strip malls). Or, realistically assessing the community impacts of extraction industries. Why the last one? Because extraction industries are temporary, but the effects on people and the environment aren't. If anyone understands this, it is us in the north. Our communities suffer at the whims of the world economy while the landscape is destroyed, and we are left holding the bill and the bag, the bag being overburden piles, pollution, a disturbed landscape and communities that suffer from the social implosion when it is all upended. Our cities, out townships and our rural places suffer. Very few of us can afford the lake places to escape to as do outsiders as prices go through the roof . Why is this important? Because what we allow now will decide what we have later. The cost plus boom of the 60's and 70's left us with over built communities, no resources and local officials suffering the delusion that all would be alright forever. In 1982, we paid for it, and we still pay for it now. And now, as we sell off lakeshore, fill wetlands, build roads to nowhere or handout millions to pie in the sky schemes (Excelsior) in an attempt to bolster communities built for one purpose: extraction. It is, ultimately, a political document, built to make goals and not offend those wanting cash and quick profits. It does not say, however, that we must state what the limits of space and behavior are, and that is the fundamental problem. If we continue to extract, fill, cut,drain, or plow over our best farm soils, or build our communities on unsustainable resources, we are left with what we have now: Horrifying suburbs like Coon Rapids; wasted, polluted landscapes like Redore outside of Hibbing, or devastated communities like rural St. Louis County suffering an economic depression with the end of logging. Only outsiders or businesses supplying tourists and cabin owners are able to reap the benefits, and those are minimal at best, with jobs that pay little, offering nothing for human development other than servitude to the arrogant wealthy. ( I have been a janitor, a nurses aide and a maintenance man so I know this well). Blaming environmentalists and others is blaming the weatherman for a tornado warning. The warning is not just about biodiversity or species, but about communities and what actually works,. When you sell your soul for 16 an hour and an atv, you will be chained to needing that forever, and is that minuscule payoff worth a a destroyed landscape where no one wants to live and community implosions when everything shuts down? That is what this document fails to address; nowhere does it say no. To anyone. It will direct grants to encourage natural shorelines, but nowhere will it say " shoreline alteration for development and access for pontoon boats will now be regulated", or " Wetland alteration other than fundamentally needed development will not be allowed."
It is statements like that which are needed.