An Eden Prairie Boy Scout’s bee houses, pollinator gardens across the Twin Cities, and a bee highway in Norway highlight the urgency of preserving endangered native bees. Recent studies show that climate change, as well as pesticides and habitat loss, threatens native bees. This ongoing bee-pocalypse goes far beyond the colony collapse disorder of commercial honeybee hives that first hit the news a couple of years ago. Wild bees, hundreds of native species from big, furry bumblebees to solitary, ground-nesting andrenid bees, pollinate most of our plants, including food crops. Continue reading
Tag Archives: environment
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air
As smoke from drought-driven Canadian wildfires flows into Minnesota skies and lungs, Tom Lehrer’s “Pollution” reminds me of the work we’ve done and the work we have to do.
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
Lehrer sang about pollution back in the 1960s, when rivers still burned and air-polluting, smog-generating particles poured out of every industrial smokestack and auto exhaust pipe. We cleaned up the rivers and air then. We can and must do it again. Continue reading
Filed under environment, food and farming
Save the flying penises

Photo by Bill Damon, published under Creative Commons license.
Wild bees may be in even more peril than managed honeybee colonies, and they are essential to food production.
Because bees pollinate or fertilize crops, entomologist Thomas Seeley called them “flying penises” for plants. Bees are essential for our food supply and our ecological health. According to a May 13 USDA report, summer losses of honeybee colonies now exceed winter losses, for first time. Honeybees not the only, and maybe not the biggest problem: wild bees are in even greater peril than managed honeybee colonies. Continue reading
Filed under agriculture, environment, food and farming
Learning from Irish farms
With stone walls and grazing cattle, Irish farms look like tourist attractions, but farming is still serious business here.
Imagine being paid to maintain fragile land as permanent pasture. Imagine a farm subsidy program designed to support young farmers, small farms and organic farms. Imagine a farm program that declares that 30 percent of direct payments are conditioned on compliance with “greening” criteria, such as crop diversification and crop rotation. All that is part of Ireland’s agricultural economy, where agriculture and food produce 25 percent of the country’s export earnings. Continue reading
Filed under environment, food and farming
Katherine Kersten vs. Pope Francis
Katherine Kersten inspired me to prayer this morning, and by that I mean more than the usual “Oh, God, not her again!” After reading her heated attack on the dastardly new “Church of Sustainability” that threatens sanity, morals, corporate profits and the very existence of the United States of America, I turned to the recent pronouncement by Pope Francis on the very same subject. And I had to wonder: was KK really so exercised over what university students are doing, or was the real trigger for her outrage the decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-environmental teaching of Pope Francis? Continue reading
Filed under environment
Bring back the Citizens’ Board — protect Minnesota waters
July 1 will be “a sad day for democracy, a sad day for citizen engagement, open government and environmental protection in Minnesota,” said Jim Riddle at the last meeting of the Citizens’ Board of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency today. That date marks the legislative end of the Citizens’ Board, in retaliation for the board’s 2014 decision to require an environmental impact statement from a proposed 9,000-cow mega-dairy operation in Baker Township, Stevens County near Chokio, Minnesota. Continue reading
Filed under agriculture, environment
Cheap fries, high costs to Minnesota land and water

Photo by 16:9clue, published under Creative Commons license.
Sebeka, Minnesota vegetable farmer Kathy Connell went to McDonald’s last week — not the restaurant, but the annual shareholder meeting. She had a message about pine forests, potatoes and Minnesota water, but McDonald’s shut her out. Connell, along with other Minnesotans and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, is concerned about R.D. Offutt Company’s use and misuse of land and water in northwestern Minnesota’s Cass, Hubbard, Becker and Wadena counties, part of the Pineland Sands Aquifer. Continue reading
Filed under agriculture, environment, food and farming
Buffer zones, bees, and turkeys in the special session

Photo by Bob Peterson. Published under Creative Commons license.
What’s wrong with the agriculture, environment and natural resources bill? It’s hard to know where to begin. Partly, the problem is the bill is too damn big. Along with the budget items, (mostly) Republican legislators threw in a pile of bad laws that they thought they could get through at the last minute. They figured, wrongly as it turned out, that Governor Dayton would focus only on the education bill and would let them get away with murder in environmental rollbacks. They were wrong.
Filed under environment, food and farming
Three reasons Dayton should veto the environmental bill
The Republican-deformed agriculture and environment budget bill attacks Minnesota waters, bees, and the MPCA citizen board. And that’s just the beginning of a long list of problems with the bill. Continue reading
Filed under agriculture, environment
Ice out — watch the water
The ice is out across Minnesota, and rivers run higher with snowmelt. Temps are rising, green life poking up out of the dirt, and I saw a bright yellow crocus today. But beneath the softening soil, and beneath the surface of Minnesota’s lakes and rivers, all is not well. Continue reading
Filed under environment


