This Issue

Speak up for Resources

One week this past summer, octogenarian Catalina Maldonaldo walked more than 100 miles in sandals. She walked to the capital of Honduras to demand government action against illegal logging in her home province. According to a National Public Radio report, about 3,000 Hondurans marched to Tegucigalpa to protest environmental problems caused by logging, mining, and shrimp farming. One might wonder how people in such a poor country could afford to protest any economic activity. March leader Father Andres Tamayo explained that they could not afford to remain silent. "As the natural resources of the country are pillaged," he said, "the very lives of the people are more precarious."

Poverty shows the bare bones of human existence. Because we live in a wealthy nation, we may lose sight of the precarious nature of our lives and the real connection between our wealth and our natural resources.

The Minnesota DNR has the challenge of keeping that connection in mind while managing the state's natural resources. Last spring the DNR published A Strategic Conservation Agenda 2003-2007, its plan for measuring progress. In this issue, "Hunting for Results" looks at one area of the multifaceted agenda.

For the plan, DNR scientists and resource managers first identified indicators of the current condition of our land, waters, and wildlife. (For example, hunters' harvest levels can indicate the condition of a game population such as ruffed grouse.) Then, based on those indicators, they set measurable targets and devised strategies for protecting and restoring resources.

Implied but not spelled out in the plan are the myriad relationships at work in the natural world. While the plan sets goals for various forest indicators, for instance, it does not attempt to capture the value of forests to clean air and water. Updated versions will try to show some of the links among resource stories.

How Minnesotans see natural resources can have a huge impact on what the DNR does. Over the course of our nation's history, Americans have shifted their views of natural resources from believing anything was fair game, to recognizing the need to use resources carefully, to wanting to preserve nature for its own sake.

How do we Minnesotans see nature today? How do our views affect our actions?

In a poll taken for St. Paul Pioneer Press and Minnesota Public Radio in July 2004, 625 registered voters were asked: "Of the following issues, which one do you feel will be most influential in your voting decision in the November election for national offices?" At the top of the list of eight concerns cited was the economy, a priority for 30 percent. Dead last: the environment, of top concern to just 1 percent.

Economy/environment. For the marchers in Honduras, the connection is palpable; and they want their say in decision making.

Do we want our say? When are we willing to speak up for conservation?

Many Minnesota hunters are vocal proponents of managing for wildlife. Going afield, they can see what is happening. They can count their success by the harvest. For many of us Americans, not living so close to the land, the picture is less clear.

In reality, everyone's connection to Earth is tenuous. In his book A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson offers perspective on the very air we breathe. "The troposphere is . . . no more than six or seven miles high in the temperate latitudes where most of us live. Eighty percent of the atmosphere's mass, virtually all the water, and thus virtually all the weather are contained within this thin and wispy layer. There really isn't much between you and oblivion."

Because we have so much to lose, everyone needs to have a conservation agenda. Ideally, we ought to consult it every day and hold ourselves accountable. And we ought to hold our leaders accountable by carrying our conservation concerns to the voting booth.

Kathleen Weflen, editor