MinnPost:
“Swackhamer has a serious gift for synthesizing complex scientific material in ways that non-specialist listeners can grasp, and it’s paired with matchless expertise on this subject: She directed the University of Minnesota’s Water Resources Center from 2002 to 2014, and led the effort to produce the massive Minnesota Water Sustainability Framework, commissioned with funds from the Legacy Amendment to provide policy guidance for decision-making over the next 25 years.
She has served in leadership roles on scientific panels advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Joint Commission, and has just begun a three-year term on a National Academy of Sciences panel focused on environmental science and toxicology, recognition of her focus on toxic-chemical pollution. And she does not shrink from controversy. For example, she had much to say about the fraught connections between large-scale agriculture and Minnesota’s water problems, some of it quite provocative.
If we shift from issues of water quantity to issues of water quality, she observed, we see that more than 4,100 lakes and stream sections across the state – or more than 40 percent of the total – are classed as “impaired” because they fail to meet federal quality standards. The major driver of these impairments is excessive inputs of nutrients, primarily phosphorus and nitrates from fertilizers, and the major source of those nutrients is row-crop agriculture.”
