Lee Bergquist: Water Wars on the Sand Counties of Wisconsin→

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Two articles on groundwater and lakes

“War Over Water

In 2010, Minnesota lawmakers passed legislation giving that state’s DNR the authority to establish groundwater protection areas that allow the agency to limit water use to meet human needs and protect lakes, streams and wetlands.

After three years of review, the first protection area was designated in November 2015 in metropolitan St. Paul — an area that runs to the Wisconsin border. Two other areas have been identified in rural areas of Minnesota.

In Wisconsin, with Kraft’s work being questioned and environmentalists pressing for action, the DNR and the growers association underwrote a two-year, $230,000 study of the Little Plover.

In April, the Wisconsin Geological & Natural History Survey and the U.S. Geological Survey found that groundwater played a key role in the health of the Little Plover; the river was vulnerable to groundwater pumping; and that stream flows would improve substantially if wells nearest the river were removed.

The study “did not refute the work of Dr. Kraft — if anything, it built on that work,” said Ken Bradbury, director of the state natural history survey and co-author of the study.

But Tamas Houlihan, executive director of the potato and vegetable group, said his industry isn’t convinced, although he says growers near the Little Plover have voluntarily changed their farming and irrigation practices to conserve water.”

— http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2016/09/03/war-over-water-land-plenty/89481060/

“Water Policy

Plainfield — Three years after Brian Wolf bought his home on Long Lake in 2006, lawmakers and water policy experts began stopping by to see what had happened to the lake.

”It’s as if someone pulled the plug in a bathtub,” Wolf told one group of visitors in November 2009. “This lake is dead.”

Legislators left Wolf’s home in western Waushara County with plans to address growing worries about high-capacity wells and the effect groundwater pumping was having on lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands.

But lawmakers tried and failed to pass a groundwater bill in the 2010 legislative session. This year, legislative efforts also went nowhere.

This summer, the water in Long Lake is mostly gone, dotted by a few marshy areas. Cattails and grasses sprout from the former lake bed. Other traditionally shallow lakes in this region of sandy soil in the middle of the state have shared similar fates.

A dock on Long Lake near Coloma is surrounded by weeds. The lake has seen its water levels plummet and has become a marsh. Landowners blame the large number of high-capacity wells used to irrigate crops in the region.

They have become symbols of the tug-of-war over water use in Wisconsin. The advantage has shifted to large water users as the number of high-capacity wells have proliferated and efforts to put more limits on the use of groundwater have foundered.”

— http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/local/wisconsin/2016/09/04/conflicts-thwart-reforms-state-water-policy/89482796/

Steve Carpenter: Stay Focused on Phosphorus→

Center for Limnology:

“These severe blooms amplify the urgency behind a statement issued today by Canadian and American scientists, myself included, for governments around the world to focus on a proven solution — that is, we must control phosphorus to decrease the intensity and frequency of harmful algal blooms. A mid-October algae (or phytoplankton) bloom shows up on the Lake Mendota shoreline. A mid-October algae (or phytoplankton) bloom shows up on the Lake Mendota shorelines...

Phosphorus inputs to lakes and reservoirs, which come from agricultural and urban runoff, are the main driver of blooms, and that phosphorus reduction is the key to improving water quality. Some government agencies, however, have lost sight of this basic fact of lake management.”

Schindler et al. 2016

Linda Poon: Climate Change Migrations→

CityLab:

“Nearly 3,000 species of animals in the Western Hemisphere alone will have to find new habitats with more preferable climate conditions by the end of this century, according to a stunning new map by cartographer Dan Majka for the Nature Conservancy.

Called Migrations in Motion, the map outlines how species will move from their current habitats to their new ones while avoiding major manmade and natural barriers. Pink lines indicate the movement of mammals, while the blue and yellow lines represent the migration of birds and amphibians, respectively.”

Governor Dayton Moves to Protect Bees

PAN:

“This morning at the State Fair, Governor Mark Dayton and Commissioner of Agriculture Dave Frederickson announced Minnesota’s comprehensive new plans to limit the use of bee-harming pesticides across the state. Today’s decision concludes a nearly 3-year review of the impact of neonicotinoid insecticides on pollinators, conducted by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA). The executive order announced today makes Minnesota a national leader in pollinator protection — and the first state to tackle neonicotinoid use in farm fields and on public lands.

“Today, Minnesota set the strongest rules in the nation to protect pollinators from pesticides,” said Lex Horan of Pesticide Action Network. “The plan will help ensure that bee-harming pesticides won’t be used unnecessarily, and it lays the groundwork for reducing the use of neonicotinoid seed coatings. This decision is rooted in the resounding scientific evidence that neonicotinoids are harmful to pollinators. It’s past time for state and federal decisionmakers to take action to restrict the use of bee-harming pesticides, and today Minnesota did just that.””

— http://www.panna.org/press-release/new-rules-minnesota-leads-country-protecting-pollinators-pesticides

MPR: Gunderson & Dunbar

“Seeking to reverse a decline in bees and other pollinators, Gov. Mark Dayton issued an executive order Friday that limits the use of nicotine-based pesticides.

The governor’s move won praise from environmentalists, but farm groups said it could hurt farmers financially.

Nicotine-based insecticides known as neonicotinoids are effective against a variety of pests, so they’re widely used, but a growing body of research shows the insecticides harm bees.

After a two-year review of 300 scientific studies, the state Agriculture Department decided restrictions were necessary, said Agriculture Commissioner Dave Frederickson.

”Some of these are bold recommendations that have not been considered by any other state across the nation,” Frederickson said at a Minnesota State Fair news conference.”

— http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/26/dayton-orders-steps-protect-bees-pollinators

We now await the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's review of the neonicotinoids, which is anticipated to be completed by 2018.  

The Governor's Executive Order

Minnesota Department of Agriculture - Neonicotinoid Review

Jessica Pupova: Small amounts of Lead matter→

NPR:

“Lead problems with the water in Flint, Mich., have prompted people across the country to ask whether they or their families have been exposed to the toxic metal in their drinking water, too. When it comes to assessing the risk, it’s important to look in the right places.

Even when municipal water systems’ lead levels are considered perfectly fine by federal standards, the metal can leach into tap water from lead plumbing....

When there is a problem with lead in drinking water, service lines are the most likely culprit. Service lines are like tiny straws that carry water from a utility’s water main, usually running below the street, to each building. In older cities, many of them in the Midwest and Northeast, these service lines can be made of pure lead.

Dr. Bruce Lanphear has spent decades researching low-level lead exposure, and his work is often cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says that while blood lead levels have been reduced drastically in recent decades, even levels as low as 5 micrograms per deciliter can lower IQs and increase the risk of attention and behavioral problems in children. For adults, lead exposure can cause kidney problems and high blood pressure.

Because it would be unethical to expose people to a known toxin, clear data are lacking on exactly how much lead a person must be exposed to before it shows up in the blood or triggers health and behavioral problems. Public health officials say that removing all lead from a person’s environment is the best course of action.”

Justin Fox: Zoning Overuse - 100 Year Review→

Bloomberg News:

“Over the past few years, zoning has been blamed, mainly by economists bearing substantial empirical evidence, for an ever-growing litany of ills. The charge that zoning is used to keep poor people and minorities out of wealthy suburbs has been around for decades. But recent research has also blamed it for increasing income segregation, reducing economic mobility and depressing economic growth nationwide.

One can never be certain about these things, but it’s quite possible that excessive land-use restrictions are among the major causes of our long national economic malaise. Jason Furman, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, made this very point in a speech in November. Yet the platform adopted at the Democratic National Convention this week made no mention of either “land use” or “zoning,” while the Republican platform mentioned them only to condemn the current administration’s purported efforts “to undermine zoning laws in order to socially engineer every community in the country.”

The irony, of course, is that zoning laws are themselves a form of social engineering. That doesn’t mean they’re always malign, but during this anniversary week it does seem worth going over how and why the engineering got started. ”

Ron Meador: Minnesota Buffer Map→

MinnPost:

“Apart from its importance as a reference tool for landowners and regulators, the map of Minnesota watercourses requiring protective buffers creates a fascinating new view of the state and its distinguishing natural resource.

An exercise in high-resolution and highly interactive cartography, the map and online viewer published a couple of weeks ago by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources merges data from detailed paper maps and modern satellite imaging.

It enables a close-up look at all of the state’s lakes and streams, shown in blue in the section above, and also its public ditches, rendered in green. (The red squiggles indicate locations earmarked for ground-truthing.) You can choose to view them laid over satellite imagery of the surface, a road layout or a minimalist gray base map.”

Andy McGlashen: Uninformed or the Serious Misinformed Use Lead Ammo→

ENSIA:

“Lead poisoning causes brain damage and, in humans, is thought to be linked with lower IQ, poor school performance and violent behavior. Even the ancient Romans knew lead could cause cognitive damage and death.

“Indeed, we know more about the toxicity of lead than we do about almost any other contaminant,” says Myra Finkelstein, an environmental toxicologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies lead’s effects on wildlife.

Finkelstein was among 30 scientists who signed a 2013 consensus statement citing “the overwhelming scientific evidence of the toxic effects of lead on human and wildlife health” and calling for “reducing and eventually eliminating the introduction of lead into the environment from lead-based ammunition.””

Philip Warburg: Floating Solar→

Yale Environment 360:

“Floating solar panel arrays are increasingly being deployed in places as diverse as Brazil and Japan. One prime spot for these “floatovoltaic” projects could be the sunbaked U.S. Southwest, where they could produce clean energy and prevent evaporation in major man-made reservoirs.

The Colorado River’s two great reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are in retreat. Multi-year droughts and chronic overuse have taken their toll, to be sure, but vast quantities of water are also lost to evaporation. What if the same scorching sun that causes so much of this water loss were harnessed for electric power?

Installing floating solar photovoltaic arrays, sometimes called “floatovoltaics,” on a portion of these two reservoirs in the southwestern United States could produce clean, renewable energy while shielding significant expanses of water from the hot desert sun. ”

Mondale and Roosevelt: Protect the Boundary Waters→

New York Times:

“MINNESOTA’S Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is one of America’s most popular wild destinations. Water is its lifeblood. Over 1,200 miles of streams wend their way through 1.1 million acres thick with fir, pine and spruce and stippled by lakes left behind by glaciers. Moose, bears, wolves, loons, ospreys, eagles and northern pike make their home there and in the surrounding Superior National Forest.

All of this is now threatened by a proposal for a huge mine to extract copper, nickel and other metals from sulfide ores. The mine would lie within the national forest along the South Kawishiwi River, which flows directly into the Boundary Waters Wilderness.”

Smart people calling for action to protect a national asset.

Les Neuhaus: Farmers Pollute Lake Okeechobee, People Tired of Inaction→

New York Times:

“Mark Perry, executive director of the Florida Oceanographic Society, based in Stuart, said the state’s inability to close a deal to purchase thousands of acres of land south of Lake Okeechobee — to create a natural runoff from the lake into the Florida Everglades, where the diverse ecosystem could naturally filter toxins from the north — has been to blame for the problems being experienced by communities west and east of the lake like Stuart.

But the area south of the lake has been controlled by sugar farmers for decades, and environmentalists like Mr. Perry say state legislators in Tallahassee kowtow to agricultural lobbyists who fund their re-election campaigns.

“The flow used to go south to the Everglades, and now this is a man-made, criminal disaster,” Mr. Perry said. “They, as in the state and federal government, say they can’t send the water south, but they can. This is an absolute atrocity that they are allowed to continue this in the name of agriculture. This is the worst I’ve ever seen it.”

The 2016 sugar harvest was the longest on record because of rain delays, making it also one of the most profitable on record, resulting in 2.15 million tons of sugar. Under Mr. Scott, the board of the South Florida Water Management District failed in 2015 to carry out a plan to buy roughly 47,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar south of Lake Okeechobee that would have acted as a reservoir for the lake’s runoff.”

And then the state politicians have the gall to blame environmental agencies or the President of the United States.

Nathan Martin: Animal Migrations→

The Atlantic:

“Much of the current research on migration taking place in Wyoming stems, at least in part, from the work of Hall Sawyer, who grew up hunting and fishing in the state and has studied its wildlife for more than 15 years. In the late 1990s, Sawyer tracked the migration of a herd of pronghorn from Grand Teton National Park more than 100 miles south into the Upper Green River Valley. Then, in the mid-2000s, he stumbled upon a revelation when he was tracking mule deer herds in a southwestern part of the state called the Red Desert.

“We thought the mule deer just resided year-round in the desert or migrated short distances out there,” he said. “That’s when we discovered that half of those deer were migrating some 150 miles.”

The migration Sawyer revealed is the second longest recorded land migration in North America—only Arctic caribou go further. But these mule deer do not travel across barren tundra. Between the herd’s winter range in the windblown Red Desert and summer habitat among the granite and cool timber of the Hoback Canyon, they travel through oilfields and skirt residential developments, swim reservoirs and finger lakes, and cross three highways and more than 100 fences. The migration traverses a complex patchwork of public and private land controlled by people and agencies with diverse, sometimes conflicting interests.

That a migration of such epic length existed in the first place—unknown, under science’s nose, in the 21st century—struck Sawyer as amazing. But as the excitement subsided, he started to think about how difficult it would be to ensure that such a migration could persist. ”

Fascinating story about animal migration and the research on elk migration in and around Yellowstone National Park.

France Diep: Water Use per Crop→

ScienceLine (via street.mn chart of the day):

“Homeowners have a “definitely significant” role in the nation’s water budget, says Cristina Milesi, an ecosystem modeling researcher now with NASA who led the 2005 Environmental Management study. “Each family may have only a small lawn,” she explains, “but once you add them all up they have a big impact.”

Watering the lawn generally accounts for 50 percent to 75 percent of a home’s water use during the summer. To save water and money, Milesi suggests choosing more drought resistant turf and adjusting your watering schedules to fit the weather and season. Many cities have suggested or required water schedules for different times of the year.

Some even advocate abandoning the great green lawn in favor of meadows, vegetable gardens, local native plants or just letting the grass die.”

Ron Meador: Lawyers Should Report Environmental Abuse→

MINNPOST:

“If a lawyer can break client confidentiality to disclose child abuse, alert police to an impending assault, or blow the whistle on financial fraud — well, why not to report crimes against the environment?

That excellent and, I think, eminently reasonable question is discussed at length in the Boston College Law Review by Tom Lininger, a professor at the University of Oregon’s law school.

A former federal prosecutor of polluters who mishandled hazardous waste, Lininger’s scholarship focused on domestic violence and sexual assault before turning to the intersection of ethics and environment in American bar associations’ codes.”

 “Green Ethics for Lawyers” can be read here.

Sean Caroll: An Ecology Lesson

Nautilus:

“Why is the planet green? Why don’t the animals eat all of the food? And what happens when certain animals are removed from a place? These questions led to the discovery that, just as there are molecular rules that regulate the numbers of different kinds of molecules and cells in the body, there are ecological rules that regulate the numbers and kinds of animals and plants in a given place. And these rules may have as much or more to do with our future welfare than all the molecular rules we may ever discover...

One major school of thought was that population size was controlled by physical conditions such as the weather. Smith, Hairston, and Slobodkin (hereafter dubbed “HSS”) all doubted this idea because, if true, it meant that population sizes fluctuated randomly with the weather. Instead, the trio was convinced that biological processes must control the abundance of species in nature, at least to some degree.

HSS pictured the food chain as subdivided into different levels according to the food each consumed (known as trophic levels). At the bottom were the decomposers that degrade organic debris; above them were the producers, the plants that relied on sunlight, rain, and soil nutrients; the next level were the consumers, the herbivores that ate plants; and above them the predators that ate the herbivores.

The ecological community generally accepted that each level limited the next higher level; that is, populations were positively regulated from the “bottom up.” But Smith and his lunch buddies pondered the observation that seemed at odds with this view: The terrestrial world is green. They knew that herbivores generally do not completely consume all of the vegetation available. Indeed, most plant leaves only show signs of being partially eaten. To HSS, that meant that herbivores were not food-limited, and that something else was limiting herbivore populations. That something, they believed, were predators, negatively regulating herbivore populations from the “top-down” in the food chain. While predator-prey relationships had long been studied by ecologists, it was generally thought that the availability of prey regulated predator numbers and not vice-versa. The proposal that predators as a whole acted to regulate prey populations was a radical twist...

Indeed, trophic cascades have been discovered across the globe, where keystone predators such as wolves, lions, sharks, coyotes, starfish, and spiders shape communities. And because of their newly appreciated regulatory roles, the loss of large predators over the past century has Estes, Paine, and many other biologists deeply concerned.”

Luke Runyon: Causes of the Monarch Butterfly Decline→

NPR:

“Monarch butterflies are disappearing. Populations of these distinctive black and orange migratory insects have been in precipitous decline for the past 20 years, but scientists aren’t exactly sure what’s causing them to vanish.

So far, potential culprits include disease, climate change, drought and deforestation. Everyone from loggers to suburban developers has been implicated. But much of the blame has been placed on farmers and the pesticides they rely on — pesticides that have reduced the milkweed that monarch caterpillars feast on. Now, however, scientists say that may not be the full story.

Every spring, hundreds of thousands of monarchs sweep across the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada, and then back again in the fall. It’s an amazing journey, one that takes place over multiple generations for the butterflies. The insects breed while traveling north, expending four generations to make it to Canada. The final generation then flies all the way back to Mexico to spend the winter there.

Monarch populations are measured in hectares (roughly 2 1/2 acres). Surveys of their wintering habitats in the central mountains of Mexico show dense populations of monarchs at an average of more than nine hectares during the winters from 1995 to 2002. In 2014, monarchs took up less than one hectare.”

Ron Seely: Bacteria in Private Wells at a Crisis→

WisconsinWatch.org:

“Late on a winter night in 2004 in Kewaunee County, six-month-old Samantha Treml was rushed to an emergency room, violently ill from bathing in water poisoned by manure spread on a nearby frozen field that seeped into the home’s private well. The rest of her family got sick, too.

In 2014, seven people visiting Door County were sickened after manure from a large farm made its way into a home’s private water well.

In 2015, Kewaunee County Board member Chuck Wagner discovered that the new $10,000 well he was forced to install two years earlier was again contaminated with viruses and cow manure. Wagner and his wife now use a reverse osmosis system to filter the water before drinking or cooking while they contemplate whether to dig a second new well.

And this year, the Algoma School District is offering free water to residents whose wells are contaminated...

Between 2007 and 2010, an estimated 18 percent of 3,868 private wells in Wisconsin tested positive for coliform bacteria — an indicator of disease-causing bacteria, viruses or parasites — according to a 2013 study by researchers with the state Department of Health Services. That translates into as many as 169,200 of the 940,000 Wisconsin households served by private wells exposed to disease-causing pathogens.”

Matt Steele: Zoning Contributes to Unaffordability→

streets.mn:

“There’s an Ethiopian proverb that goes something like, “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.” When it comes to housing, Minneapolitans may have it better than those in Seattle, San Francisco, D.C., and Brooklyn, but a larger and wider slice of Minneapolis is feeling the pinch of fast-rising rents. For some, this even means displacement or possibly even homelessness. This is unacceptable. And it doesn’t have to be this way, because we could eliminate artificial caps on housing supply in Minneapolis, thereby reducing equilibrium rents and making housing more affordable for more people. If every dwelling unit is like a little barely-visible spider web, it may seem like a unit here or two units there won’t make a big difference. But, on the whole, the economics are sound: Rising supply necessarily lowers rents.

No, I’m not going to claim that upzoning is the panacea to housing affordability. But our current zoning code is working against natural housing supply, and that’s working against housing affordability. It seems like such an easy, obvious win to get rid of the barriers to new housing stock in our city.

To understand how our zoning code is restrictive to the point of being harmful to housing affordability, let’s look at a real life example... ”

The reader comments to this article are worth reading as well.

John Enger: Our Private Sewers Pollute→

MPR:

“The water that fills Ken Henrickson’s toilet bowl is pumped directly from the lake he lives on, and when he flushes, it goes back to the lake.

”I’m not sure if it’s a good system or not,” he said last month. Henrickson lives along the rocky shore of Rainy Lake, which forms part of Minnesota’s border with Canada, in the state’s far north.

Henrickson’s is one of the half-million Minnesota homes from which wastewater flows into buried septic tanks — systems that are maintained, and often ignored, by homeowners, not professional engineers. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency estimates one in every five septic systems across the state is failing.

The water off Henrickson’s piece of shoreline is laced with sewage — likely his own, and that of about 200 neighbors. There are at least that many failing septic systems in a 15-mile stretch from Henrickson’s neighborhood east to Voyageurs National Park.”

We really need to move to more advanced sewer systems in shorelands. 

Global Warming Visual→

Climate Lab:

“The animated spiral presents global temperature change in a visually appealing and straightforward way. The pace of change is immediately obvious, especially over the past few decades. The relationship between current global temperatures and the internationally discussed target limits are also clear without much complex interpretation needed.”

Click this link to go to the animated data graphic. An interesting way to present a lot of data!