Hot? Under the collar?

If we average a 95℉ Summer day with a -25℉ Winter day, we have an average 60℉ day. Unfortunately for our comfort, Minnesota tends more toward days at either extreme than near the more comfortable average. Temps over 90 today would heighten the appeal of standing up to our waist in a cool trout stream, but strong breezes from the Southeast encourage us to settle for A/C instead of waving a fly rod and ducking a fly line.

Southern Minnesota stream

Photo by J. Harrington

While sitting in our cool A/C'ed air, we submitted comments to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in support of having a full-fledged Environmental Impact Statement prepared for a proposed "4,980-sow swine farrowing facility in southeastern Minnesota’s Newburg Township in Fillmore County." If you're not familiar with Fillmore County, it's home to a number of trout streams. Much of the geology is karst. The county already has noteworthy risks to its water supply. The potential benefits a large farrowing facility would seem to offer appear to be limited to a very few and any risks and detrimental consequences to many ("the public"). We, as a state and a society, need much better ways to manage the siting and operation of extractive industries and/or those that create environmentally-unacceptable risks.

Northern Minnesota stream

Photo by J. Harrington

We reached such a conclusion as we learned this week that one of the reasons the Public Utilities Commission approved Enbridge's Line 3 "replacement" is they have no authority to shut down an old, corroded, high-risk facility like the existing line. We hope that, when the dust settles some day, we'll no longer have a system that privatizes profits while leaving a disproportionate amount of the risks and cleanups in the public sector. The current system means that all taxpayers now subsidize costs that should be incorporated into the price of the product. Given a choice, we think we'd prefer socialism. It seems fairer.

As things seem to stand at the moment, the natural resources, especially trout streams and wild rice, in the Northern part of the state are at risk from oil pipelines, potential copper-nickel mining and flash-flooding from intense rainstorms associated with climate change. Souther Minnesota is grappling with oversized hog farm proposals, frack sand mining, and agriculture that's more like industry than family farming. Pardon us if we seem somewhat disheartened at the prospects of what should be legacy treasures for our children and grandchildren being sacrificed for short term profits for a very small number of people.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

W. B. Yeats, 1865- 1939

I went out to the hazel wood,   
Because a fire was in my head,   
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,   
And hooked a berry to a thread;   
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,   
I dropped the berry in a stream   
And caught a little silver trout.   
   
When I had laid it on the floor   
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,   
And someone called me by my name:   
It had become a glimmering girl   
With apple blossom in her hair   
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.   
   
Though I am old with wandering   
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,   
I will find out where she has gone,   
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,   
And pluck till time and times are done,   
The silver apples of the moon,   
The golden apples of the sun.

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