Green Visions

We might be forgiven for looking a little harder than usual to find something to be happy about these days.

When Cindy Hale and Jeff Hall saw the income from their small farm drop "from several thousand dollars a month to zero, overnight," they realized the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't going to be over anytime soon.

Road salt is useless if it's colder than 15°. It corrodes pavement and metal and it doesn't biodegrade. Not to mention what it does to water quality when it washes into streams, rivers and lakes.

Beet juice and cheese brine aren't bad de-icing options, but deer love them, and attracting deer to roadways isn't exactly improving safety.

And then there's potassium acetate.  It has a lower freezing point, it biodegrades ... it's just so gosh-darn expensive.

If you've never heard of "wake boats," you're not alone.

If you think college students keep members of "the establishment" on their toes, you should see what effect high school students have.

MPIRG (Minnesota Public Interest Research Group) has had a chapter at UMD since 1971, and even all these years later, incoming freshmen arrive with a passion to make a difference.

A dab of taconite tailings.  A soupçon of dredge sediment. A pinch of wood-processing byproducts.

It's all a part of the process as NRRI researcher Marsha Patelka pursues her goal of turning waste resources into good topsoil.

Refineries, paper mills, wastewater plants, lumber companies, paint factories, steel furnaces, and meat-packing plants all lined the St. Louis River Estuary at one point, and, before it was illegal to do so, dumped their waste directly into the river.

The journey of  a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Likewise the journey of a thousand steps to sustainability and quality-of-life goals for Minnesota cities and towns has been curated down to a mere 175. 

GreenStep Cities is a free, voluntary program that helps cities work at their own pace to make and achieve sustainability goals.  You can see how Duluth is doing here.

Tiffany Sprague is an excited person.

She's excited about science and communicating science.

She's excited about citizen science and the work people and businesses can do every day to manage stormwater.

She's excited that the University of Minnesota sees the need for effective communicators about science.

And she's excited about her new job/s that let her blend her knowledge with her enthusiasm.

The student environmental activists joining us in the studio this morning aren't as upset as climate activist Greta Thunberg was yesterday, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, but they're still determined.

Working as part of the Our Mississippi, Our Future initiative, Sydney Arens and Isaac Conrad (wearing a shirt that read "Awareness Inspires Conservation") stopped by to talk about the community forum they're organizing February 3 and now acting now can prevent crises down the road.

Every year, the St. Louis River Area of Concern coordinators draft an updated Remedial Action Plan.  This year, the draft is available online with changes, additions and deletions marked in red, so it's easy to see where they are and click for more information.

Back in the '30s, during the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps provided natural-resource jobs to out-of-work young men so they could support their families.

Many crucial decisions on PolyMet’s mining proposal will be coming out of the courts throughout January 2020. JT Haines, from The Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy (MCEA), bring us up to speed on the decisions and what they could mean.

Sad, but true.

For decades, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent to educate us about the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

And yet, in spite of it all, what does it take to change our behaviour.

A nickel.

 "What researchers found when they examined the data was that consumers are less motivated by emotional appeals to save the environment and more by the impact on their pocketbook—even when it’s just a few cents."

In part two of a special multi-part series featuring artists exploring their role in the climate conversation, KUMD speaks with poet and musician Ben Weaver about how small gatherings of music and poetry have become an outlet for working through climate grief.