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by Bob Luck
On Friday afternoon I sat in a parking lot in Menomonie, Wisconsin, about an hour east of St. Paul, and gave my wife a call. She told me that it was pouring rain and hail at our home in downtown Minneapolis, and she wasn’t sure if our rooftop garden of cucumbers and tomatoes would survive. As we spoke, I watched a dark low-hanging cloud approach from the west. It wasn’t raining yet, but the wind was gusting and just after I hung up, the civil defense siren sounded. All summer long, I’ve been having the same sort of foreboding that I experienced prior to that storm. Apart from a stretch of smoky days, it has been a pleasant summer here in the Bold North. The trout fishing has been excellent, and the Trico hatch has been bigger than any year I can remember. More often than not, we are able to turn off the air conditioner at night and sleep with the windows open. But as I read about wildfires in Canada, heat waves in the South and the recent fire in Maui, I know that climate change will not spare Minnesota. And climate change is not our only challenge: it seems that we are hearing daily about threats to our streams: nitrate contamination in the Driftless Area, or a new CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) in a fragile watershed, or a bottled water plant in the Vermillion River headwaters.
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The EPA has proposed to strengthen the Clean Water Act, and Trout Unlimited needs your help in supporting this important policy. The new "Waters of the United States" rule would establish protections for small streams, headwaters and wetlands, many of which lost protection under the previous administration. These waters are critical for healthy fisheries and downstream ecosystems. Click here to voice your support.
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September 2024
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