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Presley Martin brings an artist’s perspective to cleaning up the river. He scours the riverbank near his Minneapolis home for discarded bits of styrofoam and plastic and then arranges the items he finds for photographs or reassembles them into found-object sculptures. For one of his recent projects, Floating Meditations, Presley spent 30 minutes on a dock, grabbing all the plastic that floated by within arm’s reach, and then he photographed the items. The resulting images represent a tiny sample of the vast quantity of plastic polluting the river.

Are you itching to get out to spruce up your gardens? After this unprecedented pandemic winter, it’s only natural to want to get a jump start on spring and gardening. But before you grab your tools…

Minnesota’s lakes, rivers, and streams provide year-round recreation opportunities for outdoor enthusiasts. Many Minnesotans connect with nature through fishing, and anglers play an important role in the fight to protect wildlife habitat. The nonprofit organization Minnesota Trout Unlimited provides anglers with a unique perspective on the link between water quality and fish populations.

After repeatedly hearing about the dangers and environmental costs of using excess salt and deicers on streets, sidewalks, parking lots, and driveways, people are looking for safer alternatives. It’s natural to seek an easy, alternative product that does the same thing as salt but that is also safe for pets, water, soil, and vegetation. But here’s the unpleasant truth that exposes this trick question: there is no deicer that is proven to be “safe” for our pets. The silver bullet is excellent “mechanical control,” generally referred to by us common folk as “shoveling.” Plain and Simple.

At the start of each new year, people tend to take stock of their lives and figure out what’s worth keeping and what needs to be purged. 2020 was such a bad year in so many ways—too obvious and too numerous to recount here. But since it was such a bad year, wouldn’t it be a shame if we didn’t learn anything from its hardships, pain, and losses? What were the lessons learned? Have we figured out what’s really important? Have we changed any of our priorities? Personally? Professionally? As a nation? Do we have a better dream for this coming year?

I fondly remember teaching first graders about plant and animal winter survival adaptations, such as hibernation and dormancy. This year in Minnesota, people will be more or less hibernating right along with those plants and animals. To beat COVID, we know it’s best to limit our physical contact with each other, so a lot of us will be home for the holidays, whether we like it or not.

Leaving the leaves on-site avoids unintentionally hauling off hibernating insects, giving insects a chance to emerge in the spring.

The climate of a region has big impacts on water resources like lakes and streams. So, it’s no wonder watershed managers are keeping a close eye on how our climate is changing. At last year’s 50th-anniversary event for the Bassett Creek Watershed Management Commission, keynote speaker climatologist/meteorologist Dr. Mark Seeley clearly showed how our region is already feeling the effects of a changing climate. Dr. Seeley presented copious data and analyses that show how the climate in our region is getting warmer and wetter and discussed the implications on our water resources. (Seeley's presentation is available at www.bassettcreekwmo.org/learn-participate)

COVID-19 and the uprising after the death of George Floyd has affected almost everything about Masjid An-Nur and its North Minneapolis neighborhood. Before all the unexpected changes of 2020, this mosque was already planning its transformation into an ‘Eco-Mosque.’ This summer, a major landscape renovation will affirm their commitment to sustainability and environmental justice.

​To our community, On June 10th, more than 6,000 scientists participated in a one-day strike to acknowledge the ways that systemic racism and white supremacy have shaped the scientific community. Their statement read, in part: “We recognize that our academic institutions and research collaborations — despite big talk about diversity, equity and inclusion — have ultimately failed black people…. The enterprise of science has been — and remains — complicit in systemic racism, and it must strive harder to correct those injustices and amplify marginalized voices.”