Tag: water

MPR News reporter Mark Steil has the latest in Beneath the Surface: Minnesota’s Pending Groundwater Challenge Heavy irrigation in farm country and increasing demand in the Twin Cities have raised recent concern among many Minnesotans about the adequacy of their water supplies. It’s an old problem in southwestern Minnesota, but one that is getting more Read more →

“[The] DNR has described a mine that functions perfectly, exactly as intended, that has no problems whatsoever…but they don’t explore scenarios in which something goes wrong.” — Kathryn Hoffman, an attorney for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy “Minnesotans have until Thursday to comment on the environmental analysis of the proposed PolyMet mine, a huge Read more →

— Dave Peters, editor, Beneath the Surface, Minnesota’s Pending Ground Water Challenge You can’t talk about water use in Minnesota for long before you get around to talking about farming. That’s clear from two recent stories by MPR News. One, by MPR News reporter Dan Gunderson, showed how increased irrigation and leaching of nitrates from Read more →

Jedediah Purdy writes in the New Yorker about the politics of “no ones job” and how it is seen in the response to the chemical leak in West Virginia’s Elk River. Last Thursday an estimated seventy-five hundred gallons of MCMH, “a chemical used to remove impurities from coal, ran into the Elk from a one-inch Read more →

“Even in the land of 10,000 lakes, water is no longer unlimited. Lakes shrink, groundwater drops, wells go dry or get contaminated. Some cities have to look harder for good municipal water or pay more to treat it. Twenty years ago these were isolated problems. But three-quarters of Minnesota’s residents get their water from aquifer-tapping Read more →