The Star Tribune, in a July 12 editorial, praises what it calls a “painfully honest” appraisal by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency of our state’s nitrogen pollution problem. The report, issued in late June, documented that more than 70 percent of the nitrogen pollution of lakes and streams comes from agriculture.
The editorial calls on state and federal policy-makers to focus on the problem and find ways to encourage and reward solutions. It quotes a Freshwater Society call for a “cultural shift in our agricultural practices, what we grow and how we are growing it.”
Read the Star Tribune editorial. Read the MPCA report.
Read the Freshwater Society statement on the report. View video of a 2012 Freshwater lecture on nitrogen pollution of both air and water by Purdue University Professor Otto Doering. Read a q-and-a interview with Doering. Download a 141-page report to the Environmental Protection Agency by a committee that Doering led.