Category Archives: Focus: Water

ENTS 248 – Sustainable Development

Focus: Transportation, Focus: Water, Resource

Sustainable development is the internationally and nationally recognized framework for reconciling development (economic development, social wellbeing, and peace and security) with environmental protection and restoration. This course will examine the historical origin of this framework, its meaning, the enormous environmental and poverty challenges that sustainable development is intended to overcome, and its actual and potential effect at the international, national, state, and local levels. It is designed to give students the ability to recognize and address sustainable development issues in any context. There are no prerequisites.

6 credit; Social Inquiry; offered Spring 2018 · John C Dernbach

Signs of Progress: The State of the Cannon and Straight Rivers

Focus: Water, Resource

Dear Reader,
Clean water. So vital to our lives and something we all value. At the Cannon River Watershed Partnership we envision a time when the waters of our area are healthy, when it is safe to swim in all the lakes and rivers, when we can eat fish without worry, enjoy a canoe trip free from garbage
in the river, and all drinking water is clean. In order to achieve this vision, it is important for the people who live and recreate in this area to understand some information about the water, land and wildlife, to get out on the water and to take action to improve the water. This document is our attempt at providing some of that information and sparking your interest in getting involved. Many good things have happened in the last fifty years. In 1958 a memo from the DNR indicated the Cannon River by Faribault was uninhabitable for fish due to industrial pollution of the water. The river has come a long way since then. We no longer discharge raw municipal sewage to the
rivers, industrial facilities treat their discharge to limit pollution, cities are doing a better job with street runoff, and farmers are working to improve their practices to protect the water. There are signs of progress such as the comeback of the Bald Eagle and some of the streams and lakes showing
improvements. There is still a long way to go in some areas and we hope you will be our partner in working toward making the needed changes a reality.
Special thanks to the Water Resources Center at Minnesota State University Mankato for compiling much of this document and to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for providing the funding to make it happen.
Beth Kallestad
Executive Director
Cannon River Watershed Partnership

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Support for the Minnesota Buffer Law

Focus: Land, Focus: Water, Resource

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Support for the Minnesota Buffer Law: A Cross-County Case Study of Rice and Dakota Counties

Vegetative buffers are a Best Management Practice that have been well studied as a regulatory tool for agricultural non-point source pollution control. In 2015, the Minnesota State Legislature passed the Minnesota Buffer Law mandating buffer establishment on all public waterways and ditches. This study investigates farmers’ support for the Minnesota Buffer Law in Rice and Dakota Counties. Our study examines farmers’ support for environmental practices through legally mandated regulation, an area of study that scholars have note addressed in the literature on Best Management Practice adoption. We collected data from interviews with farmers and various stakeholders to address the question: do local situational variable and farmers’ personal attitudes influence support for the Minnesota Buffer Law in Rice and Dakota Counties? We found that the interplay between farmers’ personal values and local situational variables is an important category in our results. We propose a cyclical framework in which the relationship between attitudes and policy is reciprocal and a change in policy may affect attitudes through learning about details of a policy by experiencing it, or through a change in social norms and framing.

Northfield Area – Bird City

Action, Event, Focus: Land, Focus: Water

We will be convening the second Northfield Area – Bird City meeting on Thursday, February 11th from 5:15-6:30pm at Just Food Co-op. Together, residents, groups and officials improve habitat in the community, reduce threats to birds, and engage people to promote increased interest in and access to nature. Because of your work in the community it would be great to hear your ideas as we work together on moving this initiative forward. If anyone has any questions or concerns, please contact South Metro Community Coordinator Avery Hildebrand with Conservation Minnesota and Audubon Minnesota.

SERC InTeGrate Project

Focus: Energy, Focus: Food, Focus: Land, Focus: Transportation, Focus: Waste, Focus: Water, Resource

The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) works to improve education through projects that support educators. InTeGrate is a specific SERC project funded by a 5-year STEP Center grant from the National Science Foundation. The program supports the teaching of geoscience in the context of societal issues both within geoscience courses and across the undergraduate curriculum. Our goal is to develop a citizenry and workforce that can address environmental and resource issues facing our society.

Polycentric Flood Governance : A Case Study of the Greater Northfield Action Arena

Focus: Water, Resource

This paper by Courtney Dufford explores the actors, values, strategies, and knowledge operating within the Cannon RiverWatershedand theirimplications for common pool resource governance.
By applying the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to a case study of the Greater Northfield area as a subset of the diversity of actors found within the CRW, this research will address the following sub-questions:
What actors are currently involved in flood management in the Greater Northfield area? What values do diverse actors bring toward flood management? What strategies do actors mobilize to achieve their flood management goals? What knowledge is utilized to inform these strategies?

Rice County Water Management Plan

Focus: Water, Resource

The Rice County Water Resource Management Plan fulfills the requirements of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 103B.311. The overall purpose of this plan is to protect, preserve and manage natural surface and groundwater systems within Rice County in the face of rapid urban growth and intensive agricultural activity. The plan also presents sustainable and equitable means to effectively reach those goals by providing guidance and specific standards for decision-makers, residents, landowners, educators, and implementing staff at the local level.

Northfield Wellhead Protection Plan

Focus: Water, Resource

The City of Northfield Wellhead Protection Plan is a way to prevent drinking water from becoming polluted by managing potential sources of contamination in the area which supplies water to a public well. Much can be done to prevent pollution, such as the wise use of land and chemicals. Public health is protected and the expense of treating polluted water or drilling new wells is avoided through wellhead protection efforts.

Wading Through the Muddy Floodwaters: Social Vulnerability to Flooding in Northfield, MN, A Case Study

Focus: Water, Resource,

Many researchers have studied social vulnerability in coastal cities and at large scales, yet few have conducted investigations on a smaller scale. This study characterizes the current social vulnerability to flooding of Northfield, Minnesota, a small river town using the frameworks of Blaikie et al.’s (1994) social vulnerability definition and Cutter et al.’s community resilience dimensions (2008). Our methodology combines archival and interview analysis. Archival analysis illustrates that flooding has often been a risk to the economy, infrastructure, and people of Northfield. Interview analysis, through the lens of experts, residents, and business owners, shows how the community anticipated, coped with, resisted, and recovered from recent flood events. We generated 15 factors to characterize Northfield’s current social vulnerability to flooding, which generally fit into Cutter et al.’s dimensions (2008). We argue that Blaikie’s et al.’s (1994) definition and Cutter et al.’s (2008) dimensions are helpful frameworks to examine social vulnerability to environmental hazards in small communities. We also make policy suggestions for Northfield based on our 15 factors. We hope this study provide insights into flood management and research for Northfield and other small towns in Minnesota.

Contact: Kim Smith, ksmith@carleton.edu