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Sierra Club calls on Minnesota to Start Accounting for True Loss of Wetlands
Sierra Club releases Minnesota's Wetlands Legacy: Is Minnesota Doing Enough to Protect its Remaining Wetlands?Minneapolis — Sierra Club North Star Chapter released Minnesota's Wetlands Legacy: Is Minnesota Doing Enough to Protect its Remaining Wetlands? — a report calling on decision makers to put in place measures to account for and protect Minnesota's remaining wetlands. The report is available at http://northstar.sierraclub.org/campaigns/water/wetlands/drippingReport20060301.pdf (pdf, 3.36mb).
"For too long our Minnesota agencies have played with fuzzy numbers when calculating real loss to quantity and quality of wetlands. The five recommendations in this report provide the first steps for really coming to grips with how much we are really losing," said Bill Barton, Sierra Club volunteer and contributor to the report. "We hope our state agencies are ready to get past accounting confusion and get to the original legislative intent of the Wetlands Conservation Act which is 'no net loss' of wetlands."
Sierra Club released the report prior to a Tuesday, March 21st Wetlands Conservation Act Stakeholder Advisory Committee meeting scheduled for 1:00 at the MPCA Board Room Central, 520 Lafayette Road in St. Paul. The Stakeholder Advisory Committee was established by the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR). At Tuesday's meeting, the Committee will review current and proposed methods to collect wetland data and will discuss options to improve the accounting and reporting systems for wetlands. Recommendations from the Advisory Committee will be forwarded to the BWSR Wetland Committee which in turn will forward to the BWSR Board and to Governor Pawlenty's Clean Water Cabinet.
The Sierra Club Water and Wetlands Committee, consisting of volunteers and law students, reviewed the 1991 Wetlands Conservation Act (WCA), current agency accounting practices, and offered the following five recommendations to update Minnesota's reporting.
- Any wetland destruction exempted by WCA must be reported in order to be able to show the true losses of wetlands to the state.
- Local governments should be required to keep permanent files on wetland related decisions and wetlands should be mapped statewide.
- Minnesota should provide full protection for isolated wetlands.
- Minnesota should use Cowardin, a nationally used wetlands classification system, which would help ensure that destroyed wetlands were replaced with ones that have similar values and functions.
- When upland restoration is part of a wetland replacement plan, the wetland replacement and the upland replacement need to be accounted for separately.
Wetlands are a treasured resource for Minnesota: swamps, bogs, marshes, potholes, and wet meadows all are a part of Minnesota's great water heritage. Wetlands provide recreation for people, habitat for migratory birds plus many kinds of animals and plants, and flood and pollution control. All of these functions give economic benefit to the state. In Minnesota, 35% of the people fish, 15% hunt, and 54% watch wildlife for recreation. Minnesotans and non-state residents purchase licenses to hunt or fish. All this activity is important to Minnesota's economy since outdoor recreation contributes $4.25 billion to the gross state product, which generates $201.7 million in tax revenue per year.
"With the huge economic contribution from outdoor recreation such as hunting, hiking, fishing, and birding, we should be serious about protecting our remaining wetlands. As a Minnesota duck hunter I guarantee you we are losing our wetland habitat. I am really sad that my kids will inherit 'empty skies,'" said Craig Ost, a member of the Minneapolis Chapter of the Izaak Walton League and a duck hunter. "We should really work toward the original legislative intent of the 1991 Wetlands Conservation Act which was 'no net loss.'"
Wetlands have been drained and lost due to the desire to use the land they occupy for agriculture, business development, roads, utilities, or homes. Only about 9 million acres of wetlands remain of the 20 million acres that existed in the 1850s. In response to our disappearing wetlands, the Minnesota Legislature passed the Wetlands Conservation Act (WCA) of 1991 with overwhelming support. One of the primary goals of WCA is to achieve no net loss in the quality and quantity of wetlands.
The Sierra Club is a statewide membership based conservation organization with 20,000 members in Minnesota.