Transcripts

GARY EICHTEN: Joining us now is Don Arnosti, who is the Minnesota director of the Audubon Society. Good morning, sir.

DON ARNOSTI: Good morning, Gary.

GARY EICHTEN: How are we doing here in Minnesota in terms of protecting species and habitat and the rest?

DON ARNOSTI: Well, I think, in general, it's an issue that is on people's minds. I would say we're somewhere in the middle. We like to think of ourselves as a leading state. But in this, we're leading only in maybe awareness. I think the Wetland Conservation Act, which was a key issue here in Minnesota politically over the last four or five years-- and the legislature just adjourned, has made some adjustments to it-- is an example of how our society is grappling with one of the key biodiversity conservation issues of our generation.

Wetlands covering originally about 1/3 of the state and now about a quarter of the state are one of the key habitats or locations for rare plants and animals and other life forms here in Minnesota. And we need to pay attention to protecting these so that future generations have the benefit of all of those life forms that we have had.

GARY EICHTEN: Over and above wetlands, are there any other major threats to diversity here in Minnesota?

DON ARNOSTI: Well, I would say there's one that is largely-- we've done it in. If you think of Minnesota's environment, there's maybe three-- in a broad sense, three types of land environments. One is the prairies. One is the forests, and the other is the wetlands. The prairies have been 99% altered primarily to agriculture and to settlement and urbanization.

The last percent or less of native prairie that is left is really operating in the sense, like a zoo. There are small reservoirs of populations that are isolated from each other. Many, many species have probably disappeared from Minnesota permanently, even before we were aware of them. And that is one that-- what can be done is in the order of trying to restore some semblance of what might once have been there.

The other environment we haven't talked much about is the forest. That is covering about half the extent of the state that it used to. It used to cover about 2/3 of the forest, and the southern forests have largely been fragmented and altered again to agriculture and urbanization. But the northern forests are largely intact, at least as a forest environment.

What's happening right now is an issue of quality of that environment. We are intensifying our industrial use of this forest, and the harvesting is going up recently. We're not in danger of losing forest cover in this part of the state, but it's a quality question rather than a quantity question. And from a biodiversity perspective, we are taking the more complex, diverse, older mixed forest that is native to Minnesota, and we're increasingly cutting it, making it more and more a younger, more juvenile forest of the preferred species for human use. This creates problems for certain birds and other plants and animals that cannot survive in forests of that nature.

GARY EICHTEN: This all can get fairly esoteric, or at least sound fairly esoteric. Is there something in this for humans? Is there some reason we really ought to care about this over and above just kind of a general concern for nature?

DON ARNOSTI: Well, if you think of yes, let's start out with the food we eat. And if we think about it, of course, the food we eat, it all in the end is based on plant origins, even the animals, ultimately through the food chain. If you think about corn, which is an American native that's now planted around the world, and you think about the corn rusts and blights and some of the disease problems that corn has, one approach that we've taken to pests and disease problems is using pesticides and other organic and inorganic creations of ours. And those create a lot of other problems in the environment and in water and all of that nature.

About 25 years ago, the corn crop in North America was threatened by some of these rusts and blights. And the solution for that was found in some of the wild relatives of the modern corn crop found growing in Mexico City, in the regions of Mexico City, Central Mexico. That area where those wild corn crops or wild corn plants were found that were ultimately bred into our corn crop is now covered over through urban expansion development in Mexico.

So what we were able to do by finding residual populations of native genes was to convert those for use to protect the world food supply in this case. This is a little known story, a little known success story about what the value of conserving biodiversity is to humans. It's something we ought to bear in mind as we go into the future and think of our food crops and other things that we'll be living on in the future.

GARY EICHTEN: Thanks for joining us.

DON ARNOSTI: Thank you very much, Gary.

GARY EICHTEN: Don Arnosti, Minnesota director of the Audubon Society. And again, we'll take a look at this issue--