A map from MN DNR depicting the health of different watersheds.

Watershed Health Report Cards

Most people know how to find their way around their cities and neighborhoods, even if they rely largely on the computerized map on their phone. Likewise, indicators of a city’s health are often readily apparent through cues such as unkempt public spaces, roads in need of repair, and the like. How would we find our way around our watershed, though, and how would we determine or recognize if our watershed is healthy? As more and more people understand the importance, and fragility, of clean and abundant supplies of water, questions about our watersheds increasingly come to the fore. The Minnesota DNR has combined a series of ecological and physical measures into a series of “watershed report cards” that cover the state.

Where in your watershed do you live? How healthy is your “water place”?

Lake Powell is seen from the top of Romana Mesa in Glen Canyon National Park Recreation Area as storm clouds hang over the waters of Padre Bay on Sunday, Feb 12, 2012.

New reports out on pipeline, but opponents asking about cost

Policymakers and advocates who work on water issues sometimes talk about “the costs of water.” The phrase can mean many, many things; this article focuses on a proposal to pipe water from the Colorado River to parts of Utah. This part of the United States, gripped by a historic drought, is having to consider difficult questions about water use, availability, benefits and costs of moving water from region to region. The rest of the country may well face some or all of these questions in the future also.

Signs at Lake Calhoun have been changed to include the lake's Dakota name, Bde Maka Ska. The new signs were approved by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. The signs updated on Oct. 2, 2015. Peter Cox | MPR News

How to say Lake Calhoun’s Dakota name: ‘Bdé Makhá Ská’

Across all of North America, a rich array of indigenous nations and communities inhabited the landscape before Europeans came. Many places retain traces of these older cultures in their place-names; others show the impacts of continuing inhabitation by indigenous people through efforts to re-name features of the landscape with the language the land once knew. Bdé Makhá Ská, a lake in Minneapolis that formerly held the name of a 19th century defender of slavery, is but one example of this emerging trend. Bdé Makhá Ská is located just 5 miles west of the Mississippi River, a feature that is itself named in a derivation from indigenous terms.

At What Point Do We Protect Rivers? by Megan Boian of American Rivers

At What Point Do We Protect Rivers?

One of the biggest policy debates currently involving rivers is over the proposed federal Clean Water Rule. As this blog from American Rivers explains, the Clean Water Rule clarifies which waters in the United States are protected by the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act, the federal government’s primary regulatory tool against water pollution, stipulates which waters should be monitored and improved with the goal of becoming fishable, swimmable, and drinkable. The proposed Clean Water Rule draws on extensive review of scientific literature to clarify the ultimate connectivity of major rivers to other sources of surface and ground water.

University of Minnesota on the Mississippi River looking towards St. Anthony Falls. Image from the Metropolitan Design Center Image Bank. Copyright Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Introduction to Issue One

By Patrick Nunnally, Editor Welcome to the Inaugural issue of Open Rivers: Rethinking the Mississippi! What is there to say about the Mississippi River…