Minnesota River/ Lake Pepin Friendship Tours
InCommons Collaboration Challenge
Minnesota River/ Lake Pepin Friendship Tours
The recently aired documentary Troubled Waters explores the growing problem of agricultural pollution of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Pepin is filling in with Minnesota River sediment and is being polluted by phosphorus and nitrogen from farm fields in the Minnesota River Watershed. There is a growing divide between downstream environmentalists and upstream farmers. Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) worked this past summer to bring upstream farmers and downstream environmentalists together to talk about these problems and to seek a common vision and process for addressing them. More than 50 people took part in Upstream/Downstream Friendship tours to seek understanding and to create trust and dialogue. The tours were a great success. For the first time in decades, there was structured listening based on mutual respect. No government agencies or media reporters were invited so there was a safe place to talk, debate and examine differing world views. Friendships were formed and bridges were built between parties that heretofore have engaged in blame laden exchanges at public hearings and in the media. The tours are only a beginning of the creation of a sense of trust and a mutually supportive environment where true progress on this issue can be made.
This entry has been selected as a winner in the
InCommons Collaboration Challenge competition.
About You
About You
First Name
Patrick J
Last Name
Moore
Country
United States, MN, Chippewa County
About Your Organization
Organization
Clean Up the River Envrionment (CURE)
Organization Website
Organization Phone
320-269-2984
Organization Address
117 South 1st St., Montevideo, MN 56265
Organization Country
United States, MN, Chippewa County
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Your Story
Collaboration Title
Minnesota River/ Lake Pepin Friendship Tours
Country your work focuses on
United States, MN, Chippewa County
Describe your locally-based collaboration and the problem it sought to address
The recently aired documentary Troubled Waters explores the growing problem of agricultural pollution of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Pepin is filling in with Minnesota River sediment and is being polluted by phosphorus and nitrogen from farm fields in the Minnesota River Watershed. There is a growing divide between downstream environmentalists and upstream farmers. Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) worked this past summer to bring upstream farmers and downstream environmentalists together to talk about these problems and to seek a common vision and process for addressing them. More than 50 people took part in Upstream/Downstream Friendship tours to seek understanding and to create trust and dialogue. The tours were a great success. For the first time in decades, there was structured listening based on mutual respect. No government agencies or media reporters were invited so there was a safe place to talk, debate and examine differing world views. Friendships were formed and bridges were built between parties that heretofore have engaged in blame laden exchanges at public hearings and in the media. The tours are only a beginning of the creation of a sense of trust and a mutually supportive environment where true progress on this issue can be made.
Tell us about the community in which this collaboration took place
To set up the Tours, we conducted "Appreciative Inquiry" interviews with industrial scale farmers in the Minnesota River Watershed (Montevideo, Redwood Falls, New Ulm) and members of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance centered in Red Wing & Lake City. In August 2010 we organized a tour where farmers went to Red Wing. In September we organized a bus that went from Red Wing to farms near Redwood Falls.
Issue Selector
n/a
Partnership
Who was involved in co-creating or implementing your collaboration (other organizations, leaders, community members, etc.)?
The West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership, U of M Morris student Lyndsey Weber, Warren Formo of the Minnesota Ag Water Resources Coalition (MAWRC), Mike McKay of the Lake Pepin Legacy Alliance, Susie Carlin of the Minnesota River Board and Beth Kallestad of the Cannon River Watershed Partnership worked with CURE to help organize, design and carry out the Friendship Tours
To what extent does your collaboration involve partnerships that are outside or cross traditional organizational or sector boundaries?
To our knowledge, this is one of the first times that an environmental non profit such as CURE has ever worked together with a Big Ag group like the MAWRC. CURE, the Pork Producers, the Corn Growers and the Turkey Research and Promotion Council worked with the Lake Pepin Alliance and County Commissioners from the Minnesota River Board in this historic collaboration to fund the effort.
Innovation
What makes your locally-based collaboration innovative and unique?
There has been a historic conflict between environmentalists and farmers that is coming to a head over issues of water quality. To date, the main way that this conflict has been addressed has been through lawsuits, one upsmanship and bricks thrown through op-eds and sterile TMDL (water quality standards) hearings and meetings led by government agencies. It is time to change the debate and move beyond technical arguments and "gotcha" rhetoric and hyperbole and try to relate as fellow human beings with common interests. Through these tours, we introduced the process of structured listening conducted in informal settings with food, drink, tourism and people to people learning based on mutual respect and common language communication without the glare of media attention or public meeting posturing. Everyone who participated in the tours remarked "why has this not been done before?" It was obvious that there are widely different world views that needed this kind of setting to be explored to create a climate where trust can grow and common purpose and vision could be elicited. We demonstrated a new way to interact that previous government sponsored efforts had not employed.
Did you take risks in establishing this collaboration? Explain
Patrick Moore of CURE and Warren Formo of the MAWRC risked alienating their core supporters by cooperatively planning these tours. Many environmentalists don't believe that Big Ag should be engaged in this way and many of the Commodity Groups abhor the idea of giving environmentalists any legitimacy. We stepped to the edge of our circles and found ourselves in the middle of a much larger circle.
How did this collaboration differ from the normal way of doing your work?
Normally we would stake out our positions in the media, rally our supporters and move toward a showdown at a public hearing or some kind of legislative battle. With these tours, we set that all aside and created the opportunity to talk over food, drinks and on bus and boat tours. It was fun! We didn't immediately think of our rebuttals. We stopped demonizing each other and sought to understand.
Impact
How do you know your collaboration has been effective?
As part of the tour we created a data base and freely shared names, addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of all the tour participants. Since the tours, many of the participants have contacted each other and continued the dialogue and exchange. We have made presentations together to watershed groups and agencies who were very curious to learn about the tours -- how we went about organizing them and what was learned. Everyone wants to meet again and continue the dialogue. Newspapers, list serves and Facebook pages have shared photos from the tours. Several people urged us to submit the case study of this tour to this In Commons collaboration challenge. As we said to each other during the tours: "we are on to something here."
What progress or impact has been made?
We have created a bridge for interaction where there was none before. This is huge. The problems affecting the Minnesota River and Lake Pepin were 100 years in the making. First they were ignored, then they were denied, now they are starting to be acknowledged & everyone is starting to realize that in order to solve these problems we need a cooperative spirit, not a climate of blame and shame.
Next Steps
How would you go about continuing, expanding, or replicating this collaboration?
We have been approached by the West Central Regional Sustainable Development Partnership (WCRSP) and the MPCA about ways we can replicate and expand the Friendship Tour collaboration. In order to do this we need to raise money for the staff time and organizing required to do more exchanges and tours -- not only between the MN River and Lake Pepin but in other watersheds and sub watersheds in the state. To do this, we need not only funding but a paradigm shift that places more value on the power of popular education methodologies to effect cultural change. Too much of the water quality clean up resources are devoted to scientific research and data accumulation and not enough are devoted to developing trust and understanding among common people. State agencies and the MN legislature need to realize that change will happen when people trust and believe in the process and that investing in community organizing and appreciative inquiry methodologies is just as important as water quality research, baseline data and technical TMDL standards. If this happens as the result of more Friendship Tours, we will inspire the statewide conservation ethic and water quality we all desire.
Describe the current stage of implementation and desired next steps
Currently we are in dialogue with the MPCA and the WCRSDP to establish a process to further the upstream-downstream dialogues between farmers and environmentalists in the Minnesota/Mississippi River Watersheds.
The citizen participants in the Lake Pepin/Minnesota River Friendship Tours have identified several areas of potential collaboration going forward.
These include: Collaborating on input to the TMDL (water quality standards) implementation planning process for the Minnesota River and Lake Pepin; collaborating on communicating to the general public about what ag is doing and can do to help achieve the clean water standards we all desire; collaborating on lobbying to the legislature with suggestions on how to enact the “framework” document being developed by the U of M.; collaborating on the development of a small model watershed project where the best practices of what farmers and cities can do to reach water quality standards can be demonstrated and measured; collaborating on more educational meetings and future Upstream-Downstream forums in other watersheds; collaborating on pushing for more buffer strips to be planted along ditches and public waterways in the Minnesota River/Lake Pepin Watershed.
If funding can be secured, we intend to organize a series of four more meetings between members of the Lake Pepin/Minnesota River Friendship tours to explore and narrow down this list of options.
We also desire to export the methodology of the Friendship Tours to other areas of the state. By choosing this collaboration as the winner of the collaboration challenge, we would use the $25,000 award to make this happen.
| 127 weeks ago Deborah Larson said: Hey Patrick - Good work, great video. Your passion continues to inspire and the river valley remains a deep part of my soul. about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 127 weeks ago erik brand said: I was raised in rural Minnesota, and can only regret that ideas like this were not applied where I grew up in the 1970s. Now there's a ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 127 weeks ago Patrick Moore said: Jerry -- thanks for testifying. I want to tour that orchard some day! patrick about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 127 weeks ago Andru Peters said: Since the French early settlements in 1650 - 1673, followed by the British takeover in 1763, whom ultimately surrendered the territory ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 127 weeks ago Andru Peters said: Since the French early settlements in 1650 - 1673, followed by the British takeover in 1763, whom ultimately surrendered the territory ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 127 weeks ago JEAN HOIDAL said: In 1854 my great-great grandparents were some of the first settlers in the Wabasha area. They came up the Missippi from Iowa to ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 128 weeks ago Jerry Schaefer said: It's a beautiful thing to know that everything I do to clean up the creek that flows through my orchard in Ghent, MN, has a positive ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 128 weeks ago nicole zempel said: Thank you CURE for the important work that you do. The way you bring individuals from all walks of life together around a common ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 128 weeks ago Dixie Tilden said: We want it to be known that CURE's 2010 summer intern, U of M Morris Student Lyndsey Weber of Granite Falls, had a lot to do with the ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > | |
| 133 weeks ago Patrick Moore updated this Competition Entry. |
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