A Timeline of Environmental History and Activism in Minnesota

1861

Henry David Thoreau, the writer of Civil Disobedience, visits Minnesota on doctor’s orders to sample its cleanse air. He roams the woods around Minnehaha Falls, cataloging the names of the indigenous bouquets and birds. 


1869

An attempt to tunnel beneath St. Anthony Falls collapses the waterfall, forming a harmful whirlpool that threatens the region’s most important energy resource. Hundreds of volunteers fill the gap, and sooner or later the Minneapolis Hearth Section diverts the water.


1890

Joseph A. Wheelock writes a letter in the St. Paul Pioneer Press urging conservation of the remaining stand of virgin pine trees around Lake Itasca. A year later, Itasca gets Minnesota’s to start with state park.


1902

The U.S. Normal Land Place of work sets apart five hundred,000 acres of public lands to build a forest reserve in northern Minnesota. In 1905 one more 141,000 acres are established apart, and in 1909 President Teddy Roosevelt dedicates the land as the Excellent Nationwide Forest.


1903

20-four-year-previous Itasca Point out Park commissioner Mary Gibbs confronts a gun-wielding lumberjack as soaring water threatens to drown the park’s previous-growth trees. Gibbs opens the Itasca dam, prevailing in the short expression, but the loggers gain an injunction and sooner or later log the relaxation of the park.


1919

A year right after the huge Cloquet-Moose Lake fireplace kills 453 folks, activist groups like the Minnesota Federation of Women’s Golf equipment, aghast at the unregulated logging and swamp drainage that brought about the excellent conflagration, lobby for federal oversight.  


1922

The nobleman Count William Rudolph Martinovich von Rovigno, a well-known hunter of moose and bear, enlists as a conservation guard in the nascent Excellent Nationwide Forest. The mysterious rely roams the woods, enforcing limits on looking, fishing, and logging.


1927

Activist Ernest Oberholtzer sorts the Quetico-Excellent Council to oppose the seven new dams on Rainy Lake proposed by lumber baron Edward Wellington Backus. By 1930, President Hoover signs the Shipstead-Newton-Nolan Act, avoiding the alteration of lake degrees on federal land.


1956

Sigurd Olson, former dean of Ely Junior College or university turned canoe outfitter/guideline, writes his to start with e-book, The Singing Wilderness, filling it with songs to each and every environmentalist’s ears: “Wilderness to the folks of The usa is a non secular requirement.”


1961

Immediately after remaining hunted to in the vicinity of extinction—the final bison was viewed in Minnesota in 1880—three bison from Nebraska are released to Blue Mounds Point out Park in the hopes of forming a conservation herd. About one hundred thirty bison stay in the park today.


1963

Two industrial incidents spill much more than 3.five million gallons of oil into the Mississippi River, killing and maiming countless numbers of ducks. Outraged citizens clamor for motion, and state senator Gordon Rosenmeier introduces a monthly bill regulating the contamination of groundwater. 


1967

Samuel Huntington Morgan is named president of the Minnesota Parks Foundation, which raises revenue, buys land, and then sells it to the state. Its to start with venture: Afton Point out Park.


1974

Immediately after Reserve Mining Co. had poured forty seven tons of taconite tailings and waste rock into Lake Excellent each and every minute, around the clock, for the earlier twenty five several years, Federal Choose Miles Lord orders them to cease. He gets the to start with decide to buy a big industrial plant to halt functions in favor of the surroundings. 


1978

Congressman Don Fraser’s amendment to the Boundary Waters Canoe Region Wilderness Act—ending all logging and snowmobiling and further more limiting mining and motorboat use—passes regardless of large opposition from his fellow Democrats up north.  


1998

A group of Earth Firsters and Indigenous American water protectors calling by themselves the Minnehaha No cost Point out chain by themselves to oak trees to protest the rerouting of Highway 55 through the Camp Coldwater Spring web page. 


1999

The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe fights in federal court docket to restore their 1837 looking and fishing legal rights, whilst white sport fishing proponents (which includes former Vikings coach Bud Grant) protest a proposed settlement at the state capitol. In the end, the Supreme Court procedures in favor of the Ojibwe.


2018

The Trump administration reverses the Obama administration’s ban on mineral leasing on a 234,000-acre stretch of land in the Rainy River watershed in the vicinity of Ely. Twin Metals Minnesota’s revived plans for a copper-nickel mine imperil the BWCA when yet again.