"At Big Bog, damaged peat rebounds at rates measurable only in millimeters per year."
"Journalist" Stephen Regenold writing in the New York Times
The above is an interesting quote because Jerry Stensing and Doug Easthouse have said that it will take less than twenty-years to reclaim the peatlands damaged due to the peat mining they supported.
To bad Stephen Regenold forgot to ask Jerry Stensing and Doug Easthouse to take him on a tour of the massive destruction now underway as peat mining is set to destroy the Big Bog.
Four-hundred thousand tax-payer dollars for a specially constructed boardwalk to protect the delicate bog life from human feet while a short distance away bulldozers, dredges and backhoes are destroying this same bog under a permit issued by the same Minnesota Department of Natural Resources pretending to be protecting our sensitive eco-systems. Quite possibly there has never been two more hypocritical government boondoggles--- one giving away our resources to a foreign corporation destroying our primary freshwater aquifer and an entire eco-system, and another boondoggle putting on a front for tourists seeking appreciation of true pristine wilderness.
It seems the New York Times always leaves out one very important information in their stories whether it is drumming up support for Bush's dirty war in Iraq or Jerry Stensing's eco-tourism business... for the New York Times, like Berger Peat Moss, Ltd, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the corrupt Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party it is always about money and the business interests... our environment and the public be damned.
It is not coincidental that the New York Times did this story now as this massive peat mining is about to get underway.
Jerry Stensing was the one lone--- public voice--- in support of peat mining in the Big Bog... I wonder where Stensing got the money to start up his eco-tourism business?
Doug Easthouse, the Manager of the Big Bog State Park employed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has been too cowardly to defend the Big Bog--- this delicate ecosystem he claims to support.
$400,000.00 to create an environmentally friendly walkway one mile into the bog; $20,000,000.00 to create a road into the Bog so Berger Peat Moss, a Canadian multi-national corporation can truck away the profits.
It was nice of tax-payers to build Mr. Stensing a bog-walk for his clientele; it was even more generous of county, state and federal tax-payers to finance thirty miles of road into the Big Bog for Berger to haul off the profits.
Corruption feeding upon corruption... and all we get is this pathetic excuse for journalism from the New York Times.
I'm surprised Congressman Jim Oberstar missed this photo/op.
Alan Maki
Mud and Muck in Minnesota's Everglades of the North
By STEPHEN REGENOLD
Published: June 13, 2008
IT was a Sunday morning at Bemidji Regional Airport in northern Minnesota, and our plane had just left the ground. The wings shuddered as we buzzed above a highway and banked right, climbing in the four-seat Cessna toward clouds and a view so flat the land looked concave.
We were flying north over a vast and ancient lakebed, a blur of green to all horizons that’s the footprint of the long-gone glacial Lake Agassiz. “The bog is up a ways ahead,” shouted Jerry Stensing, my guide on the air tour, his voice muffled in a drone of wind and cockpit noise.
Mr. Stensing’s company, Big Bog Eco Tours, guides trips into the Red Lake Peatland, a remote and hard-to-access wilderness that is among the largest bogs on the planet. Stretching for more than 50 miles east to west, and 15 to 20 miles north to south, the Big Bog is a wet and spongy no man’s land roughly half the size of Rhode Island.
It is a place where plants eat bugs, and where otters live in rivers thick with ooze. There are no hiking trails to the bog’s interior, an otherworldly habitat of muck and moss, with moose and wolves roaming the soft earth. Rivers disappear and resurface in this Everglades of the North, the tannin-stained water seeping and flowing in a gigantic aquifer alive and burping, its deep sphagnum sponge spouting methane into clear Northern air.
“Let’s head down here at the lake,” Mr. Stensing yelled up to the pilot, requesting a closer view of the bog. On the ground a stream slinked southward, its oxbows and banks a black squiggle on tan land. An eagle hovered next to the plane, aloft on a thermal, scanning an endless mire for a meal. “This is 1,000 feet,” the pilot piped, noting our altitude. “Close as we can get.”
The air tour, a two-hour flight crisscrossing Big Bog, is Mr. Stensing’s preferred introduction to a land hard to appreciate on foot. Indeed, for decades, starting in the late 19th century, the county government worked to drain the Red Lake Peatland, with millions of dollars spent to route water from the bog’s interior to nearby lakes and streams. A huge project between 1910 and 1916 resulted in more than 1,500 miles of ditches being dug.
“The area was seen as a wasteland,” said Doug Easthouse, the manager at Big Bog State Recreation Area, a state park opened in 2000. “They wanted rid of it.”
AMERICAN Indians have long gathered medicinal plants in the bog, and local farmers created wild rice paddies at its edge. In the 1940s, the United States military bombed the muck, assessing the free fall of munitions during test runs.
But ooze and earth prevailed at Big Bog, the muck and decaying vegetation that has accumulated over millenniums mostly unaffected by the efforts of engineers and scientists of the past. “They didn’t understand the region’s hydrology,” Mr. Easthouse said.
From the airplane, banking over a city-size carpet of moss, Big Bog’s hydrology remained a mystery to me, too. The landscape — a hound’s-tooth of greens and tans and browns, all swirling with dark water and putridness — was unlike anything I had seen. Rare land features like flarks, strings and ovoid islands form on the ancient sand ridges of Lake Agassiz or in the middle of muddy muskeg, the solitary topography on an otherwise plate-flat vista.
“Like battleships at sea,” Mr. Stensing said, pointing down at row upon row of the teardrop-shaped ovoid islands.
At noon, back on the ground after the introductory flight, Mr. Stensing and I drove north from Bemidji, the highways and county roads buzzing with traffic; it was early May, and the opening weekend of the walleye fishing season. After the wide view from the sky, it was time to see the bog up close. “You bounce when you walk on a bog,” Mr. Stensing said.
But before putting our feet to the fluffy ground, we went to Big Bog State Recreation Area near the town of Waskish, where a boardwalk twists a mile into the peatland. Installed in 2005, the $400,000 walkway is a modern eco-feat attached to silt under the sphagnum with pipes and helical anchors. A translucent deck lets sunlight through to the life below. “Plants underneath the boardwalk are unaffected,” Mr. Easthouse said.
Mr. Stensing and I parked near a pond, then took to the plastic pathway. An initial signboard — the first of 19 tutorials — noted the significance of our hike: “You’re about to visit the largest peat bog in the lower 48 states!”
I stepped ahead on the path and hiked into the bog, stunted spruce and tamarack trees spiking up from the moss. “Watch out for moose,” Mr. Stensing said, only half-joking. (His dog was stomped to death by a moose last year.)
Though rarely dangerous to humans, big animals thrive in the area, including moose, wolves, deer and some wildcats. Caribou roamed the region for hundreds of years before drifting north in the mid-20th century, though their migration trails are still pounded into the land. At Big Bog, damaged peat rebounds at rates measurable only in millimeters per year.
Birds in migration stop in at the bog by the millions, including tundra swans, American white pelicans and sandhill cranes. Warblers and great gray owls, spruce grouse, black-backed woodpeckers, bald eagles and gray jays are residents. Mr. Stensing has guided ornithologists and lay bird watchers alike. “It’s probably the No. 1 activity on the boardwalk many weekends,” he said.
Other bog snoopers come for the bug-eating plants, that rare vegetative subset that can both photosynthesize and eat meat. Though there are no Venus flytraps in Minnesota, bladderworts, pitcher plants and sundews are all native orders that feed upon the abundant insect life. Slippery sidewalls leading to enzymatic chambers, gooey leaves to catch bugs like flypaper, and evolved visual trickery are all means by which these plants attract, capture and digest their prey.
“See these red lines,” Mr. Stensing said, kneeling on the boardwalk, pointing to a carnivorous pitcher plant. “Flies see this pattern and think ‘blood veins,’ then they go right in.”
We hiked the mile to the end of the elevated path, a twisting walk through stunted trees, some more than 150 years old though just 10 feet tall. The path ended where the bog opened up, with benches and binoculars mounted on pipes for people to rest and take in the view.
Later in the day, after leaving the boardwalk for a final stop on the bog tour, Mr. Stensing and I drove outside state park lines to government forest land, where you’re free to hike and explore the moist netherworld at will. We parked near a wild rice paddy, dozens of tundra swans taking off from a pond as car doors slammed.
Heading north, we hiked along a municipal ditch, a gully of root beer water, 10 feet wide and still, stretching out of sight. “You could canoe this to get to the interior,” Mr. Stensing said, cupping hand to brow, peering ahead.
A quarter-mile down Mr. Stensing pointed west and we tromped into the moss. “Good as any place,” he said.
I was then walking on a water bed, a cushioned forest floor of bumps and moss hummocks, little bushes sinking into the green when I stepped close. In low spots liquid squeegeed up through the ground where I stepped, my footprints filling in with the acidic brew, a black froth bubbling up from beneath.
Trees slanted as I walked by, infirm, their roots swimming in sphagnum and peat accumulated to 20 feet thick in spots. There was the sensation that the ground was floating, which it was.
But the peat reconstituted itself as I kept on, rebounding from behind, erasing my footprints — like those of a lone moose — as fast as I could make them.
Mr. Stensing mentioned a few plants on our walk and then resolved to let the scene do all the talking. The sound-dampening qualities of sphagnum shut down all noise, and we hiked only with the “squishes” from our feet below.
Back at the car, at the edge of a rice paddy, Mr. Stensing pointed to a muskrat skittering in the brush. We were on a gravel road, quiet and remote, the shore of Upper Red Lake to the south all but invisible beyond the bog.
THE swans were stirring again nearby, unhappy to see humans, taking flight in pairs and tracing away. Their squawks were like bells, a fluting, cooing sound, a chilling call to depart and to flee.
It was with that signal that we left the bog, car tires crunching on gravel as we headed east, bumping uphill and back into the forest. We drove in silence, the weird and wild sound of the swans still in my head, a primal noise, reverberating, alien, and hard to put into words.
For the following photos see the New York Times article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/travel/escapes/13bog.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
BOG WALK Jerry Stensing, a guide, strolls the boardwalk at the Big Bog State Recreation Area in northern Minnesota.
Big Bog State Recreation Area Map
Big Bog State Recreation Area
One of the ditches dug in an attempt to drain the bog. Big Bog State Rec. Area in northern Minnesota.
Big Bog State Recreation Area in northern Minnesota. A river snakes through the moss.
Guide, Jerry Stensing, shows a piece of moss to his clients while lounging in the Big Bog State Recreation Area in northern Minnesota.
Mr. Regenold, New York Times “Travel Reporter,”
I am writing regarding your story, or advertisement, or whatever you call it in the New York Times: Mud and Muck in Minnesota's Everglades of the North… about our pristine Big Bog
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/travel/escapes/13bog.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I have created a blog you might find of interest with some questions on your story.
No doubt in preparations for your trip into the Big Bog for your “story” you probably came across a few of my other blogs relating to the struggles of most of the rest of northern Minnesotans opposed to the peat mining which will destroy this eco-system, forever, as you described it in your article.
Here is one of my blogs:
http://pineislandstateforest.blogspot.com/
Here is another:
http://freeman-forum.blogspot.com/
And you call yourself a journalist? Well, this isn’t surprising; the New York Times calls itself a “newspaper.”
Probably it is just as well you didn’t delve a little deeper into the Big Bog’s past, present and future and the dirty business of peat mining and Minnesota politics because you probably would have ended up hopelessly mired in the mud and muck of corruption.
Alan L. Maki
58891 County Road 13
Warroad, Minnesota 56763
Phone: 218-386-2432
Cell phone: 651-587-5541
E-mail: amaki000@centurytel.net
Check out my blog:
Thoughts From Podunk
http://thepodunkblog.blogspot.com/
Alan,
Thanks for this information. I was aware of the peat mining operation, though did not realize there was so much controversy.
Surprised my MN State Park contacts didn't make a bigger deal out of it.
Thanks,
--Stephen Regenold
regenold@gmail.com; 612/723-0279
Commentary:
One has to wonder how it is that reporter Regenold is so out of touch with what is going on in the state where he lives and works... Minnesota.
This gives us a very good idea of the kind of concern reporters have for the people living in the communities they write stories about.
How could it be that Mr. Regenold would acknowledge knowing about the peat mining but not even ask to be taken to the peat mining site.
Mr. Regenold obviously did this story in this manner in order to try to cover up this peat mining operation in order to try to detract from the growing local opposition to the peat mining operation behind the pretense of hypocritically claiming a concern for a delicate ecosystem.
Mr. Regenold admits he was in touch with people in the Parks Department of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources prior to doing this story and the peat mining is taking is taking place between three Scientific and Natural Areas in the middle of the Pine Island State Forest.
One square mile of the old trees Mr. Regenold looked upon with such awe will be removed along with thousands of bog plants he so enthusiastically studied.
Unlike Mr. Regenold, I have seen moose right in the midst of the area to be mined for peat as they ate.
That a reporter would come into an area knowing there are very serious environmental concerns on the part of local people without even acknowledging their is this concern is very typical of the arrogance of "travel writers" like Mr. Regenold who frequently go on tours around the world and only provide what the well-heeled want to see as poverty, war, starvation, drought and disease afflict the local populations.
Once again we have been "treated" to a sanitized version of what passes itself off for journalism by a very arrogant, selfish, uncaring and insensitive "journalist."
Of course, if what Mr. Regenold says is true in his letter to me, this raises very serious concerns about the professional and scientific integrity of those employed in the Parks Department of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources who, like Mr. Easthouse who is the manager of the Big Bog Recreation Area and State Park are only telling people half the story while claiming to be promoting the protection of the Big Bog--- this is a story which needs further delving into. Mr. Easthouse is getting a nice fat pay-check compliments of the people of Minnesota when Mr. Stensing and Berger Peat Moss should be paying his wages.
To add insult to injury, Mr. Regennold, now receiving concerns from readers about his omission of the peat mining, has become upset with readers writing to him who are misspelling his name!
