A Midwestern Summer, and other thoughts

     In Menomonie, the balance of rural life and proximity to urban centers combine perfectly into what I wanted in a summer experience. I am from the Twin Cities, so the heat of the past few weeks (as miserable as it has been) feels comfortable in its predictability. The fresh produce from the bi-weekly farmers market, the community events, the familiar faces that pop up even after only being here for less than two weeks – these things are entirely foreign to me, yet I already feel used to them.

    This familiarity extends to the water. Visible almost anywhere in town, large, glittering: lake Menomin. Even green and smelly, lakes have their own vast organic beauty about them that I admire. The lake next to my house, Lake Como, has a similar algae problem so growing up I assumed that was the fate of any lake with enough human activity around it, but it’s still surprising to see at such a culturally impactful scale. The town is small enough, and the lake is big enough, that everyone is somehow connected. The watershed is the veins and the lake the beating heart of the community. It feels strangely intimate to attempt to come in as a heart surgeon.

    That metaphor makes it sound more impressive than it is though. I wanted my summer experience to be related to agricultural conservation. Coming from school in Rhode Island (maybe the only state small enough where 100% of the land is considered urban), I had little opportunity to work with large-scale agricultural activities and actually speak to farmers. Coming from home in Minnesota, I knew I needed to have those conversations to get a truly comprehensive picture of environmental issues in the United States. The work I am doing this summer perfectly encapsulates that. So far, I have been researching and speaking with farmers and agricultural services workers more than ever before in my life and I already feel like I’ve learned so much. Farmers care about the environment more than they are given credit for, know much more than I know. I can learn about nutrient management policies and eutrophication as much as I want but at the end of the day, education in isolation isn’t a panacea.

    I feel like what we are doing in the LAKES REU program – spanning across biology, economics, political science, psychology, anthropology, engineering – is contributing to a greater picture of what solving environmental problems really needs to look like in the future in order to not collapse as a society. We need to be flexible, multifaceted, nuanced, and always ready to learn something new.

    In the future, I want to work for the federal government. Our country can feel so broken and divided and stuck in this moment, but I just see that as a challenge. Lake Menomin also seems doomed to forever be green, but that simply isn’t true. We can come together and support each other and imagine a better future on any scale we are willing to take on.