Sheltered Lands

B U R N S V I L L E,  M N Heading south, back toward the Twin Cities, the chances of a quality recording plummet.   The concentration of humanity and their machines leave very few pockets of natural sounds.    Nonetheless, other aspects of nature preservation gain importance as I approach the metropolis. On the south shore of the Minnesota River in Burnsville, ninety five acres of land once known as The Nature Conservancy’s Black Dog Preserve has been donated to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service expanding the Minnesota River National Wildlife Refuge.   The acreage contains remnants of wet and mesic black soil prairie and a calcareous fen, a rare wetland characterized by calcium-rich groundwater.   This refuge is also a stopover site for numerous migratory birds in the spring and fall including ducks, geese and double-crested cormorants.   These pockets of refuge, small as they are, in a growingly urbanized world serve as nice mitigations. ...

Helen Allison Savanna, East Bethel, Minnesota E.  B E T H E L,  M N Twenty thousand years ago, Canada and northern America were covered in ice.   The earth had cooled, crystallizing much of its water into massive and impressive ice sheets, known commonly as the Ice Age.   But then the pendulum began to swing.   Slowly, the earth has been heating up ever since.   Science hasn’t yet figured out the reason for this rise - a natural ebb and flow, perhaps?   Despite popular belief, the tons of carbon we dump into the atmosphere is only an exacerbation – the earth had been naturally heating up well before we cut down a first tree or drilled for even an ounce of oil.   Regardless of why, as the earth warmed, the ice sheets retreated leaving behind dramatic landscape changes.   In one particular state, those changes included the formation of 10,000 lakes.   Few states have been influenced more by glaciation than Minnesota.   Her...