Armed with nothing but gardening gloves and a positive attitude, Dinah Langsjoen and her soon-to-be-second-grade son Torin emerged from the front door of their lower North Mankato home and embarked on a very simple mission: to save the world.
With only a plastic grocery sack as a weapon, the pair marched the half block to Lake Street. And immediately got busy.
“When we’re cleaning up our site,” Langsjoen says, stooping down to curb level to scoop up a handful of collected gunk, “we just go at it.”
Their goal: clear the storm sewers of any debris — organic or otherwise — that may collect.
Why? The junk collecting at storm sewer drains has no doubt collected pollutants (street chemicals, herbicides, etc.) that, if large amounts reach larger waterways, can wreak havoc on an ecosystem.
In about 10 minutes of cleanup — which included a car-tire-battered, very-used diaper — the duo dirtied their gloves and filled their bag with junk clogging the drain grate. And in doing so, they did their part, however small, in making the world a better place.
“And it was so easy,” Langsjoen says. “I’m excited for more people to learn about this.”
The “this” she’s referring to is something called the Blue Earth Project. Created by Paul Ebbenga, the project aims to clean up Blue Earth County’s land and water, and return southern Minnesota to a time when residents didn’t have to worry whether its lakes or rivers were swimmable.
The Blue Earth Project’s premise is simple. The idea is to get an army of volunteers to sign up for easy cleanup tasks, as easy as monitoring the storm sewer drains on your block. There are bigger jobs, too, such as adopting city blocks or rivers.
To make it easy, Ebbenga has created a GIS-crafted interactive map where volunteers can easily visualize their community and what their role can be in making it cleaner.
For example, if someone wants to adopt a drain near their home, they can use the interactive map to zoom in on their neighborhood and choose a drain, or several drains, to adopt. Once you claim your drain, the site gives instructions on how to monitor the drain. It even includes a competitive side: adopting more sites and uploading updates earns “points,” with volunteers listed on a “leaderboard.”
Atop that leaderboard at the moment is Langsjoen.
She says that, when she heard about the Blue Earth Project, she was intrigued by its simplicity. She was also motivated to volunteer to teach her son the importance of taking care of the environment and, in part, because of Torin’s innate compassion for it.
“He won’t even pick flowers because he doesn’t want to hurt the plant,” she says. “He calls himself a little Earth saver.”
She saw a few social media posts about the Blue Earth Project and delved into it a bit. And it occurred to her that, just on the walk to Monroe Elementary School she’d pass 17 storm sewer drains. Why not adopt them? How hard can it be to glance at a drain and see if it needs a little TLC?
“We’re walking that way, anyway,” she says. “Why couldn’t we just add that in?”
Making it easy like that was Ebbenga’s goal. But his journey getting to this point was anything but easy.
Peak environmentalist
Ebbenga was born in St. James but moved to Mankato with his family as a kid. After graduating from Mankato West High School in 2006, he immediately relocated to Arizona. While he considered himself an activist in high school, it wasn’t until he got to Arizona that his environmental mindset began to take shape.
Eventually he moved again to Colorado, where his mindset evolved further. And then one day, things crystalized.
“I was on a 14,000-foot summit hike,” he says, “and I left the mountain that day trying to figure out a way to capture the beauty that I had experienced.”
His first thought was to purchase a drone for aerial photography. But “cinema quality” drones are expensive to buy, so he decided to build one himself. While doing so, he learned that one of the most profitable and best uses for drones was in something called precision agriculture, or using science to bring a higher level of efficiency and efficacy to chemical use on crops.
And not long after that, he read an article in the Star Tribune that offered a grim assessment of southern Minnesota’s waterways.
The article quoted Minnesota Pollution Control Agency representatives saying southern Minnesota lakes are now “irreversibly unswimmable” and suggested writing them off as unsalvageable.
“That hit the hardest,” he says. “I thought, ‘Whoa, that’s pretty strong language coming from the agency that’s sworn to control pollution. And I wondered, ‘Is anybody in my hometown reading this? What do they think about it? Do they know that this agency is giving up on them?’”
His research on agriculture and learning about the MPCA’s thoughts rattled him. Around that same time, he read a book about authenticity, one that forced him to reevaluate what he was doing with his life. That’s when he says he truly knew he needed to do something to make a difference.
“That kind of connected me with my passion for environmentalism,” he says.
After teaching himself to use geographic information system technology, Ebbenga began work on a tool for engaging people in micro-environmentalism — many people helping improve the environment by each doing a little bit.
This resulted in the heart and soul of the Blue Earth Project, the GIS-based interactive map called Ecomapper. This is where people can sign up, adopt a drain and get their hands dirty a few times a year doing exactly what Langsjoen and her son did the other day.
Ebbenga says the time for action was several years ago. With each day, week, month and year that polluted fields and waterways get ignored by the public, the harder it will be to clean them up.
Making things even more difficult, he says, is the challenging nature of talking about the role farming plays in environmental issues. Overuse of pesticides combined with the lore surrounding the romantic idea of the American farmer, makes honest conversations hard to come by, Ebbenga says.
“They’re wasting money trying to get the highest yield they possibly can from the field, and it’s wreaking havoc on our ecosystem. And we’ve certainly sold out here in southern Minnesota to corn and soybean, the cornerstone of our economy,” he says.
“I kind of look at it like sort of this ‘support the troops’ mindset where everybody’s kind of scared to point a finger at a family farmer. And I get that to some degree. But the truth is, we’re heading toward a situation where it’s not family farms anymore. It’s these huge corporations, many of them international corporations. So it’ll be easier to hold them accountable in the future assuming legislation matches that, but right now, we have a farm bill that basically writes in exceptions for these farmers to do whatever they want in the name of the economic value of corn and soy production.”
A helping hand
The idea of helping with the storm drains appealed to Elizabeth Hallstein as well. She’s dealing with some health issues but still wanted to find a way to contribute to an environmental cause.
“I can’t work right now,” she says. “So I just try to pick up trash or do anything I can do when I’m feeling good.”
Several months ago, after donating money to the Zero Waste Project, which is affiliated with the Blue Earth Project, she was picking up trash in a ditch near her home when a man pulled over to talk. It was Ebbenga stopping to invite a fellow environmentally and civic-minded Mankatoan to join a group cleanup effort he was organizing.
Hallstein says nature and the environment have always been a part of her life.
“I grew up poor so nature was kind of like my only escape from my inner home life,” she says. “My sisters and I would always go walking on trails. We didn’t have money to go do what everyone else was doing. So there was a six-mile trail that went from Shakopee to Chaska. And my friends and I would always go walk on that because we were just bored teenagers. When you’re poor, and you just have your yard, you play with little bugs and things and you have to get creative.”
For Hallstein, like Langsjoen, the attraction of adopting a drain was its ease. It requires very little effort, yet it makes her feel like she’s doing something positive.
“There are about 12 drains right by my house,” she says. “It’s literally so easy and it gives you a reason to go outside. And anybody can do it. A 3-year-old, 4-year-old could do it. And it’s kind of fun! You can kind of be like, ‘Oh, let me see if I can save anything from going down the drain today.’”
Ebbenga has great ambitions for the project. He says he’d love to see this effort expand far and wide. If everyone did their part, he says, great and positive changes can happen.