A major push to expand pollinator habitat in the St. Croix River Valley includes federal agencies and major corporations like Xcel Energy and Andersen Corp.
It is also being championed by a yoga teacher in St. Croix Falls, Wis. and the Osceola, Wis., Braves baseball team.
More than 60 agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations and businesses in the St. Croix River Valley have signed a “Pollinator Pledge,” which acknowledges that they will work to help “pollinators such as butterflies, bees, some birds, bats and other insects that play a crucial role in flowering plant reproduction.”
Chris Stein, superintendent of the National Park Service’s St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, said he expects 100 signatures by the end of the year.
“This is an example of public and private sectors coming together to work on a common cause to solve a problem,” he said. “It’s beautiful, quite frankly. It’s good government.”
The Braves, an amateur men’s baseball team, started this spring planting milkweed and other pollinator-friendly plants around the city’s Oakey Park ball field, said Garth Olson, a member of team’s board.
“We plan to ask other teams in the (Wisconsin Baseball Association) league to do the same,” Olson said. “It’s such an easy thing to do. Most teams plant flowers around their parks, and it’s just as easy to plant milkweed or sunflowers as it is to plant petunias.”
Julie Karsky, owner of Yoga by Julie in St. Croix Falls, said she hands out small snack-sized Ziploc baggies of milkweed seed to clients in the spring.
“We’ve all agreed to plant these milkweed seeds together,” Karsky said. “This is how we’re growing together … because we share this world together. Without (pollinators), our world won’t be surviving. We need them.”
‘DO YOU LIKE TO EAT?’
Stein said more than 75 percent of flowering plants and nearly 75 percent of crops depend on bees, butterflies, birds, bats and other pollinators, making them critical to the country’s economy, food security and environmental health.
“Do you like to eat? Yes? Well, every third bite, thank a pollinator,” Stein said.
Stein said the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service came together at President Obama’s request “to work together on issues of common concern like climate change, habitat restoration, water quality and endangered species.”
The St. Croix Valley pollinator-species resolution is the first major collaboration locally, he said.
The effort “will be replicated throughout the United States to guarantee the viability of out pollinator populations,” U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., told a group of about 50 people who gathered Monday at Andersen’s Garofalo Center for Research and Development in Bayport to talk about the plan. “You heard the alarm; you’re reacting to it.”
Groups that have signed the pledge have been asked to do something tangible — “something on the ground that monarchs and other pollinators would notice,” said Park Ranger Jonathan Moore, the riverway’s partnership and volunteer coordinator.
“It’s less important how great it is or how small it is,” Moore said. “What’s important is that they are actually taking a tangible action on behalf of pollinators.”
50 acres at Xcel Energy
Xcel Energy’s Laura McCarten on Monday announced that the utility would be dedicating at least 50 acres of the company’s land in the St. Croix River Valley to pollinator-friendly plants. The leading candidate is the Allen S. King plant in Oak Park Heights, she said.
When Xcel’s High Bridge generating plant in St. Paul was changed from coal to natural gas in 2008, the company turned the seven acres where the coal had been stored to native prairie with pollinator-friendly wildflowers, said Tim Carlsgaard, a spokesman for the company. “One of our environmental analysts, who also has hives at his home, has set up three bee hives on the High Bridge Plant property,” he said.
Xcel is also working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to identify potential native prairie planting areas within the grounds of Xcel’s Black Dog generation facility in Burnsville, he said. The company is converting the generation facility from coal to natural gas.
Mary Divine can be reached at 651-228-5443. Follow her at twitter.com/MaryEDivine.
