This Dude Gets It

Tony Thompson. American. Farmer. Minnesotan. Cajun?

Tony owns a farm in southwest Minnesota. Runoff from his land eventually enters the Mississippi River - as does the runoff from 33 states and 2 Canadian provinces - carrying with it fertilizer, pesticides, dirt, and a butt load of nitrogen. Channeled by levees that prevents the river from depositing its "sediment" in wetlands along the coast of southeast Louisiana, Tony's farm detritus flows out the bird's foot delta of the Mississippi River into the Gulf where it forms a massive hypoxic - i.e., no dissolved oxygen - zone that creates suicidal shrimp among other resource oddities/tragedies.



But Tony is changing his ways to help his Gulf Coast "neighbors." Read about it in an interesting, albeit lengthy, article here.

Skip the article if you must, but at least check out the slide show.

Another human/environmental interest piece about the Gulf. The overarching moral here might be that we're all connected to the Gulf and it's coasts whether for fossil fuels, seafood, protein, or the crap we dump in rivers. Bring on the Pulitzer.