What would bring a big-city mayor out to a small Minnesota River Valley town on a Saturday night in February?
What that prairie river signifies, meandering across the state from Big Stone Lake on the western border with South Dakota to its confluence near Fort Snelling south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Minneapolis Mayor Rybak was a Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) Annual Meeting speaker on February 12 in Montevideo.
A bad cold kept me home; fortunately, John G. White, editor of the Clara City Herald, and Tom Cherveny, a staff writer for the West Central Tribune, cover the event, which drew around 300 people from across the region.
Cherveny reports in R.T. Rybak endorses local foods, clean water economy:
Those promoting a local foods and sustainable, agricultural economy as the way to clean water and a healthy landscape in the Upper Minnesota River Valley have a partner in the urban center of Minneapolis.
“We are part of two, big grassroots efforts that are about to meet in the center,’’ Mayor R. T. Rybak told a crowd of nearly 300 at the annual meeting for Clean Up our River Environment in Montevideo on Feb. 12.
Rybank [sic] applauded the efforts taking place in rural Minnesota. “The land is a mirror. It reflects back the values of those who love on top of it,’’ he said, adding: “I have to say that the land that you live on looks back and smiles, you do wonderful things but you have to keep up the work.’’
He pointed to efforts in Minneapolis as well to promote a local foods economy. He cited examples ranging from “Home Grown Minneapolis’’ which teaches young people how to raise and prepare their own foods to school lunch programs that feature foods from Minnesota farms.
Rybak said Minnesota needs to “reconnect’’ and redevelop the farm-to-town markets that existed when the state was first settled.
Go read the WCT article. In the article first published in the Clara City paper, White notes that Rybak and his wife, local food activist Megan O'Hara, sat with small town mayors:
He was seated at the “mayor’s table” with the mayors of Montevideo, Granite Falls, Watson and Belle Plaine, along with his wife, Megan, the Minneapolis mayor told a guest, “If we were back in Minneapolis at an event like this people would have been gone after two hours. This is just so comfortable.”
Two documentary filmmakers were the keynote speakers:
Keynoting the event were John Hickman and Jon Carlson, who are collaborating on a documentary of “Working Together for the Minnesota River.” The two spoke of their challenges and successes in putting together the film and interviews that is scheduled to run as a series on Ron Schara’s Minnesota Bound in March and April.
That should be worth watching. CURE is a deeply social-and-legacy media savvy organization that gets it about statewide collaboration, as Bluestem noted in a post late last year, Montevideo's CURE wins $25,000 Bush Foundation collaboration grant.
One of the standard tropes inflicted upon rural voters by social conservatives is that somehow "rural values" exist in a Pale surrounding the Twin Cities; usually, these "rural' values seem to center on being afraid of someone else, and using that fear to punish.
CURE and other groups learning the lesson of the Minnesota River Valley can teach us all that maybe our economic and moral values are much more alike in terms of the future we can seek together, and that geography unites us--and a very pretty river runs through it.
Photos: Megan, Grace and RT Rybak meet some cattle on Prairie Horizons Farms (above); CURE's storefront in Montevideo (below).
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