Ike History in Minnesota Videos

All videos produced by John Crampton

• The Minnesota Division of the Izaak Walton League has played a leading role in the protection of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness from the 1920s until the present-day fight to stop sulfide mining on the borders of the BWCA. The IKE's leadership has been based on partnerships with other organizations and the role played by activists who were eminent biologists and ecologists.

• Will Dilg was the charismatic founder of the Izaak Walton League of America in 1922. He was disgusted by the degradation of the Upper Mississippi River due to drainage and farming in the floodplain. So he mobilized fishermen, hunters, and conservationists throughout the nation to found the Izaak Walton League and to establish the Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife & Fish Refuge.

• In 1951 the Izaak Walton League Minnesota Division helped launch a campaign to "Save Our Wetlands" which were rapidly disappearing due to farming drainage. Led by IKE leader Richard J. Dorer who as a manager in the Minnesota Conservation Dept., the campaign developed into a major program to buy wetlands and other threatened habitat. Today, the program has become a network of over 1,440 public wildlife areas with 1.29 million acres of habitat, from prairies and wetlands to forests and swamps, for Minnesota's wildlife species.

• John Weiss, Outdoor Writer for the Rochester Post Bulletin salutes the courage and vision of Richard J. Dorer and the Izaak Walton League in restoring the bluff country, rivers, streams of Southeastern Minnesota. This country became the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood Forest.

• Video tour of the Deep Portage Conservation Reserve and Environmental Learning Center in Cass County Minnesota shows the sustainable use of a 6,000 acre forest for wildlife, clean water, timber production, ecology, and environmental education for over 500,000 people in the past 33 years. This project has been developed by Cass County in cooperation with the Izaak Walton League Cass County Chapter.

• This video tells the story of Hamden Slough National Wildlife Refuge in Audubon, Minnesota and the cooperation between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Prairie Woods Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America to restore this area for migrating waterfowl, birding, wildlife habitat, prairie restoration, and water quality.

• The Izaak Walton League-Minnesota Division led the campaign to clean up the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities in the 1930s by pushing for the first sewage treatment plant on the Upper Mississippi River. John Anfinson, Chief of Resource Management on the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area tells the story of how the IKEs have led in habitat preservation and restoration from the 1920s to today.