What is clear from the New York Times story last Sunday by Charles Duhigg titled "Pressured to take more risk, Fannie reached tipping point," is that entire legions of financiers and political bigwigs foresaw the wheels coming off America's economic train. Or should have, party as they were to the malfeasance, greed and arrogance that led to Fannie Mae's -- and Wall Street's -- collapse.

Left as the rest of us are to pick up the pieces, and pay the bills, we nevertheless seem content to explain away our current fiscal predicaments by citing vague notions such as "easy credit" and mysterious currency instruments called "credit default swaps," and some such. Hogwash. Real people with real names are to blame, most of whom acted with intent, some -- perhaps many -- with malice.

The same is occurring here in Minnesota, fiscally, yes, but more so environmentally. For generations, we've treated our lakes and rivers like ditches. The Twin Cities, hydrologically, are little more than a series of interconnected open sewers. Our northern forests have been and are being chopped up and sold in squatter-sized plots, at auction. And subsidized ethanol plants, and their handmaiden, the corn boom, are depleting freshwater aquifers while ensuring that southwest and western Minnesota streams and rivers flow ripe with farm chemicals.

Relatively few Minnesotans have seen this firsthand. But some who have, and will again this weekend when the state's ringneck pheasant season opens, are bird hunters. Someone once said, "You must have a bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush." There is truth there. But it's with land and water that scattergunners connect with first and foremost, not birds, and upon which they, and their hearts, depend.

Talk-radio bleaters whose essential jobs are to energize pools of listeners to purchase rain-gutter covers have little feel for this, self-concerned as they are about personal benefit, measured usually by cash in the hand. They are not alone. Man's destiny might in fact be to convert everything into a commodity, or go to jail trying. The nation's financial crisis, after all, argues that games without rules played by risk junkies unafraid to bet everyone's future ultimately are rigged for failure.

Aldo Leopold, Wisconsin's most famous resident and founder of the nation's conservation movement, long ago got it right about land and water and the cataclysms that attend their misuse. He said, "Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm." That was in 1949.

Since then, we've learned little, as pheasant hunters will attest anew after this weekend. The Minnesota farm country they see while chasing roosters will be so changed even from a year ago, much of it will be unrecognizable. Cash rents for corn and soybean lands have skyrocketed, while government payments for conservation land have stalled. Feeling their oats, and eager for understandable reasons to fatten their bank accounts, some farmers are cold-calling neighbors and other landowners, making bids on fallow property, with intent immediately to put it beneath a plow.

Ancillary to this is the end of duck hunting in Minnesota, which arguably is in sight. This is less important than the end of ducks, which seems also fast occurring. Ducks are not the canary in the coal mine, foretelling all manner of bad things to come. But they're one of them, along with muskrats, leopard frogs, sego pondweed and wild celery. Also clean water.

A few years back in Minnesota, a broad consortium of interested parties -- environmentalists, business owners, counties, municipalities, hunters and anglers --after many months of deliberation agreed on a plan to clean up the state's waters. Hunters and other conservationists might have been party to the pact because "they have birds in their hearts." But no less interested were business owners and the state chamber of commerce, for among other reasons this: The federal government will in many instances no longer allow them to expand until Minnesota's polluted waters are rectified.

Unfortunately, that cleanup plan, like others that have gone before the Legislature, was dead on arrival in St. Paul. Now on the Nov. 4 ballot we have another opportunity to conserve natural resources in the form of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment. This is the Boston Tea Party of conservation ideas, in which government and its legion inefficiencies are dealt out in favor of contracted outcomes, with knowledgeable, impassioned citizens at the helm, and no middlemen.

Leopold also said, "Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land." Similarly, financial prudence might be described as a state of harmony between risk and collateral. Either way disharmony now abounds, financially and environmentally, and we are all guilty of the malfeasance, greed and arrogance leading to the latter.

The difference is, stories about our environmental indifference and its similarly dire implications for all of us have not yet made the front page.

But trust bird hunters on this one: They will.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com