Today’s column (gift link) is about the reported reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service, and specific impacts on forestry research here in Minnesota.

Again I find myself lamenting a decision by our present administration, which I realize is tiresome to some. But my argument speaks not to partisans, but to the practical: the people who simply want things to work. Just as a good business person knows that cutting research and development is a short sighted way to make a profit, the same is true in forestry.

You will hear, as I have heard, arguments that this is no big deal. It’s just a consolidation and relocation of key offices. Interagency wildfire responses won’t be impacted. “Salt Lake City is closer to the woods than Washington, D.C.!” But the practical impact is obvious. If you talk to researchers on the ground, this is de facto smothering of many critical research projects, most of them tied to climate change. This gets at something that many people miss. Even though forestry is tied to harvesting trees, it’s one of the sciences that has conclusively proven the existence of climate change.

It’s not just the present ecological impact we need to worry about, but the viability of our public forest resources for generations to come.

Instead, we again hear old arguments for immediate exploitation of all resources, regardless of how it’s done. We want it cheap. We want it fast. And we’re not terribly concerned about what happens next. That’s because, by then, we’ve got the money. To be clear, in this case “we” does not mean “you and me.”

This is literally, and I do mean literally, the thinking of 19th century timber barons. They bought densely forested land across the North Woods and, in ten years, cut it down to fields of stumps and mud. The money and timber left. The jobs left. We got the cleanup.

This approach created the reasons why we have so many 100-year-old fire museums and memorials in Minnesota. It’s why we may never again see a 300-year-old white pine in this part of the world.

In Minnesota, the discovery of iron ore beneath the forest floors at least provided something in return. But there again, the best ore left quickly, as did most of the money. Strategic use of our resources eludes us when we view those resources as lottery tickets that are sure to pay out.

This cycle always tempts those with millions who want billions, but for everyone else it’s a loser. And in the long run it puts our nation, even our species, at risk for a fate we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies.

So why do we wish it for our great-grandchildren?

Read “Trump’s Forest Service overhaul spells doom for ecology research,” in the Sunday, April 12, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Forest Service reorganization throws vital research into chaos appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) is about housing. And ducks. I’ve now written about housing several times. I didn’t start from a position of expertise, but I’ve had the opportunity to learn from a lot of experts.

You could say the same of my knowledge about birds. Even 12 years ago, I actively resisted interest in birds. I sought to avoid the perceived mundanity of becoming a birder. Now, as my columns over the past few years reveal, I am a big sloppy bird nerd.

I suppose there’s something to said about our individual capacity for learning and change. Who you are today is not who you will be in 10 or 20 years. And that’s also the most vital fact about housing policy.

We’ve become tied to housing as an investment. In fact, it’s a piggy bank for middle-class people to store value in their dwelling space. Lately, buying up rental properties has become essential to a certain kind of neighborhood hustler, to the chagrin of those who must pay rent. But the most important fact about housing is the living part. In other words, we should hold reasonable hope that we may maintain stability and simple comforts while we trade our time for money.

This makes our problem with housing similar to the wood duck’s loss of habitat. And just like the recovery of the wood duck, we can recover. How? We rebuild a housing strategy that shelters people in small towns and big cities alike.

So, here’s how I turned the installation of a wood duck house on my property into simple argument in favor of expanding housing options in places that need people.

Read “What wood ducks can teach us about housing policy” in the Wednesday, April 8, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Build Quack Better: Housing and ducks appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) is about recent legal and political blowback against social media companies. But here I’ll start a little further back. In middle school, I wrote a humor column about the injustices of hall pass policies on a piece of notebook paper. At the time, I did so for my own reasons, mostly to extract something gnawing at the inside of my head. 

But then a friend grabbed the paper and read it. He laughed and wrote “ha ha” on the bottom of the page. Some other kids got curious and the thing made its way around the classroom. When I finally got it back, there were all kinds of positive comments scribbled in the margins, some of them penned in the distinctive script of girls.

So that’s how I became a writer. Most writers start out like this. You need the compulsion to write and thirst for approval. One or the other keeps you going every day. Your inner world, perhaps more roiled than the average person’s, finds relief through expression. And then writers watch private thoughts become a public commodity: assayed for weight, grade and value. We hate it, but we also love it. In time, we need it. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these qualities correlate with mental illness, addiction and personality disorders. We are writers. Form is function. 

I sometimes used to joke with students that my notebook column was really a sort of proto-Facebook. When social media became a regular thing, everybody was getting high off the likes. But just like the old pit parties at my Iron Range high school, some of us just couldn’t come back down.

As a professional writer, I saw social media as another avenue for expression, and a potential source of new readers. But the mechanism became much more than a tool for so-called content creators. If my desire and ability to write was a way to work out my problems, social media became a massive mental health project, not only for me, but everyone who joined. Not everyone can write compelling bullshit the way writers can, so people started identifying with other people’s bullshit, passing these thoughts off as their own to have the same experience. Memes made this even easier. Why bother with paragraphs? Put that shit straight into your veins.

Now, perhaps too late to do much good, people are realizing the relationship between social media and the spiraling mentality of addiction. Not only the physical addiction to looking, looking, looking, but the mindset that supports the whole enterprise. Writers have problems, believe me, but most of us write to scratch an itch, solve a problem or achieve a goal. When you take away that purpose, and leave only the ego and attention-seeking, you get what we’ve now got.

So, yes, we do have a mental health crisis that is *related* to social media, and yes I’ll join in the chorus of people saying that it is uniquely bad for kids. Of course social media companies are exploiting human weaknesses and American institutions for profit. They’re not the first to do so. But the real problem, the one that we’ve got to address, can’t be fixed by anyone but ourselves.

Read “Improving kids’ mental health will take more than social media lawsuits” in the Thursday, April 2, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post The nadir of social media’s neurotic era appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link), like many of mine lately, is about the friction between technological advances and human well-being.

For all the talk of innovation in business and political circles, you see precious little of it on any given day. We humans love our patterns and, to paraphrase George Carlin, half of us are of below-average intelligence. That’s why we are so easily lulled into a stupor as the years fly by, realizing change long past the point we could have influenced it.

That’s why I find today’s debates over data centers to be so interesting. Regular folks and the B-list commentariat (including me) have been watching innovation and change from afar, noting the development of things like artificial intelligence from the cheap seats. 

But data centers make everything local. These are real things, big things, industrial giants that we will see and live alongside. For better or worse, we will absorb their effects the rest of our days. They might improve our lives, but they could also take our jobs, health and even most of our electricity. That is, if the world’s largest and most powerful companies have their way. And while they probably will, they haven’t yet. And that’s what makes this interesting. The little people still have a little leverage. 

What can a guy like me offer this debate? Well, we’re talking about the dawn of a new industry. And because I spent much of the last ten years researching the rise of U.S. Steel and its impact on the Mesabi Iron Range, I can tell you a few things about new industries and the human capacity to check their power at the outset. 

Read “Data centers are coming. How will we regulate them?” in the Sunday, March 29, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post The mystery boxes that will shape our future appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) dives into a surprising, and very welcome, piece of good news for those of us who live in rural Minnesota communities. The Center for Rural Policy and Development issued its “State of Rural 2026” report last week, which shows a slight increase in population across most rural Minnesota counties, along with wage growth.

The numbers support something you will notice in greater Minnesota, including along the Iron Range where I live. Sure, people complain about decline. You’ll see some decrepit old buildings and the news isn’t all hunky-dory. But at the same time, when you go to see a doctor, visit a business, or pop into a government building, school or public event, you’re starting to see younger professionals doing a lot of the work. 

This isn’t some fancy breakthrough. It’s normally generational turnover, and it’s a very good thing for rural Minnesota. Here, such change had been developing more slowly after the economic shock of the 1980s. Thanks to high-speed internet and the rise of remote work, small towns attract high-level work that compliments existing industry.

So, what do we do with this information? Today, I argue that we recognize this one-time opportunity to reinvigorate our communities while other challenges loom ahead. This is a time for building communities that can last storms.

Read “Positive trends defy trope of decline in greater Minnesota,” in the Wednesday, March 25, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post We’re not out of the woods, but hope grows appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

As I share today’s column (gift link), I confess trepidation. After all, how much more does the average person want to hear about artificial intelligence?

Here’s the thing, I already know the answer. I’ve seen statistical evidence. Most people don’t want to know about AI, talk about AI or click on AI-related articles. (Indeed, a specific problem in this instance).

And yet, many people are rampantly sharing AI-generated material on social media, reading AI-generated content on websites and turning their selfies into AI-generated artwork. If we are honest, the use of AI has become common in schools and offices. Instead, I suspect most of us would just rather not know what that means.

AI is changing the economy whether we like it or not.

First, the explosion of data centers is boosting the tech and construction sectors. That boom will eventually end, leaving us with the enormous energy costs. More on that in an upcoming column.

Second, there’s good evidence that a slowdown in hiring is partially related to AI, and that companies are preparing to potentially reduce the workforce because of AI efficiencies. When that happens, we face vast societal realignment unseen since the end of the 19th century agrarian era. 

Back then, masses of people came in from the countryside from small farms and built up the modern cities through labor, creating the ancestor of today’s economy. 

But if there are no jobs in the city, where do people go next? What if there’s nowhere to go?

The drumbeat of productivity gain has been in sync with human development for 150 years. But we now reach a crossroads. The advancement of humanity and the rise of productivity are no longer the same thing. Some might argue they never were, and that is the problem historians might discuss someday.

You know, if there are any.

Read “By all measures, productivity is sky-high. So why do we feel so left out?” in the Monday, March 23, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post The divergence of humanity and productivity appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

Today’s column (gift link) introduces three new Minnesota industries that could relieve some of the economic chaos caused by the war in Iran.

Shortly after the first bombs of “Operation Epic Fury,” prices for anhydrous ammonia used for fertilizer, helium used in medical and tech sectors and minerals used in everything else quickly increased. Like oil and gas, the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz is roiling world markets.

Interestingly, three companies seek to produce or recover those very products in Minnesota. They all boast low environmental impact and better prices for local companies. A new plant in Blue Earth could produce ammonia using wind energy. The Pulsar Helium discovery in northeastern Minnesota appears commercially viable. And now, a new Iron Range company claims to be close to a feasible e-waste recycling facility that avoids using smelting.

The war is today’s problem, but only the first of many to come. A state that can provide for itself has more to gain from trade and less to lose from uncertainty. 

Read “As war drives up prices, homegrown green tech frees Minnesota from chaos,” in the Tuesday, March 17, 2025 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Ironically, war in Iran shows feasibility of Minnesota’s green tech appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

It’s been busy here at MinnesotaBrown World Headquarters. I wrote a column about Kristi Noem’s ouster at DHS that ran Saturday and forgot to post about it. Oops! (Here it is, if you’re still interested). Today’s topic is decidedly more local.

If you didn’t know, today is Township Day. Local elections will be held in townships across the state, with annual meetings scheduled tonight. The township annual meeting is a vestige of Minnesota’s earliest form of local government: direct democracy. 

In today’s column (gift link), I share my own experiences wandering into this tradition when I was elected chair of my local township’s annual meeting a couple years ago. Looking back, I can name so many ways life out here in the woods of Balsam Township benefitted our family. There are some good lessons we can learn about healing democracy and our divided society from these gatherings.

Read “On Township Day, direct democracy rules rural Minnesota,” in the Tuesday, March 10, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Shining a light on townships appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

In today’s column (gift link), I warn against new federal voter laws using a local example of why we should be wary.

I rewatched “Goodfellas” the other day and mused over Henry Hill philosophy about life as a gangster. He points out that the only records of his life were his birth certificate and his rap sheet. He didn’t vote, didn’t serve on juries, didn’t get a drivers license. That’s how he stayed off the radar.

Law-abiding citizens don’t think this way. We get licenses to drive, hunt and fish. We apply for Social Security and Selective Service. Many apply for college financial aid or other programs. Some of these acts produce or require documents with photo identification, some do not. But there is a clear line between the things we must do, or have a constitutional right to do, and the privileges of being an American. We are entitled to all of it, but it’s not all the same. Defrauding any aspect of these rights or privileges is already a crime. Denying people their rights, however, is just as bad.

Voting is one of the unshakable rights. And it’s important that people vote exactly where they are supposed to vote. That’s why states have devised differing means for citizens to prove where they live. Some states are more strict (harder to vote) and some are more flexible (easier to vote). The federal government’s role is to ensure the basic right to vote. That distinction is not new or imagined, but constitutional.

You would be amazed at how few cases of voter fraud are detected despite rigorous audits performed every year in every state. Here in Minnesota, even though we have mail-in balloting, early voting, same-day registration and multiple means of proving identity, voter fraud is very, very rare. It’s always prosecuted, because it’s easy to find. That’s why so few people do it. And, not that anyone asked, but undocumented immigrants are never the culprits. Landlords voting for their tenants and kids voting for their dead or dying parents are the most frequent offenders.

And yet Voter ID laws and strict registration rules are always being proposed. Today, these proposals come from the Trump administration. Now, I don’t crave partisanship, but I do point out that, in 2020, this administration actively tried to overthrow a democratic election based on voter fraud allegations that were proven false in dozens of courts across the country.

Most reasonable people might dismiss election claims from such an administration, but these are not reasonable times. Anti-immigrant fervor and radical “replacement theories” stoke a lot of belief that “illegals” are “stealing” our elections. It’s not true. It can’t be proved. There is no evidence. But here we are, arguing.

I think most reasonable people, right or left, can be convinced of the broader dangers of messing with a system that works and gives people the right to vote for whomever they want.

Read “Strict new voter proposals have us searching for our true ID,” in the Thursday, March 5, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post Making it harder to vote will hurt more than help, and that’s the point appeared first on Minnesota Brown.

The very moment a school stops being a school, with students running through its halls and janitors mopping the floors and oiling the furnace, it become a bologna sandwich rotting in the sun.

So many small rituals go into keeping our human artifices intact. We only notice them when they’re gone and reality comes calling. Schools are indelibly tied to memory, so they live forever even as the pigeons defile the woodwork. We can’t bear to tear them down but won’t pay to fix them, certainly not without the core purpose they were built to accomplish.

I wrote about the impact of a town losing its school last October. That’s when Randall, Minn., celebrated its now former elementary school. In that piece I talk about how most of the original buildings where I attended school are now repurposed or gone. Most folks who live in rural places experience this same phenomenon. As the population ages and changes in once vibrant little towns, the traditions fall away. 

Today’s column (gift link) is about what happens next, or at least what could happen next.

We have a paradox on our hands. Half the economic problems in rural Minnesota are related to a lack of capacity for people to come here. This seems counterintuitive when the problem seems to be people leaving.

By capacity I mean jobs, of course, but also housing and other factors that would attract either investment, people or both. Part of why there are fewer jobs is because there are fewer people to do certain kinds of work. It’s hard to invest millions of dollars in a new XYZ factory in a faraway town when you’re not sure if you’ll have a consistent supply of skilled labor, or if your experts will want to move there. (Side note: It’s harder to spend those millions if locals aren’t welcoming to new people and open to change). 

Rural Minnesota is full of housing gaps. Former schools and other public buildings might actually be a way to fill them. 

Hence, the new Sandstone School housing project and others like it, including a refurbished jail. Read more in “Would you live in a building that was once a jail?” in the Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026 edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Minnesota Star Tribune. His new book about Hibbing Mayor Victor Power and his momentous fight against the world’s largest corporation will be out soon.

The post High demand turns abandoned public buildings into new housing appeared first on Minnesota Brown.