Nitrogen contamination in the southern half of Minnesota is so severe that 27 percent of the state's lakes and rivers could not be used as drinking water, according to a new and unexpectedly blunt assessment of the state's most prevalent form of water pollution.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) said Wednesday that, overall, 41 percent of Minnesota's streams and lakes have excessive nitrogen, all of them in the state's southern and central regions. The nutrient, which is used as fertilizer in agriculture and comes from wastewater treatment plants, can be toxic to fish and other forms of aquatic life. It is a primary cause of the vast oxygen-depleted area in the Gulf of Mexico known as the dead zone.

Even ambitious efforts could reduce nitrogen runoff by less than a third - and that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily in the agricultural regions of the state that contribute 70 percent of the total load, according to the MPCA's report.

Patric Kuptz means it when he says he grew up on the Great Lakes.

"I've spent most of my life within 50 feet of here," the 37-year-old said on a sunny May morning, working on a boat near his third-generation family home - a brown brick duplex at the edge of Milwaukee's South Shore Yacht Club.

This is where, as a boy, he Huck-Finned away his summers - chasing perch from the docks, splashing in the frigid surf and making all manner of mischief around the yacht club, news of which often made it home before he did.

Today, Kuptz hardly recognizes the lakeshore as the one he grew up on, pointing to a beach that didn't exist when he was a kid in the mid-1980s, when the water was about five feet higher and yacht club members needed steps to ascend from the docks to their boats. When that record-high water dropped a couple of years later and those stairs were being thrown away, the young Kuptz couldn't believe it.

WOOSTER, Ohio -- A survey conducted by Ohio State University's College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences shows that U.S. homeowners see lawns as important to their sense of social status and acceptance in their neighborhoods, leading to the use of lawn chemicals by 62 percent of respondents.

Published in 2012 in the journal Environmental Management, the survey also revealed that efforts to educate homeowners about the environmental impacts of their landscape management choices are likely to be more successful if geared toward neighborhood groups rather than individuals, said Tom Blaine, co-author of the study and a community development specialist with Ohio State University Extension, the outreach arm of the college.

"Based on the study, the main factor influencing a homeowner's decision to use lawn chemicals is whether neighbors or other people in the neighborhood use them," Blaine said. "Homeowners crave acceptance from their neighbors and generally want their lawns to fit in with their surrounding community, so they adopt their neighbors' practices. It's not that they feel pressured to treat their lawns. Rather, they genuinely want to fit in."

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