When the Mississippi Valley Conservancy was honored as Land Trust of the Year recently, MVC shared the award spotlight with two Wisconsin legislators, who were honored for something as endangered as bluffland goat prairies.

Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Allouez, and Sen. Mark Miller, D-Monona, were honored for working together in a bipartisan fashion for the good of all Wisconsin citizens.

Tia Nelson, a prominent state conservationist who introduced the senators, said that they had set aside partisan interests to craft the compromise that led, after a contentious beginning, to the nearly unanimous passage in both the Assembly and Senate of the Great Lakes Compact. The compact by the states and provinces that border the lakes is designed to protect the lakes from water diversions.

Gathering Waters Conservancy, the nonprofit organization that serves the state’s land trusts, holds the annual awards event in Madison. Gretchen and I were among the group of MVC supporters who attended. I enjoyed hearing the praise for MVC, but I especially enjoyed Tia Nelson’s droll assessment of the senators.

She said she had tried to come up with some telling anecdotes about the legislators to spice up her introduction such as a tale of a boozy indiscretion or some interesting quirk. But she had come up empty handed.

“You guys are boring,” she said much as her father, the late senator and former governor Gaylord Nelson, might have done to add humor to the evening.

Instead, the two men were lauded for qualities of trust and hard work that produced the essential compromise to protect one of the great resources of the state.

Tia Nelson’s father, a democrat, and former governor Warren Knowles, a Republican, were another pair of bipartisan cooperators for whom the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program was named. And without that program, MVC would not have been able to achieve the land conservation that led to the award.

Even as I was considering that connection, our federal legislators in Washington were trying to craft a compromise to save our nation from an economic disaster. And our presidential candidates were pledging to “reach across the aisle” even as they sharpened their rhetorical knives for the next slashing attack.

How desperately we long for the kind of cooperation that Cowles and Miller exhibited. The times demand it both in Madison and in Washington. And how sad it is, in a way, that what they achieved is so rare that we feel compelled to make note of it; honorable compromise should be part of everyday life in our legislatures.