The Environment

By Mark Brohman

If you are a citizen of Nebraska, $15 million can get you 77 projects across the state, preserving our natural resources for generations to come. This year the Nebraska Environmental Trust (NET) is granting $14,798,718, and with more than an additional $10 million in matching funds, the impact to the state is tremendous.

By Robert Bateman

The year 1998 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of “Small Is Beautiful,” the influential book by British economist E. F. Schumacher. To celebrate the anniversary, the publishers reissued the book in a format that included remarks from people who were deeply affected when they first read Schumacher’s work and who still admire the author’s main goals. I was honored to be among those invited to comment. While some sections deal only with issues specific to Britain in the early 1970s, I believe the book’s essential thesis is as profound and pertinent as ever.

By Steve Schnarr

Missouri River Relief is a grassroots, volunteer-based organization based out of Columbia and Kansas City, Mo., dedicated to reconnecting people to the Missouri River through hands-on, on-the-river clean-ups and education. In 2008, we’re proud to be partnering with two major community river clean-ups in the “Valley below the Dams”—the upper reaches of the Lower Missouri River where the “Big Muddy” isn’t so muddy anymore.

By Twyla M. Hansen and Charles A. Francis

The conversion of farmland near cities to other human uses is a global trend that challenges our long-term capacity to provide food, fiber and ecosystem services to a growing world population. If current trends continue in the U.S., the population will reach 450 million by the year 2050. At the same time, an accelerating change in land use will reduce today’s two acres per person of farmland to less than one acre per person. This is scarcely enough to produce food for our domestic population, without any food available for export—even assuming advances in technology. We need to take these trends seriously, as the national economy and domestic food security are threatened by conversion of land to nonfarm uses.

By Dan Otto, Cathy Kling, Dan Monchuk and Kanlaya Jintakul

In a time of changing demographics, an increasing demand for renewable energy sources and a growing concern for the environment, policy makers in Iowa are faced with the challenge of identifying strategies for economic development that balances the needs of the changing population with economic and resource sustainability.

By Bruce Babbitt

Tallgrass prairie once covered the Midwest, interspersed with oak savannas along streams that drained toward the Mississippi River. Small lakes, potholes and swamps dotted the land, occupying imperfectly drained soils, still fresh from the glaciers that had melted away little more than 10,000 years ago. Herds of bison roamed the prairie, trailed by packs of wolves. Overhead, flocks of waterfowl filled the skies, migrating south in the winter, returning in the spring to nest and breed on the waters.

By Barbara Van den Berg

Our family came to Lincoln, Neb., in 1989. My husband had just received his Ph.D. from the Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was hired by the Department of Economics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

By Kendall Weyers

The first Earth Day, celebrated nationwide in April 1970, was a major success because it grew from the energy of a diverse and widespread grassroots movement. That same type of energy is showing in the planning of Lincoln’s Earth Day 2008. While traditionally sponsored and organized by the city every five years, this year’s event is being coordinated by the Coalition for the Environment and Earth Day (CEED).

By Annabel Major and Craig Allen

You may have heard them called alien, exotic, feral or non-native, but they all point to the same suspect: invasive species. For decades, humans have waged war upon a common enemy. Arriving in many different forms, often little is known about these elusive invaders until they make themselves apparent by choking out native flora and fauna, irreversibly damaging ecosystems and costing Nebraskans millions of dollars in control efforts. With examples such as the “snakezilla” (northern snakehead fish) and the “green menace” (emerald ash borer beetle) in the eastern United States receiving media attention, it is time we turn our attention to Nebraska.

By Duane Hovorka and Tim McCoy

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is America’s largest private-lands conservation program, providing wildlife habitat, reducing polluted runoff into streams and conserving soil on 34 million acres of land across the United States.

By David Ochsner

So you want to go green. Before you jump in the car and head out to the Megalo-Mart to buy some of those pigtail light bulbs, you should ask yourself: How much energy will I consume driving to the store? How green are the store’s practices? How does my daily routine affect the environment, and how can I change it?

By Rev. Richard Cizik

The world is getting warmer. This past summer, I visited our “early warming system” for North America, an island village named Shishmaref located off the coast of Alaska in the Bering Sea. The native tribe of Inupiks is already experiencing a devastating climate blow: the rise in sea level has forced them from their home of 400 years.

By Bill Whitney

By Dr. David Harwood and Dr. Richard Levy

If it happened before, it can happen again. A phrase often repeated to geology students curious about how past geological events preserved within layers of sedimentary rock can influence how we view and manage our modern world against natural hazards. Geologists, Earth’s scientific historians, identify and interpret past events by studying sedimentary layers back through time. The future is less uncertain when guided by knowledge of rates and magnitudes of change that are evident in sedimentary rock archives. For example, we know from sediments and landforms in northern Europe, Asia and North America that large, mile-thick ice sheets repeatedly covered broad regions of the northern continents. These ice masses vanished quickly, within several thousand years, melting and returning large volumes of water to the ocean.

By Marion Ellis

During 2006 a U.S. National Research Council panel led by entomologist May Berenbaum warned of a looming pollination crisis if honey bees and other pollinators continued to decline in number.[1] In 1940 there were five million colonies managed by U.S. beekeepers and an abundant population of wild honey bees. In 2006 there were 2.5 million colonies managed by beekeepers and very few wild honey bees. Reasons for the decline in honey bee numbers include shifts in farming practices, changes in land use patterns, extensive use of herbicides and insecticides, low honey prices due to global trade in honey and introduced diseases and parasites. Among the diseases and parasites, the varroa mite has been the most devastating, eliminating most wild colonies and challenging the management skills of beekeepers.

By David Harwood and Richard Levy

Concerns for our warming planet are now receiving considerable attention in the U.S. media, attention that is relevant and well deserved. Many policy-makers are finally addressing global climate change issues, which have taken center stage as we head into the coming presidential election. The scientific community continues to engage in international collaboration to bring accurate projections of warmer-than-present future scenarios into these discussions. Receipt of Nobel Prizes by Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth and by scientific members of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) indicates the importance and international recognition of climate-change issues. As these issues are discussed in the public forum, we note that the following questions are commonly asked: What does future climate warming mean for us? Aren’t these changes part of natural cycles in climate change? Hasn’t Earth been warmer in the past?

By Bill Whitney

I can remember as a youngster growing up in Aurora, Neb., in the 1960s trying to imagine what Hamilton County looked like to native Americans or early settlers. I could not imagine well, because key elements about eastern Nebraska natural history were missing in my education. There were few tallgrass prairies to look at - even if I knew what I was looking for - and there were few people around who knew enough about such things to help me understand. I was not informed by the prevailing culture that the Plains region was unique, beautiful or interesting in its own right. It was basically just farmland, which was in many respects a great thing, but not seen as that special - just normal. In fact, many of us in the central states have inherited an inferiority complex about the region, particularly about its flatness, lack of trees and monotony. I had the impression that there were much better places to live, and that I would want to escape.

By Sheri Fritz

The major droughts of the 20th century, such as those of the Dust Bowl period and 1950s, had profound environmental, economic and social impacts in the Great Plains and are viewed by many as extreme events. Yet the 20th century provides a relatively short-term view of climate variability, and it is useful to extend our perspective to include longer periods of time. A longer-term perspective gives us a better understanding of both the natural recurrence of drought for planning purposes and of whether recent trends may be a product of human impact on climate or are simply a manifestation of long-term natural variation.

By Chad Smith

In 1997, the states of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska and the Department of Interior came together in a unique partnership to develop a shared approach to managing the Platte River. Brought together by concerns over endangered species, water use and other management challenges, the states and the federal government chose collaboration and stakeholder involvement as a way to seek solutions to what had become a contentious policy debate over the future of the Platte. Water users from the three states and conservation groups joined the effort. The parties traded litigation for a meeting table and began the process of negotiating a new way of using science to deal with endangered species issues. The result was an innovative process utilizing adaptive management, stakeholder input and science to better manage the Platte for the health of the ecosystem and the people that depend on it - the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program.

By Pat McGrane

Controlling invasive noxious weeds is required by Nebraska weed laws, but what if one weed species is so obnoxious it just won’t go away! What can a person do? Send in a herd of goats to chew them off is one solution.