The Environment

By Sally Herrin

The wind is an old friend to the busy race of humans, from time past remembering. Every Nebraska landscape worth its weight in tourist brochures has a stock tank windmill, some relict, some working still. More recently, wind has been a huge, largely underused resource in Nebraska. The sixth windiest state with an estimated production capacity of 868 billion kilowatts a year, Nebraska ranks 19th in wind-energy production in the U.S., with just 73 megawatts online today.

By Donald L. Hey, Ph.D.

In the Midwest, the loss of millions of acres of wetlands over the past 200 years has directly led to multiple, interconnected environmental problems: poor water quality, increased nutrient pollution, rising flood-damage costs, vanishing biodiversity, degraded wildlife habitat and lost recreational opportunities. More than 100 million acres of wetlands in the lower 48 states have been drained since 1780, many of these areas drained to create dry land for row crops.

By David Pope

At the Feb. 25, 2008, meeting of the Missouri River Association of States and Tribes (MoRAST), the board took action to request that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers initiate a study to determine whether changes are needed to the congressionally authorized purposes for the Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System in order to best meet the contemporary needs of the people of the Missouri River Basin. Since that time, it has been working with Congress to secure funding and authorization for the study, as needed.

By James H. Locklear

I’ve been director of the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum (NSA) for almost 15 years, and I still have a hard time explaining, in a nutshell, exactly what it is we do. Marketing people tell us we need an “elevator speech,” a short, compelling summary that brings tears to the eyes and money from the pocket, but it just hasn’t come to me yet. So I appreciate the opportunity to tell the story of this remarkable, uniquely Nebraskan enterprise here in the pages of Prairie Fire.

By Thomas B. Bragg and Barbara A. Hayes

Flames leap across the prairie as smoke curls into a bright blue sky. Below, the yellow shirts of the burn crew herds the fire along its intended path… It’s spring and another fire season at Allwine Prairie, a unique, landscape-level tallgrass prairie preserve. Nestled amongst farm fields of northwestern Douglas County, Neb., the restored tallgrass prairie has remained a little-known resource, yet one that has played an important role in environmental education and research, not just for the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), who manages it, but for the entire region. Nationally significant, Allwine Prairie is the sixth oldest and the second largest of the early tallgrass prairie restorations in the United States.

By Maren Thompson Bzdek This December marks the 30th anniversary of the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust, known more informally as the Platte River Trust. The organization and its supporters have much to celebrate, including the successful restoration of 10,000 acres of migratory bird habitat in central Nebraska and steady gains in the whooping crane population.

By Jack Pollock

Less than a year after a fire that caused nearly $900,000 in damage, the visitor area of the $2.5 million Lake McConaughy Visitor/Water Interpretive Center has reopened.

In addition to serving as the lake’s headquarters for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District, the center was built to tell the importance of Nebraska’s most precious resource: water.

By Jack Pollock

What’s the issue of the century? Water!

“With essentially no new water being created and ever more users and demand for this finite resource, it is essential for our future that we understand it as best we can.”

In addition to the interpretive displays relating to the various uses of water inside the entryway to the Interpretive Center, there are several other exhibits including the historic diving bell used in the early 1940s, a history of Kingsley Dam, a mural on the many competing uses of water, an exhibit on the Platte River Basin Water Supply, and the “Changing Gallery,” an ever-changing area for Nebraska science and art students to display their projects on water.

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.