The resource area leaders, who helped prepare white papers to start discussion for each topic and will facilitate conversations during the Feb. 11 event, are,
will spend the day in focused conversation on water, land, energy, food and materials. Registration costs $10 for professionals and the general public, and is free to students.
This is the second of four regional day-long conversations on sustainability. Dan Snow, director of the UNL Water Sciences Laboratory, School of Natural Resources, is serving as a resource specialist and facilitator for the water discussions. Snow and others who participated in the first conference in November at Creighton University said they were initially skeptical about the idea of spending a day talking, but ended up concluding that it was very valuable.
“It was different from any conference that I’d ever been to,” Snow said. “More of a listening session or a town meeting. To me, this is what engagement is really all about, getting people to talk about the issues as a group, and coming up with solutions that work for everybody.”
The Joslyn Institute for Sustainable Communities is organizing the Conversations Conference for southeast Nebraska in partnership with UNL’s School of Natural Resources, the Chancellor’s Commission on Sustainability, and the Omaha-based Sustainability Leadership Institute. Conversations will continue in Grand Island in May and in Scottsbluff in August. The conferences are underwritten by the Nebraska Environmental Trust, the state Department of Environmental Quality, the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority and Lincoln Electric System.
“The Conversations Conference is unlike any you have attended before,” said W. Cecil Steward, president and CEO of the Joslyn Institute. Besides being a good chance to learn about key issues surrounding sustainability, the Conversations Conferences are an opportunity to raise the level of discussion on resource issues, and to incorporate newcomers into the civic deliberation process. Recommendations from each of the resource conversations will be shared with decision makers in both local and state government.
for water, Snow and Jim Goeke, research hydrologist and professor with UNL’s Conservation and Survey Division (CSD); for land, Sandra Scofield, director of UNL’s Nebraska Rural Initiative, and Mark Kuzila, professor of Soil Science and director of CSD; for energy, Daniel Lawse, energy expert and coordinator of sustainable practices for Metropolitan Community College, and Todd Hall, vice president of Consumer Services for Lincoln Electric Systems; for food, Jim Crandall, associate director of the Nebraska Cooperative Development Center at UNL, Elaine Cranford, cooperative business development specialist at the Nebraska Cooperative Development Center, and Kim Peterson, coordinator at the Nebraska Rural Initiative; and for materials, Deb Hansen, architectural designer at Davis Design, and Wayne Drummond, dean of the College of Architecture at UNL.
The resource area leaders said they were looking forward to the next round of conversations, and encouraged others to join the process. “Some of the conversations we had in food were the same conversations they were having in water and land, and they evolved independently,” Crandall said. “It demonstrated how interconnected each of those five are.” He added that the conference also turned out to be a good chance to address some of the misconceptions that rural and urban dwellers had about each other, and about the economic incentives and constraints each faced.
Students may contact Katie Torpy, ktorpy@sustainabledesign.org, or 402-933-0080, to register at no cost. For more information, for all other registrations, or to access the on-line conversation, please visit http://www.nslw.org/conversations.html
For more information, please contact:
Donna Woudenberg, School of Natural Resources, 402-472-8287, dwoudenberg2@unl.edu
W. Cecil Steward, president, Joslyn Institute for Sustainable Communities, 402-472-0087, or
Katie Torpy, program manager and conference organizer at the Joslyn Institue, 402-933-0080
Mery Ferdig, Lincoln CCNES conference facilitator and president of the Sustainability Leadership Institute, 402-393-5360
Writer:
Kelly Helm Smith, School of Natural Resources, 402-472-3373, ksmith2@unl.edu
