News

About 20 minutes southeast of Lincoln, off the well-worn gravel roads is a grass and dirt path leading into the Reller Prairie Research Station. After standing relatively vacant for a decade — save for its wildlife occupants, some curious humans and a handful of academic researchers — faculty and staff from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s schools of Global Integrative Studies and Biological Sciences are breathing new life into the property.

Highlights of a side event—Sustainable pastoralism and rangelands: Impacts of COVID-19 and how not to leave them behind in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development—held at the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development on 6 July 2021 and organized by the Government of Mongolia and the International Support Group for the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP).

When Willa Cather captured the essence of the untamed Nebraska prairie, she wrote of the rolling grasslands of Webster County, rather than those of Southeast Nebraska. But her words about the permanence of the land ring true about the debate over how best to proceed with 20 acres near Arnold Elementary School, part of a proposed affordable housing development within the buffer zone of the Nine-Mile Prairie ecosystem, that would be declared as blighted.