Broadview Collaborative, Inc.
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Nobody said democracy would be easy. Just ask any of the thousands of people who have been making their opinions known on the matter of the Waukesha, Wisconsin’s application to divert roughly 10 million gallons/day of Lake Michigan water. The city has been working on this application for as long as I’ve been in Wisconsin (more than fifteen years), and the public hasn’t had much of a rest for that entire time…. Read More
Last week I had the opportunity to deliver one of the key note addresses to the 600+ attendees at the Onsite Wastewater Mega-Conference in Virginia Beach, VA. Until Eric Casey, who runs the National of Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association (NOWRA), invited me to speak to the group I wasn’t very familiar with it or its work despite the fact that 25% or more of U.S. homes are served by onsite sewage treatment, generally in… Read More
Life can be overwhelming, can’t it? There are times when the problems seem insurmountable, when you just don’t know how to go on. Even for me, blessed with unimaginable good fortune, there are times like this winter when I had to literally will myself to put one foot in front of the other because standing, paralyzed at the top of the stairs wasn’t going to solve anything. That’s more personal than I… Read More
Water is in an odd quandary relative to financial matters. On the one hand, money is the quickest translator for people and is the way they can most easily understand the cost, rarity and importance of most items in life, and then make decisions relative to their own priorities and financial capabilities. Why, then, is there so little attention to these matters when it comes to water? Maybe it’s because people feel… Read More
I don’t often use the term “resonance” with regard to my work, but we definitely struck a chord with the report we released yesterday. Building off of our 2010 release of the consensus report “Charting New Waters“, The Johnson Foundation at Wingspread entered into a collaboration with Ceres and American Rivers to pursue the financing and pricing issues that underpin our nation’s water infrastructure. The product of this collaboration, “Financing Sustainable Water… Read More
Some things are hard for me to understand. Like why it’s easier to dig iron ore from deep within the earth than to mine our nation’s refuse heaps and scrap piles for discarded iron. On Friday I had the opportunity to tour an area of northern Wisconsin that is under consideration for an open-pit taconite mine. My hosts included representatives of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa… Read More
What’s water worth? It’s a frequent topic of conversation in my professional circles and perhaps yours as well. The people of Bayfield, WI probably aren’t used to thinking about this question in quite the same way that it gets asked at Wingspread, but I think they have a fundamental understanding that clean water drives their economy. My husband Marc and I have been up here for a long weekend to celebrate our anniversary,… Read More
Las Vegas may not be the place you’d expect to go for a meeting on water and agriculture, but that’s where I was last week. The Family Farm Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated the preservation and enhancement of Western irrigated agriculture, was hosting its annual meeting there last week and invited me to moderate a panel on Charting New Waters. And since agriculture is the second largest user of water in the… Read More
On the waterfront – isn’t that where we all want to be? Riverfront, lakefront, oceanfront: this is always the most desirable, highest value real estate there is. We love to gaze upon it, swim in it, and fish its depths. Our lives, our businesses, and our souls depend on it. Why, then, aren’t we doing more to make sure that we’ll be able to count on it for generations to come? Actually, a group of national… Read More
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