Broadview Collaborative, Inc.
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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
People sometimes ask me how we select our meeting topics. There isn’t any particular formula to how we do our work, but I like to tell people that we try to answer for ourselves: What is the question that isn’t being asked, but needs to be asked? In my head I have an image of a bead of water building up on a hard-packed sandy beach, but still held together by surface… Read More
It has been more than three years since the participants in The Johnson Foundation’s Freshwater Summit issued its Freshwater Call to Action, asking leaders from all sectors of society to address the challenges facing the United States’ freshwater resources. Paging back through the document from today’s vantage, it seems more prescient than ever. One of the themes that appears over and over again in the Call to Action is “innovation” as a… Read More
Lake Michigan is beautiful year ’round, but there’s only a short window of time when it’s warm enough for enjoyable swimming. This summer, with its record-high temperatures, that window cranked open a bit early. This hit home for me on Saturday when my husband and I went kayaking. Wading into the water with my boat, the warm water lured me in. We’d had a fair amount of rain in the preceding days… Read More
Last week I had the opportunity to join a number of my Johnson Foundation colleagues for the annual dinner of the Racine Area Manufacturers and Commerce (RAMAC). Racine is home to a number of manufacturers – RUUD Lighting, Emerson (parent company of Insinkerator), and Case Manufacturing, to name a few, as well as SC Johnson and Diversey, the two companies that generously provide the bulk of our foundation’s budget. I was particularly… Read More
Those of you who live in arid climates may find this hard to believe, but in the parts of Wisconsin that lie along Lake Michigan, water conservation isn’t talked about much. Milwaukee is working hard to be an international water technology hub, supplying innovation to industry around the globe. But at the same time, the city is trying to attract water intensive industry by greatly reducing the price of its water for… 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
I can’t help but be hopeful about our ability to solve our country’s overwhelming water challenges when I see the extraordinarily gifted and committed people trying to tackle these problems. It’s one of the great parts of my job – to find these experts and to try to figure out how to help them advance their ideas. In December of 2009, as part of the exploratory phase of the Johnson Foundation’s Freshwater… Read More
I love it when the good guy wins, and today a very good guy won big. This morning I learned that Stephen R. Carpenter, Professor of Zoology and Limnology and faculty member in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is being awarded the 2011 Stockholm Water Prize. Steve’s input and wisdom, gained from a lifetime of work on the ecology of aquatic systems, has been fundamental to The Johnson Foundation’s freshwater… 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
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