Grasslands once spanned across Nebraska in waves, from the tallgrass prairies in the east to the shortgrass prairie in the west and all the mixed-grass prairies in between. The history of Nebraska’s grasslands are deeply intertwined with the history of its people. Indigenous peoples across the Great Plains possess diverse and intimate knowledge about the […]

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. What is soft is strong.” -Lao-Tzu Across Wyoming’s sea of sagebrush, two cargo vans full of students approach the Wind River […]

Last October, on the day before Halloween, I set out on a kayaking trip down the Elkhorn River in search for signs of the North American river otter. I went with Craig Allen, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Natural Resources, his colleagues David Angeler and Dirac Twidwell, and Nathan Bieber, a […]

Just to the north of my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, is a patch of undisturbed tallgrass prairie, one of the largest of the few remaining remnants of an ecosystem that once covered the eastern reaches of the Platte River Basin. Since 1983 this 230-acre tract has been owned by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, but university […]

Gill moved to Lincoln, Nebraska from Israel when he was 14-years-old. Not only did he find the different toilets and impeccably green lawns unusual, but he noticed the topic of water was rarely on people’s minds, or even considered a priority.

Driving into Mullen Nebraska, in the heart of the Sandhills, the wind howled outside our Suburban as the sun set over a vast landscape. The few hundred residents of the biggest little town in Hooker County pride themselves on hospitality—a hospitality that the weariest of travelers would certainly have come to love, providing a brief reprieve from powerful gusts.