Great News!!!

Greetings Everyone:

What a great surprise today! I just walked into the office from doing an economic survey and found some amazing news coming from Lincoln, Nebraska.

The Grassland Foundation, was just awarded the "Travel-Leisure" 2009 Global Vision Award for Wildlife Tourism. As quoted from the Grassland Foundation's newsletter,

"Travel + Leisure recently announced the winners of their 2009 Global Vision Awards. These awards are given each year to the "latest and best efforts at cultural preservation, environmental conservation, and community-building through tourism." The 17 winners of this years awards include efforts both big and small, private and not for profit, and are both global and local in reach.

The Grassland Foundation was given the award for its work with the Northern Great Plains Program of the World Wildlife Fund in sending conservationists and ranchers from the Northern Great Plains to Namibia to study wildlife and land management practices. Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist at Columbia University, and member of the awards committee, commented that: "The Northern Great Plains project is an impressive example of America learning from best practices abroad."

If you would like to hear more about the work, the award, ect. please contact my friend/colleague Jill Francke at Grassland Foundation in Lincoln, NE. jill@grasslandfoundation.org

Congratulations Grassland Foundation!!! [Their link is also listed at the bottom of my blog]

Link to the award: http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/2009-global-vision-awards/2/?comments_page=1

.........

One of the highlights of my experiences over here in Namibia was participating with the Northern Great Plains group sponsored by WWF NGP and seeing how my ranch neighbors the Switzers [Calamus Outfitters -see link at bottom of bog] and others including myself can learn from the Namibian tourism model. Sadly, due to WWF Namibia work and travel conflicts I couldn't go everywhere with the group, but the recap session at the end was enlightening for all.

Many of you probably know the Switzer's ranch borders my ranch in Loup County and we're working on an innovative cross property natural resource management plan that incorporates ecotourism into the process among the neighbors on the Gracie Creek watershed. The model we're currently working on with many other groups is based off of parts of the Namibia conservation model.

When I came home for my sister's wedding in August, the two ranches sat down and had a "halftime" meeting I'd call it to talk about grants the ranches are applying for and what we as the landowners want to do with all these new ideas. [I previously blogged about this] I look forward to coming back to Nebraska and finishing up some previous work with Grassland and keep making the rubber hit the road in both grad school and back home on the ranch.

Congrats again to Grassland! Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Aaron