As with the teachings of classical Greece and Rome, so in North America and in most traditions around the world, the elementals of water have predominantly been personified in feminine-yin form: Sirens, Jengus, Melusine, Yami, Morgens, Nereids and Naiads, the Lady of the Lake, Swan Maidens, and White Shell Woman, to name a few.

Whether dwelling in still pools, rushy streams, ornate fountains or plastic bottles for drinking, fresh water spirits around the world have most frequently been appreciated as feminine. Everywhere the Undines, water elementals possessing voices of lilting beauty, may be heard over the sound of water, sages have long maintained, if one takes care to listen.

Thus, early in May upon entering the global Water for Food conference hosted by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) -- a conference "generously supported" by Monsanto and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -- I was immediately struck by the overwhelming male-yang dominance of the proceedings. By approximate measure, 75-80% of the conferees were men; likewise by my reckoning, the program listed 48 men presenters, just six women.

Conference talk flowed around themes of what people -- and the nations and corporations they organize themselves into -- either want or need to do with water, as if our relationship with this essential resource were one way. In traditional teachings of North America it's understood fundamentally that the elements and forces of the earth should be considered: listening to the call of the water, so to speak, as basic tenet of living in right relation.

Moments later, in response to a question from the audience, Dr. Simi Kamal, CEO of the Hisaar Foundation in Pakistan, one of the six women presenters, made am emphatic point. She said agricultural policies must not overlook the human dimension. She said policies -- and I took it she meant corporate policy as well as political policy -- "must empower and engage the dispossessed, the marginalized, the landless, including unpaid and underpaid women laborers in the developing world."

"The challenges for women in developing countries represents a huge issue," Kamal said. "We need to hear from them. Lets bring women out of the niche they have been placed in, and also begin to see agriculture as part of the larger ecosystem...Next year this Water for Food conference needs to dedicate a day to the issues of gender, water and food."

Slamming into the Ceiling 

The same week, some 1,200 miles away from the Water for Food conference in Nebraska, another conference was unfolding a different vision. The Future of Food gathering sponsored by The Washington Post featured spokespeople not from corporations or universities, but rather advocates for organic, sustainable agriculture. The program included Marion Nestle, Will Allen, Deborah Koons-Garcia, Eric Schlosser, Vandana Shiva, Senator Jon Tester, England's Prince Charles, and agrarian patriarch Wendell Berry.

Thanks to a bicycle I could attend the Nebraska conference, and thanks to the Internet I could also see and hear parts of the Washington conference. Both gatherings of high power food and farm leaders held potential for impacting policy, and shaping real activity around critical matters of water, land, and food. They embodied the yin and yang character in the parallel universes of agrarianism and industrial agriculture: the Tao of the Land 2011. These matters are in vivid relief this spring with over a billion hungry people on the planet. As the United Nations Environment Program once again made screamingly blunt this season with yet another report: humanity is slamming into the environmental ceiling. "Global resource consumption is exploding," their report said. "It's not a trend that is in any way sustainable."

This year in Nebraska, for the third consecutive year, the global Water for Food conference grappled in its way with the immediate challenges of growing more food with less water. Many a speaker uttered the by-now familiar refrain: Earth's population will rise to nine billion people by 2050; how will we double food production by then with increasingly diminished natural resources?

Feeding a growing world population with less water is “one of the greatest challenges of this century,” said Jeff Raikes as the conference opened. Raikes is a Nebraska native and now the CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation is a major supporter of and investor in Monsanto and their promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as the response of industrial agriculture to global crop challenges.

Raikes said that the Gates Foundation aims to reduce poverty by helping farmers produce more efficiently and to move beyond producing only enough food for their own families. He noted that of the 1.3 billion or so of the world’s population who live in extreme poverty, about 75 percent depend on subsistence agriculture.

Agrarians actively question the corporate model of extensive high-tech farming and GMO crops as inappropriate for most of the developing world. They argue that it should not be pushed on the poorest farmers in the name of feeding the world, and that these schemes enrich only the corporations, not the people on the land.

The general thrust of discussion at the Nebraska conference, however, was that large-scale approaches and techniques such as hybrid GMO crops with fertilizers and pesticides could produce more food more quickly and with less water, including small-scale farms in developing countries. The Monsanto representative, VP for Global Strategy Kerry Preete, mentioned efforts to increase plant density, such that they could put 40,000 corn plants on one acre of land. In 2012-13 Monsanto will introduce a new GM corn variety that, despite reports showing this is dubious, he claimed would use less water. How could small-scale farmers in developing nations pay for such technology? Poor farmers can't, Preete said, but rich farmers can and as they adopt technology, the cost comes down.

In Washington meanwhile critics vigorously questioned the claimed yields and pointed to recent studies stating that sustainable, organic farming methods use less water and could provide more food and better livelihoods for farmers in the developing world.  They cited research done by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) which established that small-scale systems of agro-ecology are capable of producing enough food for the developing world while helping to preserve and replenish natural resources. A report published earlier this year by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food came to similar conclusions, arguing that more sustainable systems could double food production in certain regions.

UNL President James B. Milliken said at the conference that the university's new Water for Food Institute aims are "fully compatible" with the aims of the Gates Foundation. “The challenges are so numerous that we can’t expect to solve them all," he said, advocating that a “network of knowledge around the world,” as represented at the conference, is essential. He expressed UNL's intention that the Water for Food Institute evolve to become an international pivot point for disseminating such knowledge.

UNL is just now making a momentous switch in the Land Grant universe by joining the Big Ten Conference. The key importance of the new institute and the issue of water for food -- globally as well in America's agricultural heartland -- was apparent in the ongoing conference involvement of top university officials: President  Milliken, Chancellor Harvey Perlman, and Vice Chancellor Prem Paul. All participated actively in the conference, and welcomed the formal agreement UNL signed with the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education. The agreement sets out the arrangements for cooperative research and education on matters of water and food. They said they intend a multidisciplinary institute mobilized to meet urgently impending matters.

In committing itself robustly to the means and ends of industrial agriculture, UNL has drawn criticism from both inside and outside the university. They charge UNL with catering primarily to corporate agriculture, thereby giving only token support to  family-sized farms, mid-sized farms and the far-flung rural communities of the Cornhusker state. With this emphasis, critics say, UNL is stinting in its obligation to carry out the University's fundamental land-grant mission -- the creation and application of “knowledge with a public purpose.”

New Realities: Signs All Over 

András Szöllösi-Nagy, rector of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in The Netherlands, told the Nebraska conference that food is closely linked with social and political issues. As food prices go up, he said those issues come to the forefront. There is growing vulnerability in this, he said, because humans are driving dramatic change in global water systems and food production with population growth, trade, subsidies, political upheaval, technological implementation, and the reality of climate changes.

"Is climate change accelerating?" Szöllösi-Nagy asked rhetorically. "The hypothesis is yes it is accelerating, but we have no hard proof yet. What we do know is that global mean temperatures are clearly increasing...There is lots of uncertainty, and the Precautionary Principle should hold.

"Still," he added, "something is changing. The signs are all over: more floods, more droughts, more extreme weather events. We have new realities we need to reckon with, he said, explaining that the whole concept of a 100-year flood is outdated. We must throw out the tools we use to characterize such extreme events, he said, because so-called 100-year floods and storms are happening all the time and becoming routine."

The very week of the two conferences in early May, those new realities again smashed into the news: Texas and much of America's Southwest because of an exceptional drought, the Mississippi River for impending flooding of farmland and suburbs on a scale "never seen before," and the Arctic Circle because of newly accelerated melting due to global warming.

Meanwhile in Washington at the Future of Food, England's Prince Charles (text - video) was setting out a case that our current use of the land, and our systems of food production do not address these problems but rather aggravate them. He said if we are going to address the challenges of climate change, water shortages, general resource depletion, and all the other things, then the current industrial model of agriculture and food systems is unsustainable. It requires radical transformation.

The Irrigation News 

The Water for Food conference in Nebraska was brimming with intellectual acuity, technological sophistication, organizational aptitude, and sincere determination to overcome the global challenges.The event, fueled by a recent $50 million gift to UNL from the late Robert B. Daugherty, attracted more than 400 participants from 24 nations.

Daugherty, a Nebraskan who died last November, made his fortune developing and marketing center pivot irrigation systems through the Omaha-based company now known as Valmont Industries, Inc. UNL used his bequest to establish the new Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute as an information distribution center in partnership with national and international agencies, including UNESCO.

The current CEO of Valmont, Mogens Bay, told the Nebraska conference that despite problems irrigation is not going away. Without it, many farms around the world would dry up and blow into the far distance. Bay said center-pivot technology -- which has made vast stretches of formerly unfarmable land productive -- is adapting to become more efficient. His company's newest center-pivot rigs use a variety of sensors linked to a central computer. The computer divides a quarter section farm field (160 acres) into 5,000 zones, with specific zone control for the rate of applying water, fertilizer or insecticide.

Likewise, Anil Jain, managing director of Jain Irrigation Systems, Ltd. in India, told the conference about the "transformational impact" of drip irrigation. He said more than a billion people on the planet are small holders, tending 1-5 acres. Many of them must irrigate the land to produce a crop, he said, and drip irrigation can do the job efficiently and conserve water.

Jain spoke enthusiastically about "fertigation" -- applying water and fertilizer in liquid form through the systems. Fertigation, he said, is a catalyst for high-tech agriculture hand-in-hand with biotechnology because the systems deliver fertilizers and pesticides directly to plants. He said solar-powered water pumps, rain-harvesting systems, and small-scale drip irrigation could be installed for $1,000 an acre. He said that smallholder farmers could pay that investment back fast with increased crop productivity -- not the first time an enthusiastic farm-profit forecast was declared in the agricultural pivot of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Industry Leader Guys: Get Bigger 

Kerry Preete, Monsanto's VP for Global Strategy, appeared on the Industry Leader panel in Nebraska. He began by posing his variation on the standard rhetorical question: "How do we double the world's food supply on the same footprint?" The world needs to produce 1.5 billion more tons of grain by 2050. The obvious industrial implication of his question was through transgenic crops, Monsanto's profit pony.

As with many of the other speakers in Nebraska, Preete articulated the case for agriculture to become bigger and more efficient to meet global needs. A student participating in the conference asked the panel whether transgenic (GMO) crops are a safe way to meet this projected need? As if served a slow softball over the center of home plate, Monsanto's Preete cheerily answered "Yes. After 20 years of wide use we are confident, as are all of the regulating agencies, that our seeds and crops are safe."

Not everyone shares that confidence. Certainly not soil scientist Don Huber, who has warned of potential catastrophe, and certainly not the authors of a new literature review into the safety studies on GM food. The review documents the reality that most studies claiming that GM foods are as nutritional and as safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates. The authors concluded “the controversial debate on GMOs...remains completely open at all levels.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, Jon Tester (D-Montana), the only farmer in the US Senate, was telling the Future of Food conference, “The rise of GMOs and who controls the seed, is one that’s particularly disturbing to me as a farmer. With GMOs, farmers don’t control the seed, multinational agribusiness does...You and I have heard over and over that our only hope to feed the planet as our population grows is GMOs," Tester said. "Well, I’m here to tell you that I don’t buy it. What it has done and what it continues to do is take away options for family farmers. And it takes away options for consumers. If we keep moving down this path, farmers won’t be able to control their seed, something they have done since the beginning of time. And no longer will you truly know what you’re eating."

Back in Nebraska, listening to Monsanto's Preete, I could not help but think of Earl Butz, the Republican Secretary of Agriculture (1971-76), whose infamous mantra to farmers was to "get big or get out." Butz's challenging remarks immediately preceded the epic farm crisis of the 1980s that drove thousands of American families off of their farms, consolidating and concentrating good farm lands in far fewer hands, a process that continues pell mell not just in the US but globally.

This harsh reality of farm consolidation was cited in Washington where Will Allen, founder and chief executive of Growing Power, told the Future of Food conference: “We need more people growing food in their back yard, side yard, community farm. We need to support those existing farmers that are struggling. Our rural farmers are struggling, and they have been the backbone of our food system for so many years. In 1960, they told us farmers to grow soybeans and corn, fencerow to fencerow; we were going to feed the world. And we have what? A million less farmers. That system hasn’t worked.”

What does it profit a land? 

In Nebraska, CEO Jeff Raikes said the Gates Foundation believes that an increase in technology leads to an increase in wealth, "We need to see farmers as customers," he observed. "We need more affordable solutions, and we need to shift the mindset of farmers toward prosperity, somehow enabling them to see farming as a business...One of the greatest challenges of the century is getting more crop per drop."

Raikes said that countries that have been able to move out beyond extreme poverty have done so, historically, by improving their agricultural productivity. “What ultimately happens is that improvement in agricultural productivity creates greater wealth in the economy, and that opens up new opportunities."

This point of view was widely supported by presenters at the Nebraska gathering. Kebede Ayele, country director of International Development Enterprises in Ethiopia, said that while better technology is important, it has to be accompanied by education. “We have to convince them (farmers) and make them believe they can be profitable in agriculture." Mick Mwala, Dean, School of Natural Resources, University of Zambia, also argued that farming is a business, urging that more and more farmers need to embrace this conception.

These messages struck my ears bluntly. They are distinct from the agrarian motivations and pathways I see as leading forward for generations to come. Farming as a business to make profit and feed people, or farming as a way of life in harmony with nature and health, and serving as a clean healthy foundation to support the high-tech digital culture evolving so swiftly in this new millennium?

In Washington, agrarian elder Wendell Berry delivered the agrarian gospel with no holds barred at the Future of Food conference: "We must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization," he said. "Our fundamental problem is world destruction caused by an irreconcilable contradiction between the natural world and the engineered world of industrialism."

"...There is no use in saying that if we can invent the nuclear bomb and fly to the moon, we can solve hunger and related problems of land use," Berry said. "Epic feats of engineering require only a few brilliant technicians and a lot of money. But feeding a world of people year to year for a long time requires cultures of husbandry fitted to the nature of millions of unique small places — precisely the kind of cultures that industrialism has purposely disvalued, uprooted and destroyed."

© 2011 by Steven McFadden 

Waves of change have irregularly swept through the realms of food and farms over the decades. By most reckonings, another massive wave is building toward a crest, driven by oil prices, climate change, market speculation, genetic experimentation, human health corruption, corporate interest, and consumer demand.   

 In the context of these roiling factors, Chuck Hassebrook had a message for the audience at the Nebraska Sustainable Agriculture Society's mid-February conference: "We can shape the next wave of change with sustainable agriculture." But, he added, to do that we will need the same qualities of determination and perseverance as the pioneers. 

Hassebrook is Executive Director of the Center for Rural Affairs. He also serves on the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska, a powerhouse among America's agricultural academies, where he is one voice for sustainability in an institutional chorus determinedly advancing industrial approaches to farms and food. 

In his talk, he picked up on the theme of change in the historical period starting after World War II when the wave was propelled by power equipment, petroleum-based chemical inputs, and confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Initially those innovations made farm work easier and more prosperous.  But now, 60 years later, we must ask 'what hath we wrought?' 

There is a new wave of change now, Hassebrook said, but if we want a better sustainable future, we are going to have to take responsibility for creating it. "Each person has a moral responsibility to leave the land in at least as good a condition as it was when it came under their caretaking, and possibly even better," he said. Then he offered three strategies. 

Three Strategies  

1. Sustainable agriculture needs to continue to check its authenticity and find ways to make it possible for small and mid-size farms to take a fair share of the market. Studies show consumers overwhelmingly trust family-size farms more than they trust the large corporate farms, especially when it comes to ethical treatment of human beings and animals. 

We need to band together to market our products to get to a place where the majority of the people who do the work are also owners of the land. That's what a family farm is. 

In the era of the pioneers, the people who worked the land owned it. Not so much now. Instead, the corporations or people who own the land hire employees to work the land for them, and those employees are in the majority of cases poor. 

Hassebrook's observations put me in mind of Trauger Groh, my co-author for  Farms of Tomorrow (1990), and one of the founders of the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in New Hampshire. "If you work in nature with animals or with crops you have to take a deep personal interest in it," Trauger told me when interviewed him for The Call of the Land. "The hired person cannot do this. A salary is insufficient motivation. We need another way. 

“We have no employees on our farm," Trauger told me. "We have partners. At the Temple-Wilton Community Farm our principle has been to run the farm by a group of independent farmers in association with each other, not employees...Employment is the last outgrowth of slavery. If you are employed, you have to work on order. The employer sets the tone and says what you must do. People won’t want that in the future." 

2.  The second strategy Hassebrook offered involves the role of sustainable agriculture in addressing climate change. As studies show, organic soil absorbs lots of CO2 from the atmosphere and fixes it in the soil beneficially, thus helping stabilize climate in an era of wildly dramatic change. 

"America and the world need our participation in the debate on climate change, not just in Washington, but also locally," Hassebrook said. "We need to talk with our neighbors. Lots of rural folk continue their disbelief in climate change and think they are being conservative. But there is nothing conservative about that position.  It is not a traditional value to put your head in the sand...If we continue to keep our heads in the sand, it may be too late to do anything about it. We need to take action now." 

In that regard the NSAS conference also heard from Abe Collins, an organic farmer who raises beef in St. Albans, Vermont, and is also the founder of New Soil Matrix. His talk was titled 'Soil Formation as the Basis of Environmental Security and Economic Development.' 

"Everything good comes from the soil," Collins said. "That's our basic assumption. Increasing soil carbon is the key to our environmental security, and to both urban and rural development. 

For many years, Collins said, the common-knowledge maxim has been that it takes 1,000 years to build one inch of topsoil. But that is no longer true. We now know how, he said, build up to eight inches of topsoil a year to pull carbon out of the air and draw down dangerous CO2 levels in the atmosphere. "We can reduce CO2 levels substantially," he said, "while enhancing ecosystems and increasing profits." 

Collins encouraged land managers to enter The Soil Carbon Challenge, sometimes called the World Carbon Cup. It's an international competition to see how fast land managers can turn atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter. The hope is that the competition will spur further innovation. 

3.  Hassebrook's third strategy was to rein in government subsidy of large farms so that small and mid-size farms can have a fair chance. The way it works now, he said, is the bigger you are the more government subsidy you get. As long as we keep the policies that support that approach we will not have the resources to invest in organic and sustainable approaches to the land. 

In 2007, the Center for Rural Affairs did an analysis of farms in 13 leading farm states. They learned that in those states, just 260 of the largest farm operations received more money from USDA farm programs than all of the people and communities in all of the counties combined, a total of nearly 3 million people in over 1,400 municipalities. The reality of that gross imbalance shines a sharp light on the distortion government money has brought to the realm of food and farms, and shows why small farms struggle while huge, corporate farms prosper. 

Woody Tasch of the  Slow Money Alliance makes a similar point about lack of support for sustainable ag. He points out that only a tiny fraction of foundation assets are allocated to organic agriculture. "We have $500 billion of private foundation assets in the USA," Tasch has written, "and less that 0.1 percent of that -- just a few hundredths of a percent -- goes to support sustainable agriculture." 

What it comes down to, Hassebrook said, is a choice about the impending wave of change: "We have got to limit what the big farms get. Direct payments usually go to land that is owned by a landlord and worked by poorly paid employees. We need to stop subsidizing the biggest and most powerful, and instead use those resources to support family farms, and to invest in the future of rural communities and the millions of people who live there. 

In closing, Hassebrook referred to an editorial he had read a while back in the Omaha World Herald. "We can draw inspiration from the pioneers," he said, "for they were people just like us: good and bad, poor and rich, successful and unsuccessful. But in general the pioneers had some important qualities. They had perseverance. They were visionaries. They made sacrifices to realize their dreams. They cared about each other and community. That saw what could be and did not let challenges dissuade them. They faced reality, and they were open to new ideas." 

Those qualities and attitudes, he said, are what modern-day pioneers of sustainable agriculture need now to shape the mounting waves of change in our farms and food.

“I’m always a little surprised when I hear people say that they are getting on a plane and heading off to the Holy Land,” Winona LaDuke said. “Because the Holy Land is here. This is it right here in America. We are standing right now on Holy Land.  My people have known that forever, and it’s time everyone came to understand it.”

Winona was the keynote speaker at the 5th annual Chief Standing Bear Breakfast, served up in the Heartland, May 21, Lincoln, Nebraska. As she uttered the last syllable of her pronouncement about holy land, the Earth responded, as it often will in a moment of truth. The ground began to tremble. The subtle shudder continued for 20 seconds or more. It was definite. I felt it. Others felt it, too.

Currently serving as director of Native Harvest and the White Earth Land Recovery Project, Winona spoke simply but eloquently for 25 minutes before an audience of about 400 people. In the course of her remarks she mentioned her late father, Sun Bear, an old friend and colleague of mine. Sun Bear was an actor, an activist in his own right, and convener of the influential Medicine Wheel Gatherings in the 1980s and 1990s. “Very often,” Winona told the audience, “I heard my father say, ‘I don’t want to hear your philosophy if it won’t grow corn.’ It took me a long time to understand what he meant, but I get it now. He was on to something important.

“I know also,” she added, “that when you grow your own food it makes you a better human being. It connects you to the land you live upon, and it relieves a certain poverty of spirit.

At the breakfast event the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska announced plans to advocate for a national holiday to honor their late chief, Standing Bear, and to strive to have him recognized as someone as important to civil rights as Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1879, Standing Bear challenged decades of U.S. policy when, in the course of federal prosecution in Omaha, Nebraska, he demanded to be recognized as a person. That was the first time an Indian was permitted to appear in court in this country and have his rights tried.  The government argued that Indians were not entitled to the protection of a writ of habeas corpus because they were not citizens or even “persons” under American law.

Late in the afternoon as the trial drew to a close, the Judge announced that Standing Bear would be allowed to make a speech on his own behalf. No one in the audience had ever heard an oration by an Indian. Standing Bear rose. Half facing the audience, he held out his right hand, and stood motionless. After a long pause, looking up at the judge, he said: “That hand is not the color of yours, but if I prick it, the blood will flow, and I shall feel pain. The blood is of the same color as yours. God made me, and I am a man ...”

Standing Bear spoke for several minutes more. When he was finished the courtroom crowd, moved by his logic and his eloquence, erupted with a resounding shout of support. Thereafter, in time, the federal judge handed down a ruling that Indians are in fact human beings — persons within the meaning of the law. This was a historic ruling on the status of Native peoples on the land they have inhabited for many thousands of years — land that, according to their ancestral traditions, they have a definite and special spiritual responsibility to protect.

Scholars have likened the impact of Standing Bear’s case to the impact that the earlier 1857 Dred Scott case had for the rights of African Americans. The Dred Scott case essentially declared that a human being had no constitutional rights because he was black. It was the most egregious legal decision of its time. violating both logic and human decency. So twisted was the legal logic that it compelled people to consider what slavery really meant. Likewise, the Standing Bear case compelled people to recognize that Natives are also human beings, with a fundamental entitlement to justice. NET has produced a TV documentary exploring the issues – Standing Bear’s Footsteps — that will be broadcast later this year.

At the breakfast in Lincoln, in what resounded as the morning’s unexpected coda to the case of Standing Bear and all human beings, Winona ended her talk with an observation.  There is currently, she said, a great national debate raging on the subject of immigration. The debate is being stirred by SB 1070, a law recently enacted in Arizona (a law that has become a model for legislation that other states, including Nebraska, will be voting on in the months ahead). “In the circumstances of this law and its impact there is a cruel irony,” she said. “Most of the people who are intended to be excluded from this land by laws like this come from a genetic lineage that has always been here — family lines that trace back in North America for 10,000 years or longer.”

These relatives — mostly people from Mexico and Central America — are in many cases farm workers: people who labor in the fields to grow our grains and vegetables, or who toil like machines in the vast Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and slaughterhouses that yield our chicken, beef, and pork. Whether we acknowledge and respect them or not, these are our Ambassadors to the Holy Land. They touch the Earth on our behalf. They raise up the food that we eat. They, like Standing Bear, are human beings, too.

I've decided to institute a weekly feature here at Joy in the Journey. As I've said, I'm a wandering kind of girl, and, at least for the foreseeable future, I will be making an almost weekly trip somewhere. Last weekend it was Lincoln, Nebraska.

I'll admit my bias upfront. I lived in Lincoln for 11 years or so (which ties it for longest in my lifetime to date). I was born there and my mom's family is from there, so I've been making my way up O Street for as long as I can remember.

Lincoln bills itself as a large small-town. Now that I've lived in more "city-like" places – Omaha, Denver and Topeka – I'd have to say that I agree with that assessment. There's something about Lincoln that never quite makes it to "citified." I haven't lived there since 2000, though, and they've experienced some growth since then. Because I have been going there since the '70s, the changes in Lincoln are the most obvious to me. Landmarks that used to mean "We're almost there!" are now swallowed up in residential areas. Looks like ~100,000 new residents have moved in since 1970. The green, tree-lined streets I miss are still plentiful, though, as is a smile on a street corner downtown.

Lincoln has a very interesting dynamic as a town pretty much created by and for government. The little village of Lancaster was renamed Lincoln and accepted as the state capital of Nebraska in 1867, when the city planners laid out future streets in a blissful grid. 

One of my favorite places to visit is the state capitol, which is the second tallest state capitol (apparently Louisiana trumps us) and the home of Nebraska's unique one-house state legislature. Designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, the capitol was constructed between 1922 and 1932 and actually came in a little under budget. It's filled with lovely '20s art deco, surrounded with wonderful verbage (you know, little quips like, "Honor to pioneers who broke the sods that men to come might live.") and topped by a statue called "The Sower." 

Another city feature, "The Lincoln Mall" runs from the capitol to the Nebraska Historical Society and boasts many levels of fountains, trees and landmarks, such as Pershing Auditorium and the State Office Building (which I called the SOB when I temped there one summer).

The sculpture "Wind Spirit" is also on the Mall. The plains and the wind are one, and this sculpture does a wonderful job of capturing the "tameless, and swift, and proud."

Of course, Lincoln is also the home of the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, so it has that "college town" feel as well. We residents looked forward to school starting with both excitment and trepidation. As others who've lived near colleges can, I'm sure, attest, there's just nothing like waking up one morning and finding 23,000 extra people have moved in over the weekend.

Of course, then there are those special weekends when it's 78,000 invaders who come to watch the Huskers play at Memorial Stadium, another place I've been going since the '70s (or was it the '80s? Dad?) and where most of my family will be this weekend, eager for a new hope.