Land and water are essential rural resources, but increasingly their ownership, control, and benefits are all decoupled from rural livelihoods. Both land and water are actively being reimagined as assets to be managed, marketed, and financialized, often on balance sheets in distant boardrooms. These changing ownership patterns also intersect with what has been described as a slow-moving ecological catastrophe and a looming social and economic crisis. Today’s rural realities were not inevitable; neither are tomorrow’s. As we gather in 2023 for this Land & Water research series, we ask,
Who really owns rural America?
January 26, 2023
4:00 pm
University of Nebraska College of Law
Lincoln, NE
Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
The Ogallala aquifer has sustained life on the American Great Plains for millennia but faces imminent depletion. In his award-winning book Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains, anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeys back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the complex layers of law, economics, culture, and history that have shaped the current crisis.
April 2023
Center for Great Plains Studies
Lincoln, NE
Agriculture, Food, Land and Water in the Great Plains
This panel—to be presented at the Plant to Table: Food Production, Culture, and Consequences in the Great Plains symposium hosted by the Center for Great Plains Studies in April 2023—will feature Neil Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Law and former director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University, along with the Rural Reconciliation Project’s co-creators, Anthony Schutz and Jessica Shoemaker, to discuss how the law has shaped land and water use for agriculture on the Great Plains.
July 12, 2023
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE
Land & Water Research Workshop and Roundtable
This interdisciplinary research roundtable and workshop convened diverse scholars to share current knowledge and future research trajectories on issues of land and water concentration, commodification, and financialization. Key participants included:
Vanessa Casado Pérez, Professor of Law and Research Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics, Texas A&M University
Madeleine Fairbairn, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Levi Van Sant, Assistant Professor, School of Integrative Studies, George Mason University
Anthony Schutz, Associate Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law
Jessica A. Shoemaker, Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law
More details here.
February 21, 2024
4:00 pm
University of Nebraska College of Law
Lincoln, NE
May 23, 2024
4:00 pm
Spring Creek Prairie
Lincoln, NE
RSVP Required.
Dana Fritz, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape
Dana Fritz, Hixson-Lied Professor of Art, Art History and Design, reflects on how humans make, shape, and understand landscapes. Like a virtual fieldtrip to the Nebraska Sandhills, but through the lens of the most thoughtful and introspective of guides, visual artist Fritz will discuss and share photographs from her new book, “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape.” The book examines, in provocative ways, the unique hand-planted forest of the Bessey Ranger District and now includes some of the last images captured before the 2022 wildfires near Halsey.
Guided Prairie Walk, led by Theo Michaels
For those of us with the Project, our roots are in the specific big skies, open spaces, and rolling grasses that surround Lincoln, Nebraska. With this particular connection in the front of our minds, we invite our local friends and neighbors to join us for an interpretive springtime walk though a 1,160-acre tallgrass prairie sanctuary just outside of Lincoln. Led by ecologist and creative writer Theo Micheals, we will explore the physical terrain as well as the layered place-based human relationships that shape this landscape during perhaps its most exciting season. RSVP required.
For more information on these events, as it becomes available, please complete this form: