Coming back to life ...

The past month has seen little activity by me in the blogosphere. As a colleague and friend Craig Fleming from the USACE says, "Life happens, sometimes!". I've only experienced a few periods in my life as intense as the last month. Conferences, various illnesses by kids, spouses and self, giving seminars, winning grants, wow - it's all happened, more than once, in the last month! It's all come good in the end, and reinforced some thoughts and ideals along the way.

The centerpiece, AM-wise, was the Missouri River Natural Resources Conference in Billings, Montana. My colleague Sarah Michaels, from UNL's Political Science department, was one of the Plenary speakers, and gave us (scientists & engineers, that is) a real prodding to wake up and recognize our differences so we can get on with the business of saving the planet. Or at least the Missouri River, in the first instance! The other plenary speakers were on fire too - Jim Martin, formerly from Oregon's state agency and now director of conservation at Berkley Conservation Institute gave a great presentation pointing out how we (scientists primarily) need to look up now and then - and in particular think about how increasing demand for water will affect conservation efforts. The rest of the conference was in the usual vein - plenty of presentations about how fish species A is growing in life stage B in habitat C, or Bird X is or is not eating Y. So much knowledge, in so many people, and so hard to track how its all relevant. Independently I've run into alot of stuff about Knowledge Management which suddenly seemed horribly relevant (pun intended) - more on that in a future blog post, although I've touched on it before.

So, many apologies for the long lag in thinking, but I've been much too busy DOING it to think about it! Not what I signed up for when I set out to become an academic ...