Joan Nassauer
Revisioning the Corn Belt
Presenter: Joan Iverson Nassauer
Author, From the Corn Belt to the Gulf
Professor, School of Natural Resources and Environment
University of Michigan
Is it possible to have a healthy U.S. agricultural economy, a healthy food supply, healthy rural communities, healthy agricultural ecosystems and healthy streams? Should we have to compromise any one of these environmental and societal goods to achieve another? Can this be achieved while the United States helps to feed the world, aims to achieve greater energy independence, and trades equitably with other nations? Can agricultural landscapes be reclaimed as desirable places to live and delightful places to visit? Is each of these a legitimate goal of federal agricultural policy? Joan Nassauer addressed all these questions in her research for the book, From the Corn Belt to the Gulf, using two watersheds in Iowa as the basis for her studies. She will share what she discovered at our annual meeting in October.
Joan Iverson Nassauer is a Professor of Landscape Architecture for the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan.
Nassauer’s work on rural and metropolitan landscapes offers strategies for basing landscape change on strong interdisciplinary science. Her books: Placing Nature (1997, Island Press) and From the Corn Belt to the Gulf (2007, Resources for the Future Press) incorporate her research investigating policy and public acceptance of environmentally beneficial landscape change across scales – from the front yard to the Corn Belt region. This research has received numerous awards and appeared in many books and journals. Nassauer has been honored as a designer and as a landscape ecologist. She is secretary of the National Academy of Environmental Design, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a Fellow of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. In 2010 she was named Distinguished Landscape Ecologist in the United States, the highest honor of the US Landscape Ecology Association, and in 2007 she was named Distinguished Landscape Ecology Scholar by the International Association of Landscape Ecology. Recently, she has served as New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Visiting Fellow, 2006; Beatrix C. Farrand Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 2003; and Miegunyah Distinguished Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia, 2001.
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