December 2012 Archives

German tradition says eating herring at midnight on Dec. 31 brings good fortune for the year to come. Is herring part of your New Year's celebration? If not, here's your big chance!

BY KATE KNUTH

Looking for some tips on how to contribute to the public conversation regarding your work? Participants in IonE's Boreas Leadership Program got some great ones from the pros at the final media workshop of fall semester. In the first half of the workshop, students heard from reporters at the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio and an editor from the Institute on the Environment's own Momentum magazine. In the second half of the workshop, Mike Burbach, editor and vice president of the Pioneer Press, and Susan Albright, co-managing editor of MinnPost, offered observations on how to write an effective op-ed.

Lake Superior's lake herring, also known as cisco or inland tullibee, are an environmental success story. Once supplying up to 19 million pounds of commercial catch per year, lake herring populations plummeted in the 1960s and '70s due to overfishing, habitat loss and the introduction of rainbow smelt.

By John S. Adams

Editor's note: Adams, emeritus professor of geography planning & public affairs at the University of Minnesota, submitted this post in response to "A Measure of Well-Being," published in the Fall 2012 issue of Momentum.

During the recent presidential and congressional campaigns we were smothered with endless babble about jobs, jobs, jobs, tax cuts, entitlements, fiscal cliffs and other sound bites supposedly aimed at clarifying a path to rejuvenated prosperity.

We didn't learn much.

Our country should be understood as a mosaic of metro-centered regional economies, but despite the intensity of campaign debates we didn't learn much about the different ways a region can obtain its income and grow its economy, nor how national economic growth plays out unevenly from the global to the inter-regional to the local scale.

The question that should have been probed and debated by our candidates is this: What are the current trends that matter, that affect how regions grow? Some candidates tried to keep this question the table, but results were hit and miss.