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| http://knrc.weebly.com/the-waters-of-kansas.html |
Kansas Natural Resource Council (KNRC) and the Biofuels and Climate Change: Farmer’s Land Use Decisions (BACC-FLUD) project have teamed up to produce a series of videos telling the story of water in Kansas from border to border. Each film discusses the history of how the various water sources have been utilized in the past; how the present day competing interests are affecting water supplies and how community efforts or failures to manage water sources will impact the future. The videos are unique because they feature interviews with people from across Kansas. The Kansans featured in the film tell their personal accounts of how they are directly effected by groundwater, surface water, reservoirs or rivers.
The intention of the series is to facilitate a community conversation about Kansans' relationship with water using personal narratives. While the initial project has only produced three videos so far, the ultimate goal is to produce multiple short films, ten to twenty minutes long, that continue to address how water has been used to build and sustain Kansas and what needs to be done to preserve it for the future.
The completed films and detailed descriptions can be found on the Kansas Natural Resource Council’s website and are titled Cheyenne Bottoms, Farming over the Ogallala, and Our Shrinking Reservoirs. The videos were produced by Christie Scanlin Dobson of StormDoor Productions. The BACC: FLUD (Biofuels and Climate Change: Farmer’s Land Use Decisions) project is embedded within a much larger research project examining climate change and renewable energy, which represents Phase VI of the Kansas NSF EPSCoR (KNE) program. The National Science Foundation (NSF) established the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) as a way to promote scientific progress in states that have traditionally received lesser amounts of NSF research and development funding.
