Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation: President's Corner- Visions

This article first appeared in INHF's Summer 2007 magazine.

As always, we are pleased to share this new issue of your quarterly Iowa Natural Heritage—your natural resource investment report. Visionary leaders created the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation 28 years ago, and we’ve tried to retain their visionary spirit. In this issue you’ll read about visions, old and new.

Though John and Maxine Ham passed away shortly before their beloved marsh’s public dedication, their vision lives on—in the cacaphony of bird and frog calls, stands of wild rice and the excited shouts of kids spotting their first crawdads (pages 4-5).

More than 25 years ago, vision galvanized a determined group of volunteers, local officials and INHF to create one of Iowa’s early destination trails: Heritage Trail in Dubuque County (pages 6-8). Inspired by that example, INHF is helping local officials and volunteers in eight counties in central Iowa to envision and build a premier regional trail system of nearly 1,300 miles. On an even grander scale, we’re helping diverse partners create the Mississippi River Trail, which will extend 2,000 miles along the entire river from source to Gulf—connecting 10 states and 400 communities. I recently joined a small group of folks with strong visions and stronger legs to “scout” the trail’s Iowa segment by bicycle.

INHF’s public policy discussions lay out an even broader vision. Rather than becoming paralyzed by the doom and gloom about global climate change, we envision Iowa taking a leadership role as the first highly developed state to become carbon-neutral (pages 10-12).

In the near future, we’ll share another grand vision: the Upper Midwest Wildlife Habitat Initiative. Unifying public and private support, it will help implement the states’ wildlife action plans to protect vital wildlife habitat.

As always, we appreciate your help, support, partnership—and vision.

Your conservation partner,

Mark C. Ackelson

President

For more information, e-mail Cathy Engstrom, Director of Communications, or call (515) 288-1846.

The power of vision