Special Request: By March 16, 2013, MVC needs to raise thousands of dollars to help us finish a documentary about protecting our precious Driftless Area landscape. The film is entitled "Mysteries of the Driftless," and you have a chance to be part of it. Please visit http://igg.me/p/283563/x/1829972 , check out the movie trailer, share this link with your friends, and contribute online!

Enhanced Easement Incentive Survives in Senate "Extenders" Bill. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee approved the Family and Business Tax Cut Certainty Act, following through on a promise to take a critical look at the "tax extenders" by leaving a quarter of those provisions on the cutting room floor. It's a testament to your hard work that the enhanced easement incentive survived in this package, along with the s-corporation donation incentive and IRA charitable rollover, which we also support. The extension would last two years -- 1/1/2012 through 12/31/2013. Yesterday's bill is the opening volley of a lengthy negotiation. The best way you can demonstrate support is by seeking Senate co-sponsors for S. 339, the stand-alone easement incentive bill promoted by the Land Trust Alliance.

"I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself." - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

"The work of land conservation is not just about protecting material nature -- plants, animals and ecosystems -- but also about protecting human values and cultural landscapes." - William Cronon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

According to an Aug. 1993 article in The New York Times, just in the last 100 to 150 years grazing, logging, invasion by exotic species and the suppression of fires on which many ecosystems depend have brought about rates of ecological change "unprecedented in their severity for the last 5,000 years," said Dr. Kenneth L. Cole, a paleoecologist who directed the National Park Service's global-change program in the western Great Lakes region, based at the University of Minnesota. MVC does ecological restoration to try to save the precious remnants of our native landscape.

View the article here!

Park or housing? City weighs bluffland use.

La Crosse officials are considering whether 160 acres of city-owned bluffland intended to be a park would be better used for residential development. The University of Wisconsin System sold the former Experimental Farm to the city in 1963 for $38,900 with the understanding it would become a park.

Despite the original intent, city council member Andrea Richmond said,“If there’s an opportunity to put some taxable property up there, we should really take a hard look at it.”

http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/park-or-housing-city-weighs-bluffland-use/article_d0812c9c-26db-11e1-9e8d-0019bb2963f4.html