DENVER — Current United States Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue and Former US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack are among the experts joining Colorado State University’s inaugural Water in the West Symposium on April 26-27, 2018 at McNichols Civic Center Building, 144 W. Colfax Ave., Denver.
The Symposium will bring more than 370 participants and 30 leading water authorities from across the nation to speak to the future of water in the Western region.
“When you think about water and the variety of uses that we put water to. It’s an amazing natural resource and something obviously that life depends on,” said Vilsack, who joined CSU as a special advisor on the National Western Center project in April 2017, has been key to visioning the Symposium.
“It’s not just life that depends on [water], economic opportunity depends on it, the opportunity to enjoy and entertain and to recreate depends on it, the opportunity to have safety and security in your home depends on it, your public health depends on it, it’s an amazing resource and it’s one, frankly, that most of us take for granted,” he said.
The Symposium will seek to understand water issues from a multidisciplinary perspective and set the stage for the research, policy work, and outreach focus for the future Water Resources Center, the first building to be constructed on the new National Western Center campus, and will address topics such as:
- Research and innovation in water across sectors
- Financing water projects
- Federal perspectives on Western water issues
- Connections between food, energy, and water in the West
“I think the time has come to really understand the role that water plays in our lives, to treat it as the precious natural resource that it is and to figure out ways that we can ensure that future generations will have sufficient water to do all of the variety of activity that water currently does today,” said Vilsack.
Vilsack said the event is key to communicating the urgency of addressing water issues and bringing leadership across business, agriculture, recreation, conservation, and a variety of other sectors to the table to begin the necessary work to identify solutions.
“I think the time has come to really understand the role that water plays in our lives. To treat it as the precious natural resource that it is, and to figure out ways that we can ensure that future generations will have sufficient water to do the variety of activities that water does today,” Vilsack said.
— Tiana Nelson, Colorado State University
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