We read and hear a lot about eating locally these days, and many of us assume the phenomenon is of recent origin, and of course we are delighted to be part of the movement to finally be eating "sensibly."

Few people today know the delight of gathering wild mushrooms, greens, tubers, rhizomes, flowers, stems, buds, seeds, and acorns or other nuts for their own sustenance.

Gov. Blunt Announces Seventeen Missouri Trail Projects will Receive Federal Grants

            JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt announced today that 17 trail projects in Missouri will receive approximately $1,174,393 in funding through the federal Recreational Trails Program. 

ST. LOUIS, Missouri, December 2, 2008 (ENS) - Rare and vulnerable to extinction, bright blue migratory songbirds can be seen flying through the trees on an 80 acre piece of land in the watershed of the Current River, one of North America’s most biologically diverse streams.

The Missouri parcel links together federal and state protected lands and provides breeding habitat for the cerulean warblers, Dendroica cerulea, whose population is declining throughout its range in both North and South America.

Lynn Robbins, professor of biology at Missouri State University, received a $43,829 grant from the National Park Service for his project, “Determine Summer Habitat Use by Indiana Bats to Inform Adaptive Management Actions at Ozark National Scenic Riverways,” a university news release said.

Robbins has been studying free flying bats using specialized ultrasonic detection equipment, called Anabat II, since 1995. This study is part of a National Park Service initiative to manage conservation areas in ways that do not harm endangered species such as the Indiana bat.

For Immediate release:
December 1, 2008

John Gustavson of Boulder, Colorado is trying to convince farmers in Mississippi County to let his company explore for uranium. Not unlike the snake oil salesmen of old, he seems to be promising farmers millions of dollars to cure an ailing economy and says “cleaner” nuclear power plants will help cure the global climate change problem.

Effects of Bootheel uranium search costly

By KEN MIDKIFF
Columbia Tribune
Published Friday, November 21, 2008
Something’s going on down in the Bootheel. At this point, it is all still pretty much a mystery, but if all comes together, it is likely to be an environmental disaster.