Defining Sustainability in Nebraska’s Republican River Basin

This symposium presents an opportunity to discuss agricultural sustainability. But we have little practical understanding of what agricultural sustainability really means. This is a common problem with sustainability efforts. This Article provides one example of this problem. But it also provides a story of how an effort at defining sustainability served as a catalyst for a group of stakeholders that wanted to make improvements in water management. Understood in this way, sustainability discussions can serve to overcome historic barriers to progress that so often arise with resource management problems, especially in the agricultural sector.