We Walk to Iowa Before Dinner

As part of the conference, there was a guided walk along the redeveloped Missouri River waterfront near the hotel.  Our guide was the Army Corps of Engineers biologist who played a major role in the work.  He spoke to us a lunch about developing a plan for the Missouri including people from all the states it runs through and how the Corps had to be dragged into a new way of thinking about dams and about citizen participation.

The walk started on the Con Agra 'campus.'  Merriam Websters' online dictionary defines campus this way:

Etymology: Latin, plain

Date: 1774

1 : the grounds and buildings of a university, college, or school
2 : a university, college, or school viewed as an academic, social, or spiritual entity
3 : grounds that resemble a campus

I wonder when definition 3 came into use.  Anyway, ConAgra is a major employer here.   They are a major purveyor of packaged foods in the US, but they did withdraw advertising from the Glen Beck show,  but one could ask why they were advertising with him in the first place.  Probably because that was a good audience for them.

 Soon we were walking along the river on this warm, but very windy evening.

This is the pedestrian bridge across the Missouri River into Iowa.

This sign told not only of the good things the dams built along the Missouri did (stopped flooding downstream), but also the serious negative impacts (such as 51 of 67 native Missouri River fish are now rare, reduced in numbers, and in one case endangered). That's not something common in such public signage. 

The Missouri River from the bridge.

And into Iowa.