Nancy Jackson is the Executive Director of the Climate & Energy Project (CEP) of The Land Institute. CEP’s purpose is to deploy energy efficiency and renewable energy, especially wind, across Kansas and the Midwest.

Jackson represents Kansas on the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord advisory group, charged with designing a regional cap-and-trade system. She has supported ambitious scope and targets and pragmatic means, including agricultural offsets. Jackson was also appointed to the Kansas Energy and Environmental Policy advisory group, an eighteen-month stakeholder process to identify and recommend economy-friendly means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Kansas; she serves on the Energy Supply technical work group. Jackson also serves on the Kansas Wind Working Group.

CEP’s key programs include:

* The Blue Green Alliance. Labor and environmental groups collaborate with community and technical colleges to improve workforce development and with the Department of Commerce and the American Wind Energy Association to identify and assist the growth of renewable energy manufacturing companies.

* Kansas Interfaith Power & Light. Member churches sign a covenant wherein they agree to pursue an energy audits and efficiency improvements, and purchase renewable energy for their sanctuary, and to speak with their congregants about the moral imperative of addressing climate change.

* The Take Charge Challenge. A friendly contest among six Kansas communities – rural and urban, large and small – to reduce electric use the most over one year. Working closely with our utility partners and civic organizations from the Boy Scouts to the League of Women Voters, from the Chamber of Commerce to Agricultural Extension, schools to churches, we are making energy efficiency a community affair, and refiguring conservation from “sacrifice” to “win.”

Jackson has an extensive background in the nonprofit and university sectors. She holds an MA in environmental history from the University of Kansas and for more than a decade commissioned and edited award-winning scholarly books on American culture, history of the American West, and the development of Western resources, including agriculture, forestry, mining, and tourism. Prior to joining CEP, she served as Development Director for the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. Jackson began her career in corporate finance and equities research.

Nancy Jackson lives with her husband and two young daughters – along with several longhorn cattle, friendly chickens, and two dirty dogs – on the banks of the Kansas River not fifteen miles from Blackjack Woods where her children’s great-great-great-grandfather homesteaded and fought in one of the first battles of the Civil War.

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