The Great Plains Environmental Law Center provides legal and environmental education resources to those in Nebraska and surrounding states in order to improve and protect our environment.

The Great Plains Environmental Law Center (GPELC) is a 501(c)(3) community-based nonprofit, whose purpose is to provide resources to communities and individuals in the Midwest in their attempts to safeguard their homes and environment. Our educational resources include explanations of environmental laws without the legal jargon, information about public information—what it is, what you are entitled to, and where to find it—and fact sheets about types of development, causes of environmental degradation, and the financial effects of sustainable and unsustainable development. Our legal resources are a network of cooperating attorneys who are well-versed in environmental law and familiar with the types of cases that are generally brought forth in the Great Plains.

At GPELC, our first priority is to provide communities with the background information and additional resources they can use to protect their environment. As communities work to protect themselves, GPELC works to make environmental justice a reality for the state of Nebraska and the Great Plains region. We do this by holding public agencies accountable to their promises and the laws created to protect us and our environment, and by developing and implementing projects that continue to educate the public about their environmental rights.

Purpose

Since 2002, the Great Plains Environmental Law Center has assisted and advocated for communities in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming, Ohio, and New Mexico concerned with the quality of the environment and natural places. In all of our work, we have been guided by the fundamental principle that communities should have access to the assistance they need to be on an equal footing with developers and others who influence public policy. Some of our recent community-driven successes include:

Stopping a mega-dairy in rural Nebraska

Successful challenge of two industrial hog farms in rural Nebraska

Improvement in the Public Meetings Law for citizen participation