yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Restoring Flows to Depleted Ecosystems | Breakthrough


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

My work is really around a campaign called "Changed the Course," which is about getting the public engaged in freshwater conservation and beginning to figure out how we can restore flows of water to depleted rivers, wetlands, and freshwater ecosystems. We're piloting this in the Colorado River Basin, which is one of the most water-stressed river basins in North America.

One of the most exciting moments of my life professionally has been bringing the Colorado River back to the sea, which happened for the first time in many, many years last year. I first went to the Delta in 1996, and what you see there, except for a few patches, is a very desiccated place. You know, I had read about the Delta before all the dams and diversions, how it was this incredibly beautiful, lush, vibrant, alive ecosystem. With all the damming and diverting of the water upstream, that Delta had just dried up.

Thanks to so much hard work by conservation groups and officials on both sides of the border, this agreement was signed a couple of years ago saying we're going to give some water back to the Delta. It's a very small amount, but last spring, on March 23rd, the gates at Morelos Dam, the last dam on the Colorado River, went up. For the first time in many years, water began to flow through the channel of the Colorado River back toward the sea. Just a tiny bit of water actually reached the sea, but it was such a symbolic, very important event to have a river actually meet the sea again.

If a river is born with the destiny, it's to reach the sea, and the Colorado hasn't been able to realize its destiny in most years for a long, long time. It just blew me away because you would try to find where the leading edge of the river was going to be on a given morning, and you'd look up, and almost like a mirage, you know, you would see the river start to come towards you. Suddenly, your feet are getting wet, and all of a sudden, the channel is filling. It was just amazing to see.

Here we are in this town called San Luis Río Colorado, and there were little kids swimming and playing. These kids had never seen the river that had given their town its name. Then, just on the science, I watched life come back. You know, you can see these micro crustaceans called copepods that had been dormant in the sands of the channel for a decade or more, and then with the water, they come back to life. Nature is very resilient. If we can add some water back, life will come back.

To me, that's one of the most inspiring things about this: it looks like we've dammed and diverted; the river is no more, the Delta has dried up. But in fact, if we choose to, we can begin to bring these ecosystems back.

More Articles

View All
Visual representations of decimal multiplication
So we have here on this number line that we’ve now marked off with the tenths, and you can see that this is three tenths. Here we can think about this as a multiplication of a decimal. And so what is this representing? I’ll give you a hint: it’s represent…
Serfs and manorialism | World History | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we already talked about the feudal system. How you can have a king, and then you might have some vassals of the king who give an oath of fealty to the king in the homage ceremony. You might have a duke, and you could keep going down t…
Mark Zuckerberg : How to Build the Future
Welcome to How to Build the Future Today. Our guest is Mark Zuckerberg. Uh, Mark, you have built one of the most influential companies in the history of the world, so we are especially excited that you are here. I’m not sure where to go from there. Um, wh…
Finding mistakes in one-step equations | 6th grade | Khan Academy
We’re told that Lisa tried to solve an equation: see, 42 is equal to 6a, or 6 times a. Then we can see her steps here, and they say where did Lisa make her first mistake. So pause this video and see if you can figure that out. It might be possible she mad…
Mild and medium tension | Forces and Newton's laws of motion | Physics | Khan Academy
You bought a huge canister aluminum can of super hot red peppers, 3 Kg worth, and you hung them from two strings from the ceiling ‘cause you don’t want anyone to get your super hot red peppers. You wanted to know what’s the tension in both of these string…
Lewis diagrams for molecules | Chemistry | Khan Academy
Let’s draw LS draw structures for certain molecules. It’s a lot of fun to do that. Okay, now the first thing we need to do to draw these structures is to identify the number of valence electrons. Okay, and we’ve talked about these valence electrons in ou…