Restoring Flows to Depleted Ecosystems | Breakthrough

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.