From email from Gigi Richard:
Our next presentation in the Fall 2010 Natural Resources of the West: Water seminar series a project of the Water Center at Mesa State College will be…
Mon 6 December, 4:00 pm
Saccomanno Lecture Hall, Wubben Science Building , Room 141 (WS 141)
Mesa State CollegeRunning Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River
Jon Waterman
Author and National Geographic Freshwater HeroIn the spring of 2008, Jonathan Waterman, a National Geographic Society grantee, Sonoran Institute Fellow, and an award-winning author, began a journey by foot and boat down the iconic mother of all western American rivers, the Colorado. Standing at over 10,000 feet in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, he emptied his mother’s ashes into the headwaters and began a journey by foot and boat down the river, all the way to its last trickle in the Sonoran desert and down the parched Mexican delta to the Pacific Ocean. It would be the first time anyone had ever traveled from these headwaters 1,450-miles to Gulf of California and it would be a compelling, complicated, and hugely informative journey.
As part of his Colorado River Project, Waterman has undertaken a lecture campaign throughout the west to educate the public about the river’s challenges in times of climate change and population growth. He also chronicles his experience and the river in his new narrative book,Running Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River, a photo book, The Colorado River: Flowing through Conflict, and a National Geographic ColoradoRiver BasinWall Map. The Colorado, sometimes called the American Nile, supplies water for 30 million people and more than 3 million farm acres, across 7 western states and northern Mexico. But the demands made on the river have put its very future at stake. The river has not reached the sea for many years. It is the lifeblood of the American West, and as its waters dip to an all-time low, the economy, wildlife, people, and very landscape of this vast region are in jeopardy.
Mr. Waterman’s talk is presented with the generous support and funding of: The Water Center at Mesa State, Mesa State College’s Lectures and Forums Committee; The Land Policy Institute at Mesa State College; Mesa State College’s Academic Affairs Office; and the Grand Valley Audubon Society.
Seminars are free and open to the public, no registration necessary.
For the entire seminar series schedule, please see:
http://home.mesastate.edu/~grichard/WSS/Seminar2010.html
For more information please contact:
Prof. Gigi Richard, 970.248.1689, grichard@mesastate.edu
Prof. Tamera Minnick, 970.248.1663, tminnick@mesastate.edu
More coverage from the Grand Junction Free Press (Sharon Sullivan).
More Colorado River Basin coverage here.