The Secret Lives of Parks

The Beauty of Loss

Episode Summary

Photojournalist Pete McBride spent nearly 20 years returning to the Colorado River again and again to document its magnificence — and its decline. In his new book, McBride shows the effects decades of drought and overuse have had on the river, and he offers ways to help it heal.

Episode Notes

The Colorado River flows through some of the most spectacular landscapes in the Southwest, provides drinking water to more than 40 million people, and is one of the most important sources of water for U.S. agriculture. But access to the river has never been fair, and now, water levels are at historic lows after decades of extreme drought.

Photojournalist and visual storyteller Pete McBride has photographed every mile of the river over nearly 20 years of reporting and exploration. This episode, McBride speaks with host Jennifer Errick about his new book, “The Colorado River: Chasing Water,” and how he sought to capture not just the magnificence of the river but its “lost, dead beauty.” Despite the complexity of the crisis, he shares ideas for solutions — and reasons for hope.

The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Episode 28, The Beauty of Loss, was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.

Special thanks to National Parks magazine Editor-in-Chief Rona Marech, NPCA Southwest Regional Director Ernie Atencio and NPCA Southwest Associate Director Erika Pollard.

Original theme music by Chad Fischer.

Learn more about Pete McBride’s book, “The Colorado River: Chasing Water,” at rizzoliusa.com/book/9780847899746

See a selection of McBride’s photos in the new Spring issue of National Parks magazine at npca.org/magazine. Subscribe to our award-winning magazine at npca.org/subscribe

Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org

For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.

And we’re proud of it, too.

You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org

Episode Transcription

The Secret Lives of Parks

Episode 28
The Beauty of Loss

Jennifer Errick: Photojournalist Pete McBride spent nearly 20 years returning to the Colorado River to document its magnificence — and its decline. From its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains, to its final drops in a Mexican delta, the river offered him countless scenes of wonder and despair.

In his new book, McBride wants people to see the effects decades of drought and overuse have had on the river and how to help it heal. I'm Jennifer Errick and this is the Secret Lives of Parks.

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But access to the river has never been fair, and now, as water levels are at historic lows after decades of extreme drought, climate change and years of overuse are forcing the Colorado River into a worsening state of crisis. The people who depend on this water have been saying for years, with increasing alarm, that business can't go on as usual.

It can be really challenging to talk about the dire conditions along this river. For one thing, the threats are as complicated as they are severe. The river's water is governed by an arcane patchwork of regulations going back more than a century and involving seven US states, two Mexican states, and 30 tribes. The confusing nature of water rights and the widespread effects water shortages have had throughout the river system are just staggering to grasp.

And it's also depressing. Here is one of the most majestic, storied rivers in the history of the continent, flowing through 10 of the country's most picturesque national park sites, and over the past century, human use has driven it to a state of near collapse.

Pete McBride: It flowed to the sea for 6 million years, and it has not reached the Gulf of California naturally since the late ’90s. That delta, once the largest estuary in North America, is basically almost entirely dry. And I was blown away, I was amazed, that this river, this architect of the Grand Canyon, lifeline of the Southwest — we had run it dry in my lifetime.

Jennifer Errick: That's photojournalist and visual storyteller Pete McBride, who just released a book called, “The Colorado River: Chasing Water.” This hefty collection of photographs and reflections is the culmination of many years of reporting.

In it he writes, "In nearly two decades spent exploring the Colorado, I've hiked, paddled, floated, flown, and daydreamed across every mile of the river's main stem, and documented nearly every one of its tributaries, diversions, dams, and major ditches and dilemmas. I've made hundreds of thousands of images of the river, in all its shapes and sizes, trying to capture both the beauty and the mind-boggling, heartbreaking change."

The book contrasts images of vast natural landscapes, charismatic wildlife, and rushing waters with those of mines, plastic pollution, and industrial farming operations. Regardless of whether McBride has his lens trained on a snow-capped mountain or a highway overpass, he finds awe in what the river offers him.

Pete McBride: There's an artistic beauty that I think will hold people's eye and attention a little bit, but then they dig deeper, they're going to pick up another lesson from it. It's not just normal beauty. It's sort of a lost, dead beauty.

Jennifer Errick: The book is arranged in three sections, from the headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the canyons of the desert Southwest to the Colorado River delta, where the river abruptly ends. Readers can feel how the river changes as it moves downstream to its last drops in an arid landscape McBride describes as "a cracked-earth ghost of its former self."

Pete McBride: I was trying to bring beauty to challenging subjects. How do you make drought beautiful?

Jennifer Errick: McBride grew up near the river's headwaters but didn't intend to spend so much of his life photographing and advocating for it.

Pete McBride: I don't think when I was a boy I realized that I was connected to this river, but I grew up in the heart of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. And as a young boy was following my father and friends up 14,000-foot peaks, which is of course the headwaters of this river. And I think it gave me a huge appreciation of the outdoors without realizing it.

Jennifer Errick: He started his career as a photojournalist working on assignments around the world for outlets such as National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine. But by 2007, his adventures had taken a toll on him. He was sidelined with illness, and he wasn't sure what to do next. So, he went home to regroup.

Pete McBride: My father, he's been a lifelong pilot, and he flies a single engine tail dragger, and so we went up for a flight and he's always kind of trying to get me back home and he is like, "Why don't you do a project back here? It's getting drier and water's becoming more of an issue everywhere." And I think he was really just trying to get his son back to Colorado. I realized it, I was like, "Wow, you're right. I could do a story here."

Jennifer Errick: Once McBride started focusing his attention and his camera lens on the river, the depth of material became obvious.

Pete McBride: I realized that this was way bigger of a story than just a two-week magazine assignment.

Jennifer Errick: Every time McBride covered one issue, he told me, it would reveal a new layer of the larger story underneath, so he kept returning for another piece of the puzzle.

Pete McBride: I wanted to cover the river on all of its big angles, but each time you do one story that kind of reveals layers underneath it. It's a multifaceted river with a lot of history. And so that would lead to more stories and that's why I kept coming back. And it often felt like the river in its own way would call me back. I'd be like, "I'm done with telling this story." And sure enough, I'd be on another expedition walking through its deep time slot canyons and so forth.

Jennifer Errick: One of the bigger adventures McBride took with his friend and fellow writer Kevin Fedarko, was a 71 day hike in 2015 along the 277 mile stretch of the river that flows through the Grand Canyon. McBride wanted to draw attention to the park during a time when several destructive commercial projects were threatening the South Rim and its water supply. Following these 277 river miles required the two men to hike about 800 miles on land carrying their equipment up to 15 miles a day in the desert heat.

Pete McBride: In order to walk it, and why it took so many miles, is every time you come to a tributary, that tributary could go 30 miles from the south or to the north. We'd have to walk around it because it's a 2000 vertical foot sheer cliff down. And you'd be like, "Oh boy." So we have to walk, it felt like another republic to the south, and then you have to walk back to the river. And you can't follow the shoreline of the river because much of it, it gets too cliffy. So although we're walking ostensibly the Colorado River, we're sometimes staring 3000 vertical feet down at it below us. We have no access to it.

Jennifer Errick: Ironically, the biggest challenge was finding water.

Pete McBride: We did have to find, on average, a gallon of water a day. And that became the most stressful thing of the whole project. We were scaling cliffs and rappelling. And it wasn't rattlesnakes, it wasn't feeling like we're getting followed by mountain lions, which at times it felt like we were. It wasn't that. It was this constant nag like, "Where are we going to find water?" Which is really profound on so many levels. The average American family household consumes 300 gallons of water a day. And so when you have to find your one gallon of water a day to survive, it puts it in perspective, and then you start understanding how water is free, but the delivery of water is not.

Jennifer Errick: The hike, while physically grueling, was a novel way to capture one of the most photographed rivers in the country. Another approach he took was collaborating with his favorite pilot to view it from above.

Pete McBride: I was trying to find new angles, new perspectives on many landscapes that have been photographed endlessly, especially in our national parks. So the aerial perspective is one. I also had the great advantage of knowing this older, cantankerous, but very funny bush pilot, who is my father. I paid for his expenses and he donated his time and we had this great reconnection, this father-son moment.

Jennifer Errick: The book's aerial images bring a sense of scale to these grand landscapes, from verdant river valleys, to herds of animals migrating across open fields, to dramatic views of the Hoover Dam, surrounded by telltale rings along the walls of Lake Mead marking how significantly water levels have dropped in recent years. All the time in the air with his father also added an emotional component for McBride.

Pete McBride: My father is in the winter of his life. And he was born just after they built the Hoover Dam in 1935. And so his life has kind of spanned the entire kind of infrastructure development around this river, and now we've forced the river into the winter of its life, so to speak. So there's this poetic parallel that I find amazing.

Jennifer Errick: Some of the most moving images are in the final third of the book, in the parched delta where the flow of water abruptly ends. In 2014, McBride and two of his friends became the last people to paddle the Colorado River all the way to the sea, during a restoration effort known as a pulse flow when water was released from a nearby dam over a period of eight weeks.

Pete McBride: The ecological memory of that place rebounded in the nanosecond, it snapped back to life. And that was really powerful because it made me realize just we live in our human time, but nature lives on a different time scale and natural systems can patiently wait. It had been 20 years since there'd been a pulse of water like that, and suddenly there's microbes swimming in the water, and then the birds follow, and then there was immediately fish and then the coyotes are howling. And that reminded me how small we are in the scheme of the natural order, even though we have obviously a huge impact.

Jennifer Errick: In the book, McBride features this pulse flow alongside the reality of what this dried earth looks like now.

Pete McBride: There is an image of my friend John Waterman paddling in what looks like, I describe it as a Frappuccino pit, full of like brothy muck and plastic bottles and fertilizer contaminants and I think raw sewage even. It was not pleasant. And naively, we had been paddling in pack rafts and I was like, "Wow, we're going to actually paddle our way through some of this delta." I'd heard it had been drying up. I didn't really know. We'd just crossed the border officially. And we're in the Frappuccino pit, and I was like, "What has just happened?" And the river just fizzles and that's it. And we looked at it, and we're like, "I guess we're walking."

That's where it really hit me, kind of all four chambers of my heart. I was like, "Oh my goodness, I had no idea."

Jennifer Errick: I had a visceral response looking at McBride's photograph of the polluted puddle where the river goes dry, miles before reaching the ocean. According to McBride, the crisis may be most visible here, at the end, but the entire river system is affected by this severe shortage of water, even where there is an illusion of abundance.

Pete McBride: We're delivering water to all these cities and ranches and farms. It's very sophisticated and it's made it seem like water is everywhere and we can take it for granted, but it is our greatest limited resource, natural resource. And as the Colorado River exhibits so profoundly, when you ask too much of it, it disappears.

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Jennifer Errick: How did the crisis on the Colorado River get this severe? Experts trace the dysfunctional management of the river back to the first formal agreement governing its use, the Colorado River Compact of 1922. This agreement, negotiated between seven US states, defined how the river's water would be allocated, but it was based on faulty information from the get-go.

Pete McBride: We used data that was not accurate because the data they used was on a hundred-year flood basically. So we started out with this concept that the river has much more water than it does, but we have allocated in such a way that everyone gets the same amount. We're not allocating by percentage. So as the river dwindles, everyone's still taking the same amount of water as if it's flowing like it did in 1900. And now the river's flowing at roughly 20% less.

Jennifer Errick: These water allocations are granted on a “use it or lose it” basis, encouraging people to take water they don't need to maintain their water rights the following year. In the introduction to the book, McBride's friend Kevin Fedarko, the adventurer who hiked the Grand Canyon with him writes:

"No river in the Western Hemisphere is more rigorously controlled, more stringently regulated, or more heavily litigated than the Colorado. And none has been exploited so ruthlessly that according to the Bureau of Reclamation, every drop of water is used and reused up to 17 times before the river dries up and dies in the Sonoran Desert south of the border."

According to McBride, the various compacts and regulations also shortchange stakeholders, including members of the many tribes who have lived along the river for generations.

Pete McBride: There are 30 Native American Tribes that have water rights to the Colorado River, which actually amounts to about 20% of the river's flow. Like so many historic promises with Tribal treaties that we signed, they're empty. We're like, "We'll give you water, but we're never going to get water up to you."

Again, water's free, the transportation of it is not. So, bringing the Tribal voice back to the table and giving them a say in how that water is used and giving them rights and access is important. That's happening in pockets, but there's a long way to go there.

Jennifer Errick: Meanwhile, agricultural operations use up most of the river. And many water-intensive crops are shipped overseas as animal feed.

Pete McBride: Because water's becoming so limited and so challenged around the globe, other countries, Saudi Arabia, China, they're buying our alfalfa at 3x the price and exporting it in those Amazon containers that have typically been going back empty. So, they're just taking advantage of loopholes in our own policy. We've let our ag water be very accessible and very affordable.

Jennifer Errick: It's a situation McBride finds sadly ironic.

Pete McBride: 70-plus percent of the river — in the Lower Basin, it's much more like 80% — goes to agriculture, of which most of that agriculture is actually forage crops. So, while on one hand, we're living in drought, in the driest, hottest times we've ever had around this river, on the other hand, we're exporting that water overseas in the form of hay.

Jennifer Errick: Alongside his images of industrial agriculture, McBride also shares solutions, including paying farmers not to use water without losing future water rights. McBride also wants agreements governing the river to allocate water by percentages of the total flow rather than fixed amounts, so states can't take more than the river can give, especially in drought years. And he supports disincentives such as tariffs levied against companies that export water overseas in the form of forage crops.

Pete McBride: Yes, we need to eat, and we want to have baby spinach in January, and if you live in New York City, even that's coming from the Colorado River Basin. But we need to do smart ag. We can't just be growing cash crops.

Jennifer Errick: He believes an important component to better management is having more people involved.

Pete McBride: We need to make it easier, and we need a greater leadership pool, better dialogue, better leadership that's inclusive of everybody at the table. And not just inclusive for the interest of user groups that are already there, for instance, agriculture, energy, municipalities.

Jennifer Errick: McBride believes that environmental organizations are an important part of the conversation, and he praises his partners, the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Grand Canyon Conservancy that helped him publish his book. The National Parks Conservation Association is in the process of building a campaign to protect the 10 parks dependent on the Colorado River as they adapt to a changing climate and an over-allocated water supply.

Pete McBride: These groups, I think we need to support these groups more than ever with these situations, because they bring the river's voice back to the table.

Jennifer Errick: Despite how entrenched these problems are McBride finds reasons for hope, from the remarkable comeback he witnessed during the pulse flow he paddled in 2014 to examples of creative collaboration and problem-solving.

Pete McBride: Nature can rebound. It is resilient. The river is resilient. And I think we've spent the better part of the last half century kind of engineering our way to use this river to get water to other places and now we're starting to learn that, well, we can still do that, but we can be more efficient. And so our engineering is now moving towards efficiencies. I think combining efficiencies with more collaborative approaches, I think there is actually hope, and I don't say hope in kind of the fuzzy feel-good way. I mean actually earned hope where you go out and see change.

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Jennifer Errick: I feel compelled to ask Pete McBride if he has a favorite photo in his new collection, and his response is only fair.

Pete McBride: Well, that's a toughie. That's a toughie. I'm going to cheat a little bit. I'm going to give you two.

Jennifer Errick: First, he mentions an image of a rare double-oxbow formation featured on the book's cover — two bends in the river that sit side by side at Canyonlands National Park in Utah.

Pete McBride: Double oxbows of this size and scale, this is in Canyonlands National Park, are very rare. I haven't seen very many of this scope. There's some others in the Colorado River Basin, some oxbows like this that are magical, but this one is special because I took it at the first crack whisper of sunlight and it's an aerial picture and I took it with my father. He'll be 86 when this book comes out. My father still flies occasionally, but we will not be able to do a flight like that again.

Jennifer Errick: His other favorite was taken near the delta in Mexico and shows dry, vein-like patterns carved in the dirt and encrusted with salt from the high tide, "Like fingers," the caption reads, "reaching for an old friend."

Pete McBride: It has this kind of elegance that I love because it's abstract and it's artistic and there's a lot of story behind it, and it's just really, to me, shows in some ways not only the beauty of nature, but the resiliency and just the amazing artistic work of maybe our greatest artist, which is Mother Nature.

Jennifer Errick: Ultimately, these photos create a feeling of engagement between the reader and the river that McBride finds key. As McBride writes in the book:

"By showcasing our abuses of this marvel, perhaps we can push back on apathy, one of the greatest threats to the river, which can seep into the system and erode it even more. If we can do that, maybe we can find the will to cherish and protect the river in more than just a few iconic pockets."

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