For nearly 20 years, local photographer Pete McBride has documented environmental changes in the Colorado River watershed.
On foot, in boats and in airplanes, McBride has followed the river from its source in the Rocky Mountains, to its end in a parched delta in Mexico.
His latest book, out March 26, revisits that work and pairs it with essays and detailed captions about the growing demand and shrinking supply of the river, expanding on a collection McBride published in 2010. The new edition includes passages by New Yorker journalist Nick Paumgarten and “The Emerald Mile” author Kevin Fedarko, both of whom have joined McBride on some of his adventures through the basin.
McBride said he hopes the book will raise awareness about the Colorado River crisis amid the basin’s driest period in 1,200 years.
“We're in our third decade of drought, enhanced by climate change, more straws in the drink, … and now nobody wants to give their rights back,” McBride told Aspen Public Radio last week. “We're in a constant kind of political policy debate and discussion (about) how the river’s allocated”
Many photos in the book document the sprawling human impact on natural places: There are towering dams to contain water in reservoirs, fluorescent-orange ponds next to mining sites and fields of irrigated agriculture surrounded by arid plains.
But there are also scenes of untouched natural beauty, like golden aspens amid snow-capped peaks and rusty red canyons leading to green desert oases.
“What I'm often trying to do is bring beauty to very challenging subject matter in the hope that art will … lure us back into looking at it and then learning more,” McBride said.
McBride spoke with reporter Kaya Williams about the book, titled “The Colorado River: Chasing Water,” as well as what he’s learned over the last two decades. The interview has been edited for clarity and length; you can hear their conversation using the “listen” link above, or read a transcript below.
McBride will also be at the Wheeler Opera House on Wednesday with writer Kevin Fedarko. They’ll be recounting their 750-mile journey on foot from end to end of the Grand Canyon. The adventure was the basis for another one of McBride’s books, “The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim.”
Kaya Williams: You’ve photographed from great heights. You’ve also spent a considerable amount of time in the depths of the watershed. How has that affected your perspective, to see things from both very far above and very deep within this system?
Pete McBride: I think the aerial perspective is great, because it gives us a sense of how much of a lifeline, how much of a ribbon of life this river is. You get a little above it. You see where we've been, where we haven't been. I think that's a very valuable tool.
But I've also spent many, many months, years, kind of crawling around through the nooks and crannies of this entire system. I've hiked the entire length of the Grand Canyon with a fellow friend and writer who wrote the introduction for this book, Kevin Fedarko. We had to find our water every day, and when you have to find a gallon of water every day to survive when you're in the desert, it really puts things in perspective of how valuable water is.
And I think on many fronts, we've lost touch with how valuable this limited resource is. And I think when we ask too much of it, frankly, it just disappears. And we're seeing that before our eyes.
Williams: You and I were talking a little bit earlier about, you know, water policy negotiations and things like that. There are more abstract elements of how we actually get water to our taps. Do you think that these photographs and the practice of photographing our rivers and snowpack have made you think differently about those harder-to-grasp ideas of water management?
McBride: I think it's just made me stand on the front lines of the crisis. We are in a water crisis in the Southwest. Really fresh water is — people are seeing crisis all over the world, frankly. And so to go stand at the end of the Colorado River, where it kind of turns into what looks like a frappuccino pit full of plastic bottles, and then (to see it) dry up into a cracked vast nothingness, which once was the largest desert estuary in North America — to see that change and be right in the front lines makes me realize that this is more of an imminent pressing challenge than we often think.
Problem is our taps constantly flow. And people don't think about this as much as we should.
Williams: And do you think that photography and more broadly, art about the watershed can help more people understand this?
McBride: Well, I'm hopeful it will. It's hard to say. We're saturated in imagery these days. But I think storytelling is still critically important. And really, at the end of the day, this is a crisis of the river, but more importantly, it's a crisis of us. And we need to have stories about how we're doing things maybe inaccurately and understand and raise our awareness. And story, through word, through film, through still images, I still think has the power to heighten awareness and make us rethink things.
Williams: There was a great talk you did with conservationist Kris Tompkins a couple years ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival. And she said during that talk — someone had asked you know, what's giving you hope? And I think the phrase was, “hope has to be earned.” I'm curious if that's a phrase that resonates with you and what your perspective is on hope in the midst of a crisis?
McBride: I love that term so much I’ve adopted it, “earned hope.” It's basically — I have hope when we have action. And I've seen that throughout the Colorado River system. I've seen that with Native tribes that have gone up against you know, David and Goliath scenarios, a handful of Navajo grandmothers fighting billion dollar developments. I've seen individuals stand up to what they believe in with action and, and find success, some level of success. And to me, that defines hope.
Williams: As you've reflected on the last 20 years of photographing this watershed, what has surprised you the most?
McBride: What surprised me at first when I started this is how unaware I was. And I — consider that I grew up on the Colorado River system. I learned to swim in this river basically. I didn't know that the river didn't reach the ocean. I grew up with the belief that all rivers do. The Colorado River did for 6 million years and it stopped in the late ‘90s. That was number one. The question was, “Why were we not talking about this more?”
Number two is the level of apathy, how few pay attention and how we seem to care less, our attention spans are shorter. We're more concerned with our social media likes than we are with our natural systems that sustain us.
But the last one, what surprised me is there are moments of remarkable earned hope, people standing up for what they believe in and making differences. And sometimes it's just a handful of people that do that.
Williams: What do you think it will take to get more people to care to address the apathy problem?
McBride: Back to story, I think we need more story to connect us to make us realize and fall in love with these places. We protect what we love.
I think we need to rethink how we consider our backyards, our wildernesses, our national parks. We need to change them from being commodities, to more, kind of, conserved areas that really sustain us, that we cherish. And that goes from water to silence to night sky — something that all religions in the world, incidentally, revere. I think we need to start thinking of these places more as our outdoor cathedrals.
