My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Farmers are shifting to crops that require less irrigation.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

Cities like Las Vegas are becoming more water efficient. Compelled by climate change, water users are sharing technology and expertise. Lately, however, that rivalry is turning to cooperation. That system fostered enduring mistrust among different interest groups competing for water to grow crops, protect fish, and irrigate urban growth across desert landscapes. Water rights on the Colorado River are governed by laws established in 1922 and revised over the years to balance allocations state by state from the headwaters to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. We find trust when we see that our interests are aligned.” “If we can keep coming back to shared values – a sustainable river system, vibrant cities, a healthy river, sustaining agriculture – we should be able to come together and find solutions. “We need to remember that everyone is struggling with this – everyone is hurting in this region right now,” says Taylor Hawes, The Nature Conservancy’s Colorado River program director. Environmentalists, farmers, city planners, and tribal nations are learning that sustaining this vital, renewable resource depends as much on trust as rainfall. They may soon not be able to generate hydropower.įaced with this widespread extremity, the historically adversarial stakeholders in the Colorado River basin are starting to demonstrate something else that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded: that “diverse forms of knowledge such as scientific as well as Indigenous knowledge and local knowledge” provide a strong shared basis for reducing the effects of human-induced climate change. The nation’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, have reached historic lows. After the driest 22 years on record, the Colorado River system, which sustains more than 40 million people across seven states and northern Mexico, is severely strained. That report followed a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in February finding that the southwestern region of North America is experiencing the longest megadrought in 1,200 years. Just the day before an international panel of scientific experts released an assessment of the impact of human activity on climate that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called “a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Joe Biden made only a passing reference to “the devastating effects of the climate crisis.” His lack of urgency on the issue was hard to miss.

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