Related On-the-Ground Events: Design School for Regenerating the Earth Travels the Colorado River Basin
May 23rd - June 4th
Design School for Regenerating the Earth
Joe Brewer, Penny Heiple, and Benji Ross from Design School for Regenerating the Earth are going to be hosting in-person, open discusions with communities along the Colorado River Basin. While these are not ProSocial World events, these talks will heavily feature ways to weave ProSocial into bioregional work and we encourage members of our community to join in the conversation. These events will also offer opportunities for members to meet in person!
Follow along with updates about this journey here.
A message from Joe Brewer:
The Colorado River is probably the most conflicted and challenging body of water in the world. It has a vast networks of dams to control its water flows and generate electricity or food for 30 million human inhabitants. Textbooks present this incredible river system as the standard example for how NOT to manage a river.
It was famously divided into promised volumes of water to different states during a record decade of high precipitation. This means it is over allocated and has been since the 1950s. Water no longer drains into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
Our route from the headwaters to the sea ends along the Gila River in Arizona
We will be following a route along the Colorado River over a two-week period -- giving talks and workshops where local people invite us into their towns and visiting sacred sites along the way.
Departing from Barichara on May 19th, we'll fly into Colorado and make preparations in Boulder. Then we'll begin the real trek on May 21st by going to the official headwaters of the Colorado River in Rocky Mountain National Park near Granby.
After that we have invitations to give talks and workshops in Paonia (May 23rd), Carbondale (May 24th), and Grand Junction (May 25th). Then we'll go off into the sacred landscapes of Utah and Arizona for a full week -- making on stop with a community in Cortez -- and tracking the course of the river where it is possible to do so.
Our arrival in Mexicali on June 1st begins another wave of talks and workshops in Baja, California. We have been honored by the Cucopá tribe to visit their ancestral lands where the mouth of this majestic river no longer empties into the Sea of Cortez.
On June 3rd, we'll continue on to Superior, Arizona, to experience the lower basin where waters drain into the Gila River before emptying again into the Colorado. Here we will give talks and workshops once more on June 3rd and 4th.
Then on the 5th of June, Joe will fly back to Barichara while Penny and Benji return to Colorado.
Onward, fellow humans.