Catching Up With Nathan Fey About America’s Most Endangered River
Whether home is a major city, remote ranch or somewhere in between, nature is essential to our lives. Our health and well-being depend on healthy environments, both urban and rural. From walks in the park to epic adventures, we revel in the American West’s natural beauty—and we’re also fully aware of the many forces at play that threaten our home. Climate change fuels historic drought, record-breaking heat and destructive wildfires. Industry extracts and exploits dwindling natural resources. Nowhere is that more clear than where we’ve dug our roots in deep, right here in the Colorado Basin.
Last week, the Biden Administration announced a series of alternatives for operations on the Colorado River, moving one step closer to imposing unprecedented cuts in how water users interact with this lifeline in the West. And this week, our Mighty Partner, American Rivers named the Colorado River’s Grand Canyon America’s Most Endangered River.
We caught up with Nathan Fey, Mighty Arrow’s Land & Water Program Director, to talk about it.
American Rivers just named the Colorado River’s Grand Canyon America's Most Endangered River because of threats climate change and outdated water management. What does this news mean to you? What is your response?
(Nathan Fey) The Grand Canyon holds the imagination of everyone, whether you’ve visited by foot, boat, or vehicle, or whether you’ve only seen images of its impressive rapids, beaches, and towering stair-stepped plateaus. For anyone, the Grand Canyon presents us the power of water on the land, over millennia—it shows us how water and rock dance together, eroding into critical habitat for fish and wildlife and rare plants, and creating landforms that humble and excite. It is difficult to witness the enormous power of the Colorado River decline due to mismanagement, exacerbated by the aridification of the Southwest. I am deeply concerned about the future if we lose these great places where nature remains dynamic, and this is a real possibility for the Grand, which has been sporadically lethargic for too long. We must take action to protect the Colorado River from being pushed to the brink and becoming incapable of sustaining the great Southwest and our collective psyche.
Photo Credit @Michael Quinn, Grand Canyon National Park
The Grand Canyon has been a sacred place and home to Indigenous Tribes since time immemorial, it is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, a treasured national park and iconic recreation and travel destination. If a place this renowned and beloved—the Grand Canyon—can be pushed to the brink, what does that mean for the future of the West?
(Nathan Fey) I wonder myself, is this the moment where we must sacrifice the Grand Canyon in order to save the West? This report underscores for me how past policies and ethics toward our natural resources—especially water in the West—have failed to account for scarcity. We’ve failed to fully account for the sacred places and systems that define the West. Now, in an effort to stand-up a man-made system of control and delivery of water that was built on failed math, we stand to lose one of our greatest national wonders. Losing the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River will decimate economies and ecosystems throughout the region. With this in mind, will the future of the West look like we just pulled the keystone from the castle wall, and everything will come crumbling down?
With Mighty Arrow, we deal in resilience and in tackling daunting challenges just like this, and climate change is at the crux of your work with Land & Water Stewardship. How does this inform your work? Are there any projects you'd like to point to as bringing innovative solutions to this changing landscape?
The climate conversation is at the crux of nearly everything we are working on at Mighty Arrow—we believe that climate change is the most urgent issue that we face as a society. Yes, there is a clear nexus between climate and our Land Conservation and Water Stewardship strategies, where our actions aim to protect landscapes and natural systems that draw down carbon and protect the air we breathe and the water we drink. Climate is central to our work in food systems and social justice as well, where we are supporting cross-sector efforts to upgrade agriculture infrastructure, or advance regenerative practices that improve soil health and reduce water consumption. We’re also helping to increase access to more resilient crop alternatives and new market pathways—especially for historically marginalized communities. We are responding to the climate crisis across sectors and with the understanding that solutions must strengthen our communities and the natural world.
Going back to climate change within our Land and Water portfolio, we are deeply investing in natural climate solutions such as forest health, wildfire resilience, and process-based watershed restoration efforts that help keep water on the land and preserve nature’s resiliency. We are proud to support partners like Audubon Rockies and their efforts to demonstrate how nature-based infrastructure can both prevent catastrophic fire events and restore watershed health post-fire by allowing water to soak, spread, and infiltrate wetlands and riparian areas. By demonstrating the value and effectiveness of these processes, we can drive significant policy changes around how we manage water resources and ecosystems across the West. Small scale pilot projects are an important step among the many actions needed to address climate.
We are also addressing climate impacts by providing critical support for large multi-national and tribal-led strategies to protect and restore critical landscapes and habitats throughout North America—including the Central Grasslands. As one of North America's largest and most vital ecosystems, the Central Grasslands provide critical support for human health and the economy through key environmental functions, not the least of which is climate resiliency.
Grasslands hold 30% of global soil carbon. Conversion of grasslands to cropland and overgrazing throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada has caused substantial soil carbon loss. However, through conservation, restoration, and improved land management, grasslands offer an enormous opportunity to limit climate change, along with other co-benefits of protecting water quality, biodiversity, agriculture, food security, rural communities and the economy.
As threats continue to escalate in the West, how are you recalibrating your work to face them? What role can foundations and philanthropists play?
(Nathan Fey) Obviously, climate change presents a very real threat to the West’s lands and waters, our food systems, and our communities and economy. We recognize these are global issues, and action is needed at the global level, as well as locally, to reverse the trends of rising global temperatures. Mighty Arrow remains focused on the West and local rivers and forests, and driving efforts towards resiliency here at home to help support the change that is needed globally.
Across our portfolio of partners and projects, Mighty Arrow is working on both short and long-term solutions. We recognize there is urgency now, but we also need to plant seeds for things that will be impactful in a decade or two from now. We are empowered by Kim Jordan, our founder, to give more now to meet the urgency of today, and to seed innovative solutions that will scale in the years ahead. In 2022 Mighty Arrow granted 12.8% of our corpus—more than double the 5% required of private foundations by the IRS. We don’t take these issues lightly—Kim has empowered us to take action NOW! I believe that other foundations and philanthropists are recalibrating their own strategies to meet the moment.
So what do we do? Beyond the government agencies and official stakeholders. As humans in the West? What would you like to see us, as a collective community, do to address this crisis?
(Nathan Fey) As humans, I think we need to do three things: Grow our awareness, demonstrate more humility, and share the responsibility.
Our rivers, and water security writ large, are in jeopardy and our lack of awareness is driving this jeopardy. Too few people don’t understand, or choose to ignore, the connections between our rivers and wetlands to our showerheads and kitchen faucets. I would like us, as a collective community, to grow greater awareness of where the water in our homes and gardens and businesses comes from. We can no longer ignore that when we use water, it comes from someplace else—and that there are real impacts to fish, wildlife, and other economies when we over-use a scarce resource. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is endangered in large part due to our demands on the Colorado River occurring in Boulder, Albuquerque, Vernal, Tuscon and places in between and far from the Canyon itself. It’s easy to be unaware if you don’t live on the river and see those impacts directly. We need to be more aware of our direct impacts—it’s a necessary behavioral shift if we are to make the kind of changes needed to protect global water security.
Photo Credit @Nathan Fey, Standing at the base of the Hoover Dam: “To stand there and think about the power of water being held back by that wall - its astonishing.”
I would like to see us embrace another behavioral shift—one towards more humility. We have never found a durable, long-term technological or man-made solution to water insecurity in the West. It's well past time for us to embrace nature-based systems and work within processes that are naturally variable, but more sustainable in the long-term. Storing water in large reservoirs may provide certainty for water users for 50 years, but that short-term certainty compounds the trade-offs of building the dam in the first place. Now we need to engineer our way out of those problems—whether it's re-creating high-flow events to temporarily restore downstream conditions, or dredging the mass of silt that is now filling the entire storage system. There was brilliance in solving for water scarcity in the Southwest, once upon a time. There is no longer wisdom in damming rivers and waterways, or channelizing riparian systems, all for the sake of more effective and efficient transport and distribution of water. I hope we can find the humility to acknowledge that there are more efficient and cost-effective ways to “manage” water in the West.
And as a community, we need to share in the responsibility to protect and restore the Colorado River. We can no longer approach these challenges and threats as adversaries—we must be allies. Like Bureau of Recreation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said in a statement, “To meet this moment, we must continue to work together, through a commitment to protecting the river, leading with science and a shared understanding that unprecedented conditions require new solutions.”
If we are to do this right and protect the river from drought, floods, and worsening impacts of climate change, we need to share in the shortages and solutions across all sectors and authorities. Enforcing the existing legal priorities on the river will perpetuate the hardships faced by fish, wildlife and underserved communities. After all of this, if we have learned nothing about sharing, the West faces an even more dire future, I fear.
To learn more about America’s Most Endangered Rivers, visit: https://mostendangeredrivers.org/
Photo Credit @Kristen M. Caldon, Grand Canyon National Park, Crystal Rapid