Hope Amidst the Climate Disaster Discourse
Behind the scenes of the surfacing miracle on the Colorado River.
I first met Mike DeHoff and Meg Flynn, Moab locals and the main characters of my latest story in Rolling Stone, a couple of years ago. They told me a story I hadn’t heard before about the Colorado River, that almighty ribbon of water that plays a starring role in humanity’s Western existence.
Passionate rafters, Mike and Meg virtually lived on the Cataract Canyon stretch of the Colorado River just downstream from Moab, Utah. Cataract is a beautiful reach known for some of the country’s biggest whitewater—that abruptly turns to lake as the river runs into the still water of Lake Powell reservoir.
I’d paddled that stretch some ten years before, and my last day on it remains one the most epically difficult undertakings in my catalogue of adventure experiences. After the current had disappeared, we sprint-paddled more than twenty miles of flat reservoir water through a mean headwind to make the takeout on a deadline (with the added element that we’d run out of food and were paddling on empty, but that’s a story for another time).
But Mike and Meg were telling me that same reach was all flowing river now that Lake Powell was dropping precipitously. Flowing river with rapids that were resurrecting themselves, the same rapids from sixty years ago, before we’d built Glen Canyon Dam and flooded them to create the reservoir in the name of insatiable human water consumption.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Everything in the news I’d been reading about the Colorado River up to that point were tales of doom. The creation of the reservoir had irrevocably destroyed the cathedral reach of one of the most beautiful canyons on Earth. The Grand Canyon stretch of the Colorado, below the dam, is slowly dying as the dam robs it of the sediment it needs for beaches and habitat. Apocalyptic climate change scenarios abound as mega-drought dries up this river that millions of people and untold plants and animals depend on.
But here was a different story that hadn’t made it into big news. On the other side of the dying Grand Canyon, as Lake Powell dropped, Cataract Canyon on the Colorado is showing light-speed rates of un-managed restoration and re-naturalization. After humans destroyed it, an entire ecosystem is restoring itself, literally right before our eyes.
This, a rare ray of light in the horrifyingly gloomy discourse.
And not only that, but Mike and Meg—as founders of the Returning Rapids Project that brings scientists, conservationists, tribes, and government agencies down this stretch to document the river’s recovery, and in turn, influence its future management toward (gasp) sustainability—were average citizen with the magnificent audacity to believe that they might be able to change seemingly unstoppable forces.
These are the narratives we’ve been missing. It’s not new that the media cycle thrives on disaster. Clicks for catastrophe, and all. It is new, though, that we’re so connected across the world, 24/7, and can consume disaster on such a vast scale. When it comes to climate change, the constant messaging that our world is burning down around us and decision makers seem unable or unwilling to do much about it is demoralizing at best. Absolutely terrifying at worst.
We need the stories about the solutions. The hope. The people making things happen. Without those, we give up. It’s why in the morning, after I read my New York Times and Washington Post briefings, I read a newsletter called Optimist Daily. Because hope, for me, is often more motivating than despair.
If you’d like a little bit of hope, this story on Cataract Canyon’s miraculous recovery came out in the March issue of Rolling Stone, and you can read it online here.