Finalist: The Dying River | POY 80 Environmental Vision Award

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This premier category recognizes a photographer’s long-term story, project, or essay that explores issues related to the environment, natural history, or science. This could include a facet of human impact on the natural world, scientific discovery, coverage of plant or animal habitat, climate concerns, or similar topics.

Caption

Slide 10 of 31

March 7, 2022

Leonard Sloan, checks the water level of a stormwater storage pond on rangeland near the Grand Canyon on the Navajo Reservation. In just a few more weeks, the water will be used up by free-grazing cows and sheep, and then he will have to truck in water for his animals every week. The Colorado River once ran more than 2000 kilometres, from the snow-capped mountainsides of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, across the western United States and Mexico. However, since the 1980s the river has dried up in the Sonora desert and no longer reaches the delta, because extensive agriculture and the diversion of the water in metropolitan areas such as Phoenix and Las Vegas led to changes in the course of the river. Dams, huge canal systems growing cities in the desert.

Jonas Kakó / Independent

The Dying River

The Colorado River once stretched over 2,000 kilometers, from the snow-capped slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, across the western United States and Mexico. But the river in the desert of Sonora has been drying up since the 80s and no longer reaches the delta, because extensive agriculture and diversion of water to metropolitan areas such as Phoenix and Las Vegas led to changes in the course of the river. Dams, huge canal systems, growing cities in the desert. Today over 44 million people depend on the water of the Colorado, but less and less snowfall in the Rocky Mountains, due to the climate crisis, intensifies the struggle for water rights. Farmers have to file for bankruptcy, real estate developers buy farms just to get water rights. The Cucupá, wich translates as „People of the river“, live in the Colorado Delta. "As a child I often went swimming in the river, Today I fish in the wastewater from agriculture, which pictures the Colorado River here with us," says Leticia Galavis Sainz (51). "The Cucupá have always made a living from fishing, but without the river our culture dies too!”