35 carbon-sequestering powerhouses and biodiversity hotspots in our quest to tackle the global crises of climate change and species decline. And the century- long march to tap the next river for water to supply a growing West is giving way to concerted investment in water recycling, reuse, and conservation. Even the ongoing utility of Glen Canyon Dam— built in payment for saving Echo Park—is being ques- tioned as the aridification of the Colorado River Basin leads to ever-shrinking water levels in Lake Powell, threatening the dam’s ability to produce power and yield water supplies. Many now view Glen Canyon Dam as a relic of an overzealous era when the West was built on notions of endless extraction—of water, of oil, of forests—without understanding the limits or the consequences of that approach. Overlooked in the damming, siphoning, channe- ling, and harnessing of our rivers is the fact that rivers nourish our soul. I prefer to think of rivers as the blessing that Edward Abbey saw when he extolled, “May your rivers flow without end …, where some- thing strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you— beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.” inundating cottonwood forests, replenishing under- ground aquifers, acting as fire breaks, and delivering and transporting food, water, and nutrients across vast landscapes. But many of our Western rivers are dying, suffering from dams and diversions, primarily for the benefit of agriculture, that drain almost all of their natural flow. The Colorado River, fed by the Green and Yampa Rivers, failed to reach the Pacific Ocean for decades because of excessive withdrawals, drying out its once-vibrant delta. The mighty Rio Grande and the San Joaquin River in central California suffer the same fate in many years, their channels bone-dry as upstream agriculture drains the rivers of their flow. Dams along the Snake, Sacramento, and Klamath Rivers—to name just a few—have decimated native salmon runs, along with the West Coast’s fishing industry and Indigenous cultures whose lives are built around salmon. Today, the story of the peregrine falcon gives me hope that we will right this path and treasure our western rivers before it is too late. Thanks to the efforts of many committed people, peregrines recov- ered from the celebration of DDT in the 1940s that led to the Nobel Prize being awarded to the founder of its insecticidal properties. In the western United States, more and more people are rejecting the inane refrain that a river running its course is water “wasted to the sea.” Instead, we’re witnessing the removal of river-destroying dams—including the largest dam removal effort in the United States on the Klamath River—and the remarkable healing powers of rivers when freed of these antiquated barriers. There is increasing recognition that the riparian forests nurtured by rivers with room to roam are both maintained that Glen Canyon was a more appropriate place for a dam than Echo Park to fuel the develop- ment of the Colorado basin. In 1956, Congress agreed, prohibiting dams in national monuments and national parks, but authorizing construction of Glen Canyon Dam in a deal that David Brower regretted for the rest of his life. Another task during my summer at Dinosaur was to assist biologists from Colorado State University with a long-term survey of small mammals in the park. We would head out to a secluded location near the river, set non-lethal traps on the ground, and stretch nets over ponds to catch, catalogue, and release bats, voles, mice, lizards, and an astonishing abundance of other critters. And then there were the fires. Yellowstone burned in the summer of 1988, previewing the massive and deadly fires that the West would increasingly face over the next several decades as climate change took hold. But my boss at Dinosaur understood even then the healing power of fire, and the need for controlled, prescribed burns to restore a landscape transformed by cows, invasive species, and other changes wrought by European settlement. So we set fires—good fire to restore native grasses and forage food for elk, ante- lope, and bighorn sheep, and habitat for the birds and mice and reptiles that swarmed the landscape largely unseen. To this day, I treasure the “high desert rangers” t-shirt that I earned from those fires, with a picture of a bear in a ranger hat holding a drip torch. Like many places in the West, the Yampa and the Green Rivers are central to this swirling landscape of life, even when out of sight. The arid, high-desert plateau of Dinosaur is largely inhospitable to life without rivers carving deep and shaded canyons,
