Tag archives for Colorado Delta
Once a Smelly Nuisance, Mexicali’s Wastewater Now Brings Life to the Colorado Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on May 9, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. If there is one place that transforms wastewater from trouble-maker to life-saver it’s the site of Las Arenitas sewage treatment plant in the Mexican state of Baja California. There, nasty urban wastewater that once made a smelly health hazard of the New River near…
Locals Help Restore the Colorado Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 24, 2013 This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. The Colorado River Delta once boasted a million acres of lush cattail marshes and riverside forests of cottonwoods and willows. But today, due to dams and diversions upstream, the river rarely flows through its delta anymore, and only ten percent of that verdant…
Bringing New Life to the Colorado Delta’s Fisheries
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 23, 2013 This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. The Colorado River sustains more than 30 million people and vast areas of farmland. But with no flow reaching the delta and the sea in most years, those last in line for the river in Mexico are suffering. For the fishing town of…
A Water Bank Helps Revive Colorado Delta Willows and Wetlands
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 23, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. In the delta community of Miguel Alemán, situated along the Colorado River corridor that forms the border between Mexico and Arizona, we arrive at an unlikely enterprise in this parched environment: a tree nursery. A few thousand cuttings of willow, mesquite, and cottonwoods…
Returning the Colorado River to the Sea
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 22, 2013 This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. Once teeming with life and spanning some two million acres, the delta of the Colorado River ranked among the planet’s greatest desert deltas. But more than half a century of damming and diverting the river’s flow to supply the burgeoning farms and cities…
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Departing Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar shared a few thoughts at his exit ceremony about the keystone accomplishments of his four years and three months in office, and called out restoration of the Colorado River Delta as his signature achievement in water management (see our ongoing series on the delta): “The fourth keystone I spoke…
Landmark Cooperation Brings the Colorado River Home
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 5, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. Standing at Morelos Dam, the last in the long line of dams on the Colorado River, and the only one in Mexico, it’s hard not to feel that we humans have betrayed this great river. It has traveled 1,350 miles from its headwaters,…
The Accidental Wetland in the Colorado Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 2, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. Traveling south from the Mexican border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, we stop about 20 miles (32.2 km) from the Upper Gulf of California. It feels like the middle of nowhere. We’re surrounded by vast stretches of cracked, dried-out mudflats layered with…
Revival in the Colorado River Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on March 22, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. So intimate was her connection to the river that as a girl she conditioned her hair with the soft mud from its channel bottom. Her family fished in the waters and hunted in the dense forests of cottonwoods and willows that spread across the…
Grabbing the Colorado From the “People of the River”
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on December 19, 2012 
The sadness of their story is written in the deeply lined, yet fiercely proud faces of the tribal elders.
For at least a thousand years, a native Indian clan called the Cucapá – the “people of the river” – fished and farmed in the delta of the Colorado River of northwestern Mexico. Their lives were keyed to the river’s natural rhythms. Each spring, after melting snows from the Rocky Mountains sent floodwaters down through the delta, the Cucapá planted beans, melons, and squash in soils newly fertilized by the river’s nutrient-rich sediment. They harvested a grain called nipa, a salt-loving plant that tastes much like wild rice. And they fished for corvina, a type of sea bass, and often ate fish three times a day.
Historical accounts suggest that four hundred years ago as many as 5,000 Cucapá were living in the delta. Today, perhaps 300 remain. Theirs is a culture at risk of extinction – and the primary reason is the colossal 20th-century grab of the waters of the Colorado River.
A Historic Binational Agreement Gives New Life to the Colorado River Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on November 20, 2012 
Today, the United States and Mexico signed a landmark agreement that will return vital flows to the lower Colorado River and its once-bountiful delta and reconnect the river to its final destination, the Gulf of California. Through a five-year pilot initiative, the new agreement could demonstrate the potential to bring back crucial portions of the…
