Yesterday we traveled through changing landscapes of incredible beauty — tracking the river to feel with our bodies how it flows down from the mountains toward the deserts below.
A hundred miles from where it began, the Colorado River is already a massive flow of water
We are on a tour of “bioregional activation” to carry this dream from community to community. You can join us at one of these community events in the next few days. People are inviting us into their homes and public venues to talk about what it would mean to actually regenerate the entire drainage of river systems that flow into the Colorado River.
This is part of an even larger vision to help organize major regions of North America. We are already working with on-the-ground organizers in the Great Lakes and Cascadia, along with a few key communities in the headwaters of the Colorado Basin. We feel the importance of helping local communities to organize around the natural features of larger landscapes.
The Design School for Regenerating Earth is how we convene these regenerative efforts. Helping local people to organize their own learning ecosystems in the form of bioregional learning centers. Supporting them to establish community processes around the distribution of resources. And connecting them with landscapes nearby that are seeking to do the same kinds of things.
The Colorado River is a living process of the continent
Today we will engage in strategy sessions and hold a public meeting in Paonia — where the North Fork of the Gunnison River brings massive volumes of water to the Colorado River where they join at Grand Junction farther east of here. We can feel the continental connections as we talk about learning ecosystems in this watershed that is also a major hub for regenerative agriculture.
The North Fork of the Gunnison River that converges into the Colorado River
What we can sense is that the weaving of communities between here and Baja California where the Colorado River no longer flows into the Sea of Cortez is that there is a story of planetary significance to be told. How do we regenerate an entire network of rivers? What kinds of landscape restoration can stabilize the climate system of the desert southwest?
How will the conversations we have today merge with the ones we have tomorrow in the Roaring Fork River Valley, the next day at Grand Junction, later in the week along the Delores River in Cortez, and eventually in Mexicali where all these rivers once flowed into the sea?
A small creek gushing with snowmelt that adds its forces to the Colorado River
We are learning how to feel connections at a continental scale by making this trip. Today will be the third day of an immersion we will carry forth throughout the next two weeks. You can support us and follow along by going here.
Onward, fellow humans.
Joe Brewer is co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth and author of The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth. He will be accompanied by Penny Heiple and Benji Ross on this sacred journey in service to the Colorado Basin.
