Gila River Festival Redux – Audio Recordings of Festival Presentations, Gila Film
The 9th Annual Gila River Festival The Gila River is in Our Hands was held September 19 – 22 and examined the impacts of climate change on the Gila River and the Gila region and how we can meet our future water needs and ensure that a free-flowing Gila River, one of the last in the Southwest, continues to exist for future generations.
An audio recording of Kenneth Brower’s keynote address “Helping Water Win” is available on Gila/Mimbres Community Radio’s Earth Matters any time via podcast. Brower learned about environmental issues – such as misguided dam projects like Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River – from his father, the great conservationist David Brower. Together, they worked on many Sierra Club publications, which increased public awareness of the nation’s wild places and the need to protect them. Kenneth Brower’s most recent book, The Wildness Within: Remembering David Brower, honors his father on the centennial of his birth. Brower passes along words of wisdom to help in the current battle to protect New Mexico’s Gila River.
An audio recording of Dr. Tom Swetnam’s talk “Wildfire and Climate Changes in the Southwest: Past, Present and Future” presented at the 9th Annual Gila River Festival will be available on Gila/Mimbres Community Radio’s Earth Matters Tuesday 10/8/13 and Thursday 10/10/13 at 10 am and 8 pm via web stream and any time via podcast. Swetnam is Regents’ Professor and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. He discusses how multi-year droughts and extensive forest fires have occurred repeatedly during past centuries, but recent events are extraordinary in several ways. Wildfire problems in the western U.S. arise from the combined effects of a century of human-land uses, rising temperatures, reduced rainfall and snowpacks, invasive plants, and people building homes within highly burnable landscapes. Impacts of recent extreme events include reduced river flows, high severity wildfires that convert forests to grasslands and shrublands, soil erosion and degraded watersheds. Historical documents and tree-ring data from the Southwestern U.S., including from the upper Gila watershed, reveal the details of the causes and consequences of these changes. Despite a gloomy outlook regarding future climate changes, we still have opportunities to learn and apply lessons from both the distant past and from recent outcomes of successful and unsuccessful forest and watershed restoration strategies.
The Gila Conservation Coalition’s film The Gila River Is In Our Hands is now available on line for those who missed the premiere during the Gila River Festival. A collaborative effort between GCC and the WNMU Expressive Arts Program documentary film class, The Gila River is in Our Hands explores the value of the wild Gila River, how it is currently threatened by powerful interests intent on diverting its waters, and how we can meet our future water needs while also protecting its free flow.