![\"brower_kenneth-bio\"](\"http:\/\/www.gilaconservation.org\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/brower_kenneth-bio.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAn audio recording of\u00a0Kenneth Brower’s keynote address “Helping Water Win”<\/strong>\u00a0is available on Gila\/Mimbres Community Radio’s\u00a0Earth Matters<\/em>\u00a0any time via\u00a0podcast<\/a>.\u00a0Brower 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,\u00a0The\u00a0Wildness Within: Remembering David Brower<\/em>,\u00a0honors his father on the centennial of his birth. \u00a0Brower passes along words of wisdom to help in the current battle to protect New Mexico’s Gila River.<\/p>\n<\/a>An audio recording of\u00a0Dr. Tom Swetnam’s talk “<\/strong>Wildfire and Climate Changes in the Southwest: Past, Present and Future”\u00a0<\/strong>presented at the 9th Annual Gila River Festival will be available on Gila\/Mimbres Community Radio’s\u00a0Earth Matters\u00a0<\/em>Tuesday 10\/8\/13 and Thursday 10\/10\/13 at 10 am and 8 pm via\u00a0web stream<\/a>\u00a0and any time via\u00a0podcast<\/a>. Swetnam is Regents’ Professor and director of the laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. He\u00a0discusses how multi-year droughts and extensive forest fires have occurred repeatedly during past centuries, but recent events are extraordinary in several ways.\u00a0Wildfire 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 Historical documents and tree-ring data from the Southwestern U.S., including from the upper Gila watershed, reveal the details of the causes and consequences of these changes.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.<\/p>\n