How to moderate human requirements for water while at the same time protecting freshwater ecosystems is one of the most critical and difficult challenges of the 21st century. By the year 2025, human demand for water will account for 70% of all available freshwater. Check out a slideshow, a video, and an essay about the plight of the once mighty Colorado River.
|National Geographic presents Geostories:|
A Journey Down the Colorado with Jon Waterman.
In 2008, Jon Waterman made an unprecedented, source-to-sea descent of the Colorado River, following the trailblazing Civil War hero John Wesley Powell, who first ran the then unknown Grand Canyon in an 1869 scientific exploration.
The Colorado River has been engineered to death. At river’s end, it is little more than a polluted ditch, often drained dry. Watch two pack-rafters as they take a 1,450-mile journey from the Colorado’s headwaters to the Sea of Cortez.