We all eat the Colorado River: this watershed is a microcosm of our society with Jeff Wagner

full shownotes and maps to reference in this episode: groundshots.substack.com

Episode #84 of the Ground Shots Podcast is a conversation with Jeff Wagner out of Paonia, Colorado, director of Groundwork, a regional nonprofit educating about food systems in a changing world and more.

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Groundwork is a place-based education program working to deepen our society’s relationships with land, food, and water and to cultivate generative and regenerative ways of living and relating. Our mission is to inspire the cultural shifts needed for a sustainable future.

Rising to meet the challenges posed by climate change, ecological decline, and environmental injustice requires more than new technologies and policies. At Groundwork, we believe it also requires profound shifts in the ways we relate to one another and to the world around us. Groundwork offers educational programs and publications that seek to shift the foundations of the ways we understand ourselves and our place in the world, in order to work towards more just and sustainable shared futures.

A culture, like our planet, is a living ecosystem, constantly shifting and changing based on the values, attitudes, and practices cultivated within a particular community. Groundwork creates spaces to critically reflect upon, challenge, experiment with, and create anew those building blocks of culture. Our offerings create opportunities for the emergence of new kinds of relationships and ways of being within the human and more-than-human world.

We believe that reimagined relationships and practices—in essence, emergent cultures—are the foundations of systemic change.

Colorado Public Radio ‘Parched’ Series

‘Chasing Water’ movie

Johnathan Thompson’s Landdesk publication on Substack regularly writes on current issues of the Colorado River

Cadillac Desert The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner

Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River by David Owen

Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West by Jack Loeffler and Celestia Loeffler

Glen Canyon Institute

Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives about a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies by John McPhee

The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive by Martin Prechtel

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz

The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

Water Education Colorado

‘The uncompromising environmentalist behind the Sierra Club’ by Joshua Zaffos High County News article about David Brower

‘Western States Opposed TribesAccess to the Colorado River 70 Years Ago’. History Is Repeating Itself.’ article by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Anna V. Smith, High Country News

Colorado River Compact

Elsewhere Studios