College Students Band Together to Save the Colorado River
Suzanne Potter, Producer
Friday, July 17, 2015
Instead of partying away the summer with friends, dozens of college kids from California, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada are celebrating Latino Conservation week by preparing for a leadership summit next week in Denver.
They're all part of a nonprofit called Nuestro Rio, which means "our river" in Spanish. The event will train new leaders in the fight to save the Colorado River from mismanagement and overuse.
"The Colorado River provides so many different things for civilization," said Adrian Hernandez Lopez, a member of Nuestro Rio and a student of environmental engineering at Santa Ana College. "Wherever you look in the West, the Colorado River is somehow involved one way or another."
Hoover Dam on the Colorado River provides power to much of Southern California. It brings water to 6 million acres of farmland and generates $1.4 trillion a year for the economy. The students are promoting a "conservation first" agenda - to make sure that every drop counts.
Greg Webb, director of Nuestro Rio's youth program, said young Latinos and Native Americans are continuing their cultural heritage by protecting the natural world.
"These young people are answering the call to serve," he said. "It's a thread that runs richly through Native American tradition, and it's a thread that runs deeply in the Latino and Hispanic tradition as well."
Last year, the students created the first-ever Lower Colorado Region Youth Council at the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation.
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