Nearly two years ago senior fellow Armando Carbonell climbed into a Cessna for some aerial reconnaissance of the Colorado River Delta. The excursion was arranged by Luther Propst, then executive director of the Sonoran Institute, a partner of the Lincoln Institute in the Intermountain West, and guided by Francisco Zamora, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Colorado Delta restoration project. The result was an extraordinary set of aerial photographs taken by Carbonell of what he describes as the "Martian otherwordliness" of the landscape. The slideshow and accompanying text can be viewed at the journal Places, part of The Design Observer Group.
The Colorado River has been severely depleted after decades of being siphoned off for development in the Southwest, and more recently impacts of climate change. The river starts 1,500 miles away in the Rocky Mountain headwaters, winds through the marshlands of Sonora and empties into the Gulf of California. The delta is now just 10 percent of nearly two million acres of wetlands that used to exist. Yet the area is remarkably resilient, Carbonell reports, particularly in the 15,000 acres of cattail marshlands and mudflats of La Ciénega de Santa Clara, home to thousands of migratory birds. Even a relatively small infusion of more water produces big results.
The headline for the piece was drawn from Aldo Leopold, who traveled by canoe through the area. The pilot on the trip was Will Worthington, a volunteer with LightHawk, a non-profit that donates flying services to support conservation, who banked over the scenes that Carbonell sought to capture with his camera.