The Future of Conservation: Younger, Savvier, and More Diverse

GUEST ESSAY Colorado Plateau Advocate magazine, Spring 2015

What a law professor's road trip with her 13-year-old daughter reveals about the next generation of conservationists.

Two years ago my daughter Lucy and I took a road trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Boulder, Colorado. I plotted an itinerary that combined hikes in some of the Southwest’s most iconic places with visits to friends in Flagstaff, Tuba City, and Moab. I wanted to show Lucy the landscapes and people I had fallen in love with years ago, and impart some of that attachment to her. At thirteen, she was still just young enough to tolerate my didactic approach to vacations, so equipped with satellite radio and smartphones, we left my brother's house in Scottsdale and climbed the Mogollon Rim in our Volkswagen Jetta, an all-female, pop-culture-inflected version of the many explorers who came before us. The places we visited offer a glimpse of the issues and challenges that Lucy’s generation will face. They, their children and grandchildren are the future of conservation, whether they want to inherit our mixed legacies or not.

We turned off Interstate 17 at the Sedona exit, headed for Oak Creek Canyon. At the Call of the Canyon trailhead, we changed into our hiking shoes. Climate change predictions for the Sedona area include rising temperatures and even less precipitation than the already skimpy eighteen inches a year. As we meandered with the streambed, taking artsy photos of rocks shimmering in clear water and goofy ones of ourselves, I mused…will there still be water in Oak Creek in twenty years, when Lucy brings her own daughter here? 

From Oak Creek, we wound up the switchbacks to Flagstaff. As we passed the San Francisco Peaks in the early morning light en route to the South Rim, I wondered…will the Peaks have any snow by the time Lucy grows up? At the Grand Canyon, we hiked down to Horseshoe Mesa, my daughter’s first time descending into heaven. The canyon will endure. That much I know.

In Tuba City, we met with staff from Eagle Energy, a non-profit that provides small solar systems to Navajo people living in an area known as the former Bennett Freeze. I had signed us up to help with installations at the western edge of the Navajo Nation. We drove to Highway 89 and headed north to Bodaway-Gap. The Echo Cliffs loomed to the east, concealing from view small San Juan Southern Paiute villages and Navajo orchards clustered around seeps and springs. “Interviews with 73 traditional Navajo elders…[describe] declines in snowfall…and water availability…the disappearance of springs and the plants and animals found near water sources….”¹ How will these centuries-old sustainable farming practices fare with even less moisture? 

We turned west and drove for miles down washboard dirt roads until we arrived at the Yellowhorse homesite, a collection of dilapidated trailers, a corral, and a hogan with a clear view of the east rim of Marble Canyon.

The Bennett Freeze, named after former Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Robert Bennett, was imposed in 1966 during the decades-long land dispute between the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe and forbid all improvements on 1.5 million acres of land. President Obama lifted the freeze in 2009, but it will take decades for the area and its residents to recover from the deliberate underdevelopment of their homelands. “In the past, Native peoples in the Southwest adapted…through unique strategies guided by their cultural beliefs and practices…modern circumstances now make tribes especially vulnerable to climate extremes.”² How will these families, whose cultural beliefs and practices have allowed them to adapt to natural and imposed scarcities, face the compounding effects of climate change? After a long day, we returned to Tuba City, ate fry bread tacos at the bright new Moenkopi Legacy Inn, and slept soundly.

The next day we were off to Utah by way of Monument Valley and Mexican Hat. Lucy was quiet, as she often is in the morning, until she asked:

"Mom, why did those families stay all that time? Couldn't they move somewhere else where they wouldn't be so poor?" 

What she witnessed the day before had been gnawing at her. How could people in the U.S., so close to where we live, have so little?

I tried to explain that this was their home, their land; they did not want to leave. They want improvements, amenities, good roads, and economic opportunities for their kids, but leaving would have meant giving up their culture, their livelihood, and their religion. I told my young daughter the complicated story of how the build-up of Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas resulted in the strip-mining of Navajo and Hopi lands, the dislocation of thousands of Navajo and hundreds of Hopi, and the overuse of pristine aquifer water. She was quiet. We turned on Hits 1, a recurring loop of Bruno Mars, Macklemore, and Katy Perry.

Near Canyonlands National Park, we camped on BLM land and slept under a sparkling blanket of stars. The next day, we hiked in the Needles district. My daughter scrambled like the most seasoned desert rat. I did not lecture her about wilderness battles or how dust from the over-trammeled Utah range is exacerbating evaporation in Colorado. On our last night, we stayed in tiny Castle Valley. As we soaked in the B&B’s hot tub, I resisted the urge to drone on about uranium mining in the area, and the enormous effort to clean up the Atlas tailings pile. 

Back in Boulder, life went on.

The road trip became a warm memory, though I wasn't sure I had accomplished any of my more heavy-handed goals. Would she love the landscape and the people of the Colorado Plateau as much as I did? Would she do what she could to make the world just, beautiful, and sustainable when she grew up? 

Later that spring, Lucy had to choose a topic for a social science assignment. She wrote about the Bennett Freeze, describing, in a seventh grader’s voice, its punishing effects on the Navajo community, and how renewable technologies might help them continue to live on and nurture the lands they love. Lucy was not the only one whose project interwove environmental concerns with issues of social justice. Her classmates, one third of whom are Latino, presented on climate change, fair trade, sustainability, and other weighty matters. “Hispanics are more likely than non-Hispanic whites to view global warming as a problem that affects them personally…[and] more likely to support policies […] aimed at curbing it.”³

Eventually, in the slow-witted way of adults, it came to me that what I learned on our road trip was more important than what I had aimed to teach my daughter. I realized that if Lucy and her peers—more racially and ethnically diverse, more concerned with justice, more likely to accept climate science, and technologically far savvier than the generations before—are the future of conservation, then the future is bright indeed.

To their soundtrack of pop and hip-hop, with their smartphones close at hand, they will protect the Colorado Plateau and its inhabitants with flare and passion.

We can’t know exactly how their story will go, but I am confident it will be as wild and enduring as the beautiful and damaged landscape they inherit.