The Colorado River speaks for herself.
That’s why I was uncomfortable speaking for her in the first-ever federal lawsuit seeking personhood and rights of nature for a major ecosystem, Colorado River v. Colorado. When I agreed to serve as “next friend” or guardian of the river in court, I knew the Albert A. Arraj Federal Courthouse was miles away from the river and well beyond hearing distance. So, in the weeks before the first scheduled hearing in the case, I left on a 4,000-mile journey to ask the Colorado River what she needs with my friend, the brilliant photographer, Michelle McCarron.

Human language lacks the complexity, the subtlety, and the breadth to adequately describe her. The reality of human mortality and the geologic brevity of our species’ collective experience restricts any attempt to convey a complete understanding of her into exercises in arbitrariness. Her story is much too long and complex for human ears. I could listen for generations and never fully comprehend even a chapter in her tale. But, because no one is more responsible for the facilitation of life—human and non-human—in the arid American Southwest than the Colorado River, I will try to describe her anyway. Our lawsuit was dismissed before I was able to bring her stories into the courtroom and I feel compelled to share what I’ve heard.

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Yes, the Colorado River speaks. She speaks a language of life. Water is one of life’s original vernaculars and the Colorado River speaks an ancient dialect. Snowpack murmurs in the melting sun. Rare desert rain drops off willow branches to ring across lazy pools. Streams, running over dappled stones, sing treble while distant falls take the bass.

In Spring, she teaches strength and rushes against legs attempting to cross her. In Summer, she offers refreshment and licks salt from skin. In Fall, she whispers medicine and her frigid kiss relieves soreness. In Winter, she rings with icy bells and mesmerizes those who know it’s better to look than to touch.

She composes 60% of each of the forty million human bodies who rely on her for drinking water. She regulates our temperature, becomes blood, and spreads nourishment through our bodies. We could not speak without her. Our lips would crack, our tongues would bleed, and we would fall silent.

If you give her your time and a sincere desire to listen, she may reward you with experiences of poetry, of beauty, of surreal juxtapositions that point the way to wisdom. She may even wash away the horrors springing from indoctrination in a culture hallucinating human supremacy.
At least, that’s what she did for me.

I joined the lawsuit because I wanted to help the Colorado River. Lawsuits are based in argument. I thought, by traveling with the river, I would discover the best arguments to help her. But, the environmental philosopher John Livingston tells us in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, “On the basis of some experience in conservation affairs, I am at last persuaded that mere argument as such is entirely worthless…Argument, it seems to me, is never going to help wildlife. It rarely has, and there is little to persuade me that it ever will, appreciably…I believe that wildlife preservation is entirely dependent on individual human experience.”

On the basis of my own experience, I agree with Livingston. Those brave enough to stand on the side of life, in these times of intensifying ecological death, are those who experience a one-ness with the natural world, an enlarged sense of self that includes lemurs, hammerhead sharks, monkey puzzle trees, southwestern willow flycatchers, rainforests, vaquita porpoises, polar bears, glaciers, venus flytraps, and, of course, the Colorado River.

Swim with her and you’ll know consciousness is a flowing river. The limits of our minds form the banks. Time is gravity pulling experience past us. We understand life to the extent we can make sense of the experiences streaming past us. The Colorado River is an expression of life. She, like life, speaks in fluid, shifting patterns, gestures, and themes that must be teased out. I perceive her meaning when I ponder how I have experienced her, when I try to order my experience in a way that makes sense to other humans. I understand her through story, and the act of writing.

I write with the desire to share what I’ve learned. The map is not the territory and words are not the experience. The experience is everything. Regardless, I invite the river to make me an instrument of her voice and I present my best case for the Colorado River as a series of reflections, of slow realizations and sudden epiphanies, as scenes that represent my flow with the river, or the river’s flow over me.
But, you don’t have to listen to me, go listen to the river for yourself. She has much to teach.