Friday, May 23
8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
High Camp (Telluride Conference Center in Mountain Village)

The symposium is open to all Wilson, Ama Dablam and Patron passholders and includes a locally grown and sumptuous lunch. Individal all-day tickets can be purchased at Mountainfilm Hospitality for $65.

The world is finally waking up to water and making connections between water and life as we know it. Climate change is already affecting water with rising sea levels, melting ice caps, disrupted ocean currents. We are increasingly living with drought, drying rivers and shortages of fresh water.

But why were we asleep? The problems caused by our profligate and heedless water consumption has been apparent for more than 100 years—even without climate change. They’ve been minutely documented by scientists and publicized by reformers, yet they continue getting worse as we continue the abuse.

Why? Because we’ve taken water for granted. We have always believed it would exist in the same quantities and qualities forever and that we could use it the same way indefinitely—polluting, damming, diverting, mining, over harvesting.

Our assumptions have led to destroyed seas, estuaries, rivers, coastlines and lakes. Dead and dying fish, unsustainable cities and damaged ecosystems are left in our wake. The root of the problem is that we look at water as a commons to pillage as fast as possible before the other guy does, or as property to blindly, naively or irresponsibly divide. Along the way, we lost sight of the impacts on nature and other people.

But water is neither no one’s nor someone’s. It’s a universal resource, belonging to everyone, today and in the future. We must rethink our entire approach to how we use, manage, apportion—and more dramatically—conceptualize water.

This symposium brings together some of the world’s leading re-thinkers in the water equation to take an unflinching look at the liquid in every dimension—from oceans and estuaries to rivers and streams. This symposium will address all its scales—from global to regional. (And local in the mini-symposium—In Depth —which will look at the outlook and challenges facing southwestern Colorado and the Colorado Plateau.)
- Wade Graham

Come hear these voices and add your own to this essential conversation.

We’ve broken the day into two parts: The morning will be spent on fresh water issues, and after lunch, we’ll delve into some of the major challenges facing our oceans. We’ll show a variety of clips and short films that range from the ridiculous to the sublime and mix in talks and conversations with the following guests, who are listed in scheduled order of appearance:

Wade Graham, a journalist and expert in water issues in his own right, will moderate the symposium. He sits on the board of the Glen Canyon Institute; his book about the environmental history of Hawaii will be out soon; he’s written about water for the New Yorker, Harper’s and LA Times; and has finally made the big time with his trenchant piece for Mountainfilm’s program.

Dennis Dimmick is the executive editor of National Geographic magazine and contributed to last year’s symposium on energy. Dennis says the key question to ask when it comes to water is, “What is normal?” We seem to be coming to the end of an unusually stable period of 6,000 years where we essentially built civilization. Now the polar ice cap—essentially North America’s air conditioner—is melting, so “normal” may well take on a new—and harsh—definition.

Peter Gleick is the head of the Pacific Institute, an organization dedicated to finding “real-world solutions to problems like water shortages, habitat destruction, global warming and environmental injustice.” Peter feel that the twentieth century was dominated by the “hard path to water”—dams, reservoirs and other enormous infrastructure. “In the twenty-first century, a new approach is needed, something that uses large infrastructure where necessary, but also uses decentralized infrastructure, smart economics, new institutions that pay attention to what communities need.”

Brad Udall is an environmental engineer who wants to connect the disparate members of the Western water economy in a way that has never been done before—so that scientists, environmentalists and business leaders can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water in the West, particularly the Four Corners region.
Udall says, “As we move forward, all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the twentieth century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets” and that “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means.”

Azzam Alwash is the founder of Eden Again, an organization dedicated to restoring the marshlands of Mesopotamia. These marshlands are at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and are considered to be the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden. In 1991, Saddam Hussein—who was angry at the marsh dwellers for being rebellious—drained 90 percent of the marshes. Azzam (who attended Mountainfilm in 2004) and his wife, Suzie, have worked tirelessly and with much success to restore not only the marshes, but also the ancient way of life that has existed since the beginning of civilization. When it comes to water, there are many bad signs, yet Azzam is engineering hope.

Alexandra Cousteau is a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and with her brother, Phillippe, founder of EarthEcho International, which works to protect freshwater and ocean systems. The granddaughter of the legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau, Alexandra is working to launch Going Blue, an international education campaign about global water resources.