In his 1949 essay “The Green Lagoons,” U.S. naturalist Aldo Leopold recalls a canoe trip two decades earlier through the Colorado River delta—then a teeming patchwork of wetland and forest stretching north from the Gulf of California. “[T]he river was everywhere and nowhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the gulf…,” Leopold wrote. “[H]e meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles, he dallied with lovely groves, he got lost and was glad of it, and so were we...” In the half-century since Leopold penned those words the lower Colorado arguably has undergone more change than any waterway in North America. Upstream, an elaborate system... [Log in to read more]