-(birds honking and calling) -(whooshing) (Aída) Imagine the Colorado River Delta a hundred years ago.

It was miles and miles of wetlands.

(whooshing) (pen scraping) (Shane) Aída Navarro has a passion for writing.

So, for her, bringing diverse stakeholders together to revive the delta is like weaving together the threads of a great story.

(mellow music) (Aída) After the dams were built and after different decisions were made, this area dried out.

All these livelihoods that used to depend on the river, that used to swim in it, sail on it, and fish.

And next thing you know, there’s nothing, there’s desert, and there’s only water going through irrigation canals.

(mellow music) (Shane) I met Aída at the annual Raise the River event.

Ten years ago, people celebrated when a binational agreement between the U.S. and Mexico sent a pulse flow, a rush of over 100,000 acre feet of Colorado River water, into the delta for the first time in decades.

-(energetic music) -(water rushing) (Aída) When the water started flowing, it was just a frenzy of happiness and joy, and everyone came down to the river and started bathing in it and fishing.

That was our first grasp of how impactful this could be for the community.

(Shane) This year’s event, celebrating the anniversary of that pulse flow, took place at an ecological restoration site, where the comeback has been dramatic.

(gentle music) (Aída) The trees used to be very little.

If you now go there, you will see trees that are, I don’t know, 30 feet tall.

There are a few families of beavers.

It’s beautiful.

(Shane) Even that brief infusion of Colorado River water fueled a 16% increase in vegetation and rekindled hope that the delta could come back.

(Aída) It proves that we can turn things around.

There is hope for us to do things right.

(Shane) The rare places where water does make it into the delta provide a glimpse of what could still be.

(wondrous music) (Shane) Juan and Alex are my guides to La Cienega de Santa Clara, a now-critical wetland that, much like the Salton Sea, was created by accident, growing and shrinking with agricultural runoff from fields in California.

(geese honking) (Shane) Today, in the otherwise arid delta, La Cienega hosts hundreds of thousands of migratory birds.

(somber music) (Shane) We move a lot of things around.

♪ We move entire rivers.

And I think, as you move down the Colorado, you see that pretty blatantly.

♪ We can turn deserts into oases, but we can also turn oases into deserts.

The forces we’ve unleashed to bend this river to our will seem so much bigger than the humans working to restore it.

But people built those dams and canals, and people can build a movement, too.

What was so exciting to you about this project?

The fact that it seemed impossible to bring water and life back to the Colorado River Delta.

And now, here we are.

♪ (Shane) On the Colorado River, we did what people do best.

We saw a challenge, tapped into our limitless ingenuity, and built a solution.

But the nature of the fix, and whose interests it really serves, tell us more about ourselves than we’d like to admit.