Future water management cannot be organized how it is presently or as it was in the past, said Celene Hawkins, Durango resident and The Nature Conservancy’s new Colorado River Program director.
The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation nonprofit, made Hawkins its new Colorado River Program director last month. She succeeds Taylor Hawes, who helped launch the program nearly two decades ago.
Hawkins joined The Nature Conservancy in 2016 and has been involved in a number of projects in the Colorado River Program, throughout the Colorado River Basin. For most of her career, she’s worked with tribal nations, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
She said she’s concerned water management in the Colorado River Basin is reaching a breaking point and collaborative solutions are needed if the next generation is to enjoy life in the basin as people currently do.
“It's a really scary time to be living in the basin and trying to help with water management at a time where there's so much fear and stress,” she said.
She sees that unease as an opportunity to fuel efforts to forge a path toward a better future.
“It’s a tense time with policies,” she said. “There's some really hard choices in front of us, but I also know from my time doing on-the-ground work that people all across the basin are going to be able to lean into some of the solutions that we need to start working on.”
Directing the Colorado River Program, Hawkins will lead teams working within seven U.S. states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. Programs range from on-the-ground conservation projects to basin-wide policy issues and interstate negotiations.
Her past work includes watershed restoration; helping irrigators manage water through specialty crops and other solutions; and a 2022 voluntary leasing agreement between the Jicarilla Apache Nation on the San Juan River and the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, in which the tribal nation agreed to lease water to the state amid critical drought and water shortages.
The agreement allowed NMISC to lease up to 20,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Jicarilla Apache Nation, increasing water security for New Mexico and helping threatened, endangered and sensitive fish, according to The Nature Conservancy.
Hawkins said she always knew she wanted a career in conservation and environment, and although her career has followed a winding path, working with tribal nations has hung before her as her “North Star.”
“This is a place that I really started my conservation career,” she said, referring to Durango. “It is in some ways my daily runs along the Animas River that helped ground me in place, so I think a lot about the very localized health of our tributaries here and the entire basin almost every single day.”
Negotiations between Colorado River Basin states, which aim to match reservoir releases more closely with the river’s actual flow, as described by The Colorado Sun, have been particularly hard and tense as of late because of dry conditions, Hawkins said.
She said many of those following negotiations are “cautiously hopeful” principal negotiators for the seven states – Colorado, Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – will find enough consensus on new rules for sharing water by the August 2026 deadline set by Scott Cameron, U.S. Department of the Interior acting assistant secretary for water and science.
“We really may not know until then whether there’s a consensus solution that is moving forward in that National Environmental Policy Act process, or whether we’re going to see a different path forward,” she said. “A lot of folks are sort of waiting for the principal negotiators to see if they can meet that deadline later this year.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
