5 lessons of hope from Gary Nabhan’s Water in the Desert book signing

Gary Nabhan stepped out of a back hall into the event space at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix, on a 97-degree July night, wearing the costume head of a horned lizard and a pair of black gloves.

His first words to the room, still wearing the head, were, “Does anybody know if they have ants at the coffee bar?” Then he took the head off, put his glasses on and decided he didn’t need the gloves after all. “It’s not gonna rain or snow, is it?” he asked, deadpan. “You never know.”

Nabhan, it turns out, is very funny. Deadpan, quick, unbothered by a room of strangers watching him molt out of a lizard costume. The humor never quite leaves him, even when the subject gets heavy.

Nabhan is an ethnobotanist, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, an Ecumenical Franciscan brother known in his order as Brother Coyote and a pioneer of the local-food and heirloom-seed movements. He lives in Patagonia, Arizona, and came to Phoenix to promote his new book, "Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage" (Milkweed), one of NPR’s most-anticipated books of the summer.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, read Nabhan’s newest release as an invitation into the many currents of his life and work, a scientist learning to repay the land with, in her words, “gifts of head, hands, and heart.” Terry Tempest Williams says she’d waited decades for his stories to gather into a single narrative, one she found “capable of rattling our souls.” The first line on the dust jacket of "Water in the Desert" has stayed with me: "I went looking for water in the desert and found that the world was teaching me how to listen."

He calls himself a shapeshifter, which, given the lizard head, was hard to dispute. He read a few passages, took questions and he sent me home with five ideas on hope. Here they are, in the order he shared them.

1. You can’t know a place by driving through it

You have to stay, Nabhan says, long enough to watch a place break, and, if you’re lucky, long enough to watch it heal.

He first floated the Colorado River down into the Sea of Cortez as a teenager, and he’s been paying attention to that one watershed ever since.

It’s a quiet argument against the way we usually study the world, he explains. Parachute in for a year, or spend three on a dissertation and move on, and you catch a place in a single frame, thriving or failing, with no way to tell which way the film is running. Stay 55 years and you see the whole reel from the slow coming-apart to the slower coming-back. You learn that a place most people had given up on might only be between chapters.

But staying only earns you a place to stand. The harder part is learning to hear what a place, and its people, already know.

2. The knowledge is already in the landscape

The healing goes faster, he says, when you stop managing and start listening to the people who’ve tended a place for generations, and to the living world watching you back. 

Arizona holds one of the largest expanse of tribal land in the country, he reminded us, and the highest share of women farmers of any state, most of them from Indigenous families.

For Nabhan, listening means taking seriously not only what people know about a landscape, but how they understand their relationship to it.

A cactus with legal standing

Take the saguaro. To the Tohono O’odham Nation, the giant cactus, Ha:sañ, is kin, a relative with human heritage. In 2021, working from exactly that understanding, the Nation passed a resolution recognizing the saguaro’s legal personhood, one of the first plants anywhere granted that standing; Nabhan helped draft it.

A sideways trip to the Vatican

When the saguaros came under threat, he didn’t fight it head-on. He’ll tell you plainly he’s no good at a direct legal fight. He has a squirrely way of coming at these things, rarely taking the straight path when there’s another way around.

Which helps explain how a fight over saguaros in the Arizona desert led him all the way to Rome. An Ecumenical Franciscan brother as well as a scientist, Nabhan told us he flew there this spring and asked the Church to stand behind the principle that a plant held sacred by a people deserves protection. By his account, they agreed.

That’s how he moves through politics, coming at things sideways. He takes a question stuck in a partisan trench and lifts it onto ground where people who agree on nothing else might still agree that something is sacred. But even then, he isn’t asking anyone to come around to his way of seeing things. He’s listening for what’s already there in a culture, whether that’s the Tohono O’odham’s reverence for the saguaro or the Church’s for the sacred.

Listen that closely, to the land, its people, even the Vatican, and your own role starts to look smaller than you might like.

3. Be a catalyst, not a hero

The Colorado River once emptied into the sea through the largest wetland on the continent, a delta, the naturalist Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, canoed in 1922 and described as a hundred “green lagoons.” Jaguars moved through the mesquite. A six-foot minnow ran the channels. Where the fresh water met the tide, it built a brackish estuary that existed nowhere else on Earth, and the species that evolved there exist nowhere else either. Then the dams went in, and the water stopped arriving.

It’s worth knowing what sits at the far end of that plumbing. The Sea of Cortez is one of the richest bodies of water on the planet, the one Jacques Cousteau called the world’s aquarium, with nearly 900 kinds of fish and about a third of all the marine-mammal species on Earth, including the vaquita, the world’s smallest and most endangered porpoise, which still lives only in the northern gulf that the Colorado used to feed. A river that stops arriving starves the whole chain, the fisheries, and the coastal families who live by them. Which, Nabhan said, is what a dam in Arizona has to do with a fisherman in Sonora.

How the water came back

And then, every so often, the water came roaring back. In 1983, a dear friend phoned Nabhan. It was Anita Álvarez de Williams, an anthropologist and Cocopah historian. She told him to get down to the Cocopah village of El Mayor, fast, to see what was happening. The river was flooding harder than she’d seen in her life. An enormous El Niño had filled the reservoirs and the dam gates opened wider than they ever had. For the first time in decades the water came roaring back. It reached the delta, filling a long-dry lagoon, and Cocopah fishermen went out to see whether the mullet and croaker might come home. I looked it up and they would. Not that year, but over the wet decades that followed, delta fish populations climbed, by one scientist’s count as much as tenfold.

While the 1983 flood was an accident of weather. The 2014 one was on purpose. Under a U.S.–Mexico agreement, water was released from Morelos Dam in a deliberate “pulse flow,” and that spring, for the first time in more than a decade, the Colorado ran the length of its old channel and met the Sea of Cortez.

The forest, and the seeds

Fast-forward to January 2024, and Nabhan is bumping through a cottonwood-and-willow forest that did not exist a few decades ago, riding shotgun with Francisco Zamora of the Sonoran Institute. According to Nabhan, since 2010, Raise the River coalition has put more than 200,000 trees into some 700 acres of channel, working toward roughly 2,400 acres of riverside forest. Those trees don’t plant themselves. Nabhan described meeting a dozen Cocopah and Mexican women who were pruning and planting while he was out in that forest. He said Zamora asked them, “What other line of work lets you watch, with your own eyes, the good of your labor outlive you?” 

Down near the sea, Nabhan said he spotted a low grassy cover and made them stop the truck. It was the grain the Cocopah have gathered for generations, a salt-tolerant grass that had gone missing for 35 or 40 years. It was spreading again on its own, its seeds built to float off on the next tide and root somewhere new. Resurrection ecology, the scientists call it. You drill down through layers of cold mud, pull up seed that’s been waiting a century and sometimes it grows. Nabhan bet his life on exactly that. In 1983, the same year that first flood came down the delta, he cofounded Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Tucson-based seed bank still guarding the region’s arid-adapted crops. Seeds keep. So, it turns out, does the work.

His own role in any of it, he insists, was minor. “I was simply one of many catalysts,” he said. If humans have the power to damage a place, he figures, we also have the power to help catalyze its healing. And then, it takes over and finishes on its own. The lesson the delta handed him, after only a few years is that “It’s coming back, but we didn’t do it. Nature took back control.” Which raises a fair question. If your part is that small, where’s the hope in it?

4. Hope is a practice, not a mood

During the Q&A portion of the evening, I asked Nabhan what gives him hope. He shared that he used to be far more of a pessimist than he is now, that he’s somehow grown more hopeful with age. 

And the hope, he said, is in the practice. It is not talking about the work, but doing it. For him, that looks like going out and planting things, over and over, mostly alongside people half his age.

Who does the planting

Many of those Nabhan is planting with are young Indigenous people. He works with many of them through a training and restoration program west of Tucson with the Pascua Yaqui, where thousands of acres of retired cotton and alfalfa fields are being coaxed back toward habitat. Closer to home, the Borderlands Restoration Network he helped found runs a nursery that grows more than 100,000 native plants a year. And up near Flagstaff, working with five tribes and the Springs Stewardship Institute, he watched a crew pull out invasive salt cedar and saw the water come back, with spring flows pushing hundreds of yards further downstream within a few years.

His favorite example of hope was the simplest. Hand someone a tree seedling and it stops mattering whether you’d agree on anything else. You put it in the ground together, you both feel lighter walking out, and the distance between you shrinks by exactly one tree. 

That, he said, is what recharges people. 

5. Every skill has an entry point

When someone else asked the practical version of my hope question, “What can the rest of us actually do?” Nabhan opened with a confession. For all the science and the coalitions, he figures he has exactly one skill. He writes. He has done it every morning, he said, since he was about 12. The restoration, the seed-saving, the binational meetings are things he helps set in motion; the words are the part that’s his.

That wasn’t false modesty. His point was that the work needs every kind of skill there is, whether that’s a graphic artist who can make a poster, a journalist, someone who loves raising seedlings, someone who’s handy with rainwater harvesting. There are entry points all through the system, he said, like the links in a food chain. You find the one that fits yours and you plug in.

It takes a whole table

Stay, listen, catalyze, practice and make room. Together, those five actions describe something larger than one man’s method. It’s how conservation actually works when it works. It is not one heroic scientist with a clipboard, but a table full of people, researchers, writers, technologists, community leaders and the peoples who have tended a place for generations, each carrying something the others can’t. 

That, more or less, is the premise ASU’s Conservation Futures Academy runs on. Much of what Nabhan described maps straight onto how it approaches conservation. Work across borders and disciplines, partner with the communities who hold the knowledge rather than speaking over them, build the coalition before you break ground and treat restoration as a craft you get better at by doing it beside other people. 

The same work, everywhere

A month before Naban's talk, a team from the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures was half a world away, in Kenya’s Tsavo, one of Africa’s largest wild landscapes, where two national parks stay connected only because the communities around them keep choosing to hold the wildlife corridors open. The memory my colleague Lukas Wenrick brought home was a morning on his knees in the dirt, planting neem and acacia with local interns, the same gesture Nabhan keeps coming back to, but on the other side of the planet. 

The Conservation Futures Academy is young. Its first class of learners finished only last fall. The work underneath it is not. It's is the professional-learning part of ASU’s Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures and its Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, built for the kind of conservation Nabhan has practiced his whole career. Conservation at ASU is patient, collaborative and rooted in the places and people it serves.

More from the field

Every story Nabhan told had someone in it who stayed, from Anita on the flooding delta and Francisco in the cottonwoods to the women pruning in the heat. People like them are why the Academy’s monthly newsletter is called Architects of Hope. Gary is one. So are the scientists and community leaders steadying landscapes around the world, and so are the people stepping into this work midcareer or choosing it young. Building something you may not live to see finished is its own kind of architecture, and the tools are there for anyone willing to pick them up. 

If Nabhan’s night landed for you, subscribe to Architects of Hope, and we’ll send the field to your inbox each month.

And the horned lizard returned

The evening with Nabhan passed far too quickly. Suddenly he was out of time. “I’m ready to turn back into a horned lizard,” he said, and, near as I could tell, meant it. He pointed everyone toward the books up front and headed off, half scientist, half desert creature, exactly the way he’d arrived.

His latest book is Water in the Desert. If you’re near Phoenix, Changing Hands Bookstore has it on the shelf or anywhere else, Milkweed Editions has the hardcover or eBook available for purchase online.

Related Conservation Futures Academy courses

A few Conservation Futures Academy courses line up well with Gary Nabhan’s journey:

• Indigenous Conservation Collaborations. Built around Indigenous knowledge and relational governance, the exact posture Nabhan kept coming back to: listen first, manage never.
• Indigenous Knowledges and Data Sovereignty. How to work with Indigenous knowledge without extracting it, and why the communities who hold that knowledge should govern the data about their own lands and lives. The formal version of what Nabhan kept saying: the knowledge is already there. Your job is to listen, not to own.
• Future of Conservation Leadership. The frameworks for building coalitions and moving cross-sector work, which is what turned one flood into 2,400 acres of forest.
• Conservation Technology Innovations: AI, Drones and GIS. For the measuring and mapping that tells you whether the seeds are, in fact, coming back.

About the author

Jennifer Woods leads content and communications for ASU’s Learning Enterprise, where she helps the Conservation Futures Academy map out clear career paths for the next generation of leaders restoring the planet. She comes to this work from the ground up. While at Crooked Sky Farms, then one of the largest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in the country, Jennifer led community development, including creating a Restaurant CSA model that gave local chefs a direct line to regenerative acreage. She’s also the co-founder of the award-winning Uptown Farmers Market and helped develop Arizona’s Good Food Finder GIS directory, spending over 10 years building the tools that connect people to their local food systems. Her earlier work in community-based conservation earned the ASU President’s Award for Sustainability. Follow Jennifer on LinkedIn.