The Show for July 29, 2026: Calculating the value of nature, Democratic primary shuffle and more

Lots of us find nature worthwhile, but putting an actual value on it can be tricky. How some are trying to calculate the value of natural resources. Plus, two of Arizona’s neighbors will likely be among the first states to vote in the next Democratic presidential primary.

Transcript

ANNOUNCER: The Show on KJZZ is supported by Banner Health, Arizona’s largest non-profit healthcare system. Last year, Banner reinvested more than $1.1 billion in community health and charity care. Banner Health, non-profit for Arizona. Bannerhealth.com/nonprofitforaz.

MARK BRODIE: Hi, I’m Mark Brodie, co-host of The Show, an original production from KJZZ. Every weekday we bring you the latest news and culture from across the state. You can find much more at theshow.kjzz.org. Here’s today’s episode.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning. It’s The Show here on KJZZ 91.5 in Phoenix. I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, why some Nevada Democrats are disappointed in the new order of voting in their party’s presidential primaries, and trying to put a value on nature like businesses do with their assets.

But first, enrollment in policies under the Affordable Care Act has dropped this year for the first time since 2019, and that enrollment is down in 49 of the 50 states across the country. The one exception: our neighbor to the east, New Mexico, where enrollment is actually up 14% over last year. Arizona’s drop, by the way, is one of the biggest in the country at 30%. With me now to explain what’s going on is Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent with KFF Health News. Julie, good morning.

MARK BRODIE: Julie, good morning.

JULIE ROVNER: Good morning to you.

MARK BRODIE: So what’s going on? Let’s start nationwide. We heard so much about when the subsidies to help people pay for their policies went away after Congress got rid of them, that there would be fewer people on ACA plans. Is that kind of what’s happening here?

JULIE ROVNER: That is kind of what’s happening here. It’s important to remember there are still subsidies for people who get ACA plans, but during COVID, those subsidies were made much larger and were expanded further up the income scale. So a lot more people were able to get subsidies and a lot of people who had already been getting subsidies were able to get bigger subsidies. That’s what expired.

So we’re back to the original Affordable Care Act subsidies. And what happened is exactly what most people predicted. A lot of people discovered they could no longer afford their insurance, and they either bought down, as we say they got less generous plans, they moved maybe from a silver plan to a bronze plan, or they dropped their plans altogether.

MARK BRODIE: OK, so why did Arizona have such a big drop? It’s one of the biggest in the country.

JULIE ROVNER: Yeah, it is. Well, one thing we know is that the states that ran their own marketplaces, that tend to have more sort of aggressive help with people enrolling and keeping people enrolled, they had much smaller reductions in the number of people.

Arizona was one of those that uses healthcare.gov, the federal marketplace, so it was among those that had the larger drops anyway. It’s not entirely clear exactly what was unique to Arizona, but one of the things we know is that people who were sort of above that four times poverty, of which there are a lot of sort of young retirees, were hit particularly hard because they lost subsidies entirely. And I suspect that’s a lot of what happened in Arizona.

MARK BRODIE: OK, I also wonder, over the last several years about health care providers or insurance providers pulling out of particular markets across the state and other places around the country, too. Does a lack of options contribute to this, especially when it comes to what folks may or may not be able to afford?

JULIE ROVNER: Yes, it absolutely does. And we are seeing providers pull back in certain places. Basically, the Affordable Care Act was set up — it was originally a Republican idea — to use the marketplace. And so you have private insurers who are competing to offer coverage. And when they are in places where they think they can no longer compete well, they’re going to pull out.

And we’ve seen insurance companies come and go over the years, the 15 or actually it’s really more like 13 years that these plans have been up and running. And depending on what goes on at the federal level, whether they decide that this is a good year for them to stay or not.

But we’re also seeing it’s not just insurance companies, we’re seeing health care providers — doctors and hospitals — who have to decide whether or not they’re going to participate with these plans. So in some cases, there may be fewer providers available, even if there are insurers still in the market. And people are making decisions based on how much they can afford and whether they can actually make good use of these insurance plans.

MARK BRODIE: Right. OK, so let’s move one state to the east, where in New Mexico, enrollment is not only up, it’s up double digits over last year — the only state in the country that saw an increase. What is happening there?

JULIE ROVNER: Well, New Mexico is also the only state in the country that actually replaced using state money the federal subsidies that expired. So it’s a wonderful sort of natural experiment in how important were those additional subsidies. Obviously, they were critically important because in New Mexico, where they still exist, even though they’re not coming from the federal government anymore, we saw enrollment increase. In all the other 49 states and D.C., we saw it decrease.

MARK BRODIE: So is it really just that simple that residents in New Mexico are still able to get help affording the policy that works best for them?

JULIE ROVNER: Well, it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. But yes, in terms of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act, yeah, it really is still that simple. There’s still a lot of problems in the health insurance market, in the employer market, in the Affordable Care Act market. We’re seeing changes in Medicaid. I mean, there’s going to be a lot of churn with people’s health insurance in the next couple of years.

But in this case, just talking about the expiration of those expanded subsidies, it seems pretty clear that when people have enough money to be able to afford their health insurance, they’re going to keep it.

MARK BRODIE: Are there any other states that have talked or are talking about doing anything similar to this?

JULIE ROVNER: Well, I know California — I mean, there are nine states that actually have some state subsidies. And we do know that in those nine states, the enrollment drops were smaller. So more people were able to keep their plans. But states are not going to have the money to basically make up for these federal subsidies.

And as I just mentioned, states are also looking at big cuts to the federal Medicaid — their participation in federal Medicaid program. So they’re going to have more money that they’re going to be asked to make up, and states are already in difficult financial straits. And I suspect that a lot of states are going to prioritize Medicaid for people who are lower down on the income scale before they prioritize people on the Affordable Care Act who are maybe just a little bit higher up on the income scale. But so we’ll have to see what states are able to do.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. All right. That is Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent with KFF Health News. Julie, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

JULIE ROVNER: My pleasure.

MARK BRODIE: A panel of the Democratic National Committee has voted to revamp the schedule for presidential primaries in the 2028 election. South Carolina will now hold the first primary, followed a week later by Nevada. New Hampshire will follow a week after that, and then Democrats in New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia will vote in successive weeks. Nevada Democrats had lobbied hard to have the first nominating contest in their state, and some have expressed disappointment at finishing with the second primary. With me now to talk more about this is Mini Racker, D.C. correspondent with the Nevada Independent. Mini, good morning.

MINI RACKER: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for being here. So what was Nevada’s pitch? Why were they suggesting that they should be first?

MINI RACKER: So I’ve been following this for a long time, and I think Nevada’s been making this pitch for years now. Number 1, Nevada is one of the only traditionally early states that’s actually a battleground in the general election. So for a long time, Nevada Democrats have kind of made the case that they should see this early investment because that’ll really pay off when they face Republicans in November 2028.

And then on top of that, it’s a very diverse state that represents the country. And I think that Democrats have been talking for a long time about how do we make sure to motivate all of these different kinds of voters. And so Nevadans were saying, look, we can be a test case for that. And so I would say those were two of the strongest arguments for Nevada.

MARK BRODIE: Well, as I mentioned, and as you reported, a number of Nevada Democrats were not necessarily thrilled with finishing second. I wonder if there’s that big of a difference between going first or going second.

MINI RACKER: Yes, I wondered that, too. And I think you saw a lot of Democrats say everyone who’s in the early states, they matter. But I think clearly by the degree of aggressiveness that the fight for first saw, it does matter. And I think talking to some of the members of the panel who made this decision and looking at traditionally the kinds of financial investments and the number of candidate visits we saw to the very first state versus even the second state, that’s where you really saw that big difference.

I think with South Carolina being first, it is going to see more money spent on hotels and events and advertising, and it is going to see, likely, more candidate visits than Nevada.

MARK BRODIE: I guess it’s fair that candidates can basically start going to South Carolina from now until when their primary is, but between South Carolina and Nevada, it’s just a week, and then a week — one week between that and each of the next states. So I guess maybe that does to some extent limit the visits and the amount of attention a state gets and the amount of money that’s spent as a result of all that?

MINI RACKER: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to say Nevada is still going to get plenty of candidate visits. It is still going to get some money. It is the first battleground that’s going to vote. That said, someone made the point to me, look, if you perform badly in the very first state in South Carolina, you’re not going to make it to Nevada. So that’s where a lot of the focus has to go. I think it’s going to be a matter of triaging your resources to see how much you can invest in Nevada before February 2028.

MARK BRODIE: Are folks talking about the significance of two Western states being among the first several here, which has not necessarily been the case in the past?

MINI RACKER: For sure. This was a huge dynamic in my reporting. I think Nevada being in the West in a growing area of the country that I think is a little more representative than some of the traditional early states was a huge argument throughout the process.

And then New Mexico made a presentation that I know Democratic insiders were very impressed with. It was the only border state, I believe, that applied to be an early state. And I think that you’re seeing in having these two Western states be in those first four weeks, you’re seeing the Democratic Party kind of start to narrow where it wants to put its focus ahead of the next presidential election, particularly around issues on immigration, the border, and a focus on Latino voters, and a focus just on the area where the country is going, on the future.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so I also want to ask you, because there’s been a lot of speculation about this, you reported a little bit about this, about maybe the DNC having a thought of what type of candidate it is interested in having as its nominee for president in 2028, and maybe the order playing some kind of role in that?

MINI RACKER: Yes, I think a lot of this is a little bit speculative, but when you look at South Carolina, this is a state that has not voted for a Democrat for president in 50 years. It’s a little more conservative. A lot of the primary voters are going to prefer a candidate who’s a little more tested, someone like Joe Biden. This is why he preferred South Carolina as the first state. Versus I think Nevada’s a little more unpredictable and a little more susceptible to a populist candidate who’s kind of shaking up the established order.

And I think when you look at the panel members who voted to have South Carolina early, first, ahead of Nevada, these tended to be some of the people who were more involved in Democratic Party politics for decades — some of kind of the old guard leadership who wanted something more traditional. Versus a lot of the newer members of the panel I talked to, younger members who hadn’t been involved in party politics for decades, they were kind of looking at putting these Western states earlier a little more seriously.

MARK BRODIE: One other demographic that I want to ask you about, Mini, is unions, because those are obviously a big component of the electorate, the population in Nevada. What do folks say that Nevada becoming the second state now says about the party’s stance on unions and maybe how it is hoping to use them and have them help?

MINI RACKER: Yeah, I think throughout the discussions about which state was going to be first, the union presence in Nevada again was one of the state’s strongest arguments. The Culinary Union is the political powerhouse of Nevada Democrats. And throughout the conversations, you saw members of this panel that made the decision talk about how important it is to win back the working class. I think we’ve kind of seen working class voters be attracted by Trump and Republicans in offering something different at times.

And so I think the Democratic Party really is starting to take seriously, hey, we need to appeal to service workers. We need to appeal to the people who are actually doing a lot of the difficult jobs in this country. And Nevada is one of those states full of exactly those kinds of voters that Democrats will be targeting.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right, that is Mini Racker, D.C. correspondent with the Nevada Independent. Mini, thanks so much.

MINI RACKER: Thank you.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie. Coming up, the Gila River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the Southwest. We’ll hear about efforts in New Mexico to protect their state’s portion of the river.

But first, lots of people value nature in different ways and for different reasons. Maybe it’s a walk in the woods or a day at the beach or a view of the mountains. But putting an actual value on nature, like a business does with one of its assets, can be tougher to do. My next guest, though, has been thinking about this and how to actually put a value on our natural resources. Josh Abbott is director of the School of Sustainability at ASU, and when he came by the studio earlier, I asked if he can describe what he’s doing to people who are not, for example, economists.

JOSH ABBOTT: But when it comes to nature, it’s often the case that there’s not really a market out there for clean water or fish in the ocean. And so we have to kind of look for ways to value that and bring forward those values that are actually there. They’re contributing to our well-being, they’re contributing to our economy, but they’re just not out there in an asset market for us to find.

MARK BRODIE: So it’s the same concept as looking at any business and saying, “OK, you have” — as you say — “these buildings, these computers, these machines, this whatever, and it’s worth this amount.” So it’s the same concept with nature, but it sounds like you have to go about it in a different way because you can’t just look up how much a widget costs or whatever. Like, you have to sort of calculate that somehow, right?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah. And so, you know, there’s a lot of different kind of tricky ways we have to go about this. Some are more transparent than others. But the general idea is that nature’s providing us what we would call ecosystem services. There’s these flows of values that are coming sort of every day to us.

And the way that you think about the value of investing in a little bit more natural capital is, OK, well, if we were to have one more thousand gallons of water in an aquifer, or a few more tons of fish in the ocean, just as a couple of examples, what would be the benefits flows that we would get now and all the way into the future? And then we have to do what markets do: We discount the future compared to the present, put all that together, and that’s the kind of calculation. So in the end, it looks very much like a standard financial calculation, but there’s a lot of details in terms of how you get there.

MARK BRODIE: I would think so. I mean, do some of the criteria that would apply to business apply here as well — things like supply and demand, things like how people feel about these things, things about whether or not another business might need something that one business has, like a trade secret or something? Like do those kinds of variables apply when you’re talking about nature also?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, certainly the laws of supply and demand matter. One of the critical things is the quantity of natural capital that is out there. If it’s very scarce — then, you know, if we have a really heavily depleted aquifer, for example — then the value of investing more in that aquifer may be very high. Whereas if we have sort of a brand new, untapped aquifer, maybe the value’s not as high in that context. So scarcity, as in so many different areas of economics, always matters.

And then another kind of really important dimension is it really matters how resources are managed. So maybe a way to think about this is you could have two identical-looking companies, one of which is under really amazing management. So think about Apple under Steve Jobs or something, versus that same company, same people, same stuff, but with someone less visionary, less capable of a leader. Those two companies would have a different valuation on Wall Street, right?

Same sort of idea applies with our natural capital. How well are we managing the resource? Are we overfishing our fisheries? Are we utilizing them in ways that deplete their value? Are we devoting our groundwater to high-value activities, or are we using it in ways that sort of squander the wealth it could create? So that’s another important dimension.

MARK BRODIE: How well do we know what supplies exist? Like how much do we know how much water is underground, or how many trees are in the Amazon, or how many fish are in the ocean?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, it won’t surprise you that it really depends on where you are and particularly which natural asset you’re talking about, right? We know far less in many ways about our natural capital than we know about our physical capital.

What I would say, though, is that the sort of proliferation of technology really in the last 10-15 years has really enhanced our ability to know things. And so the state of trees, state of forests all around the world, including in places where you maybe don’t have a lot of money or resources to spend on monitoring those resources, we can use satellite data to really understand tree cover. And so there’s unprecedented levels of knowledge about things that we can observe from satellites.

MARK BRODIE: We know a lot more now, it seems like, than we did maybe 10 or 20 years ago.

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, we’re learning more and more about the physical quantities of natural capital that are there. Obviously, that’s a moving target because in many cases we’re also heavily depleting them even as we are learning about them.

We’re also increasingly learning a little bit more about the values that they create, the services, the benefits that they give us, and starting to be able to attribute values to that. The value is probably the part that’s the slowest to develop.

MARK BRODIE: Well, I would imagine that it must be somewhat up for debate, right? People value, I guess to an extent, people value business assets maybe a little bit differently from person to person or accountant to accountant. But is there variability? Like if you try to put a value on the number of fish in the sea, for example, might that be vastly different than a colleague who’s looking at everything else the same?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, there are certainly going to be some differences that arise because of differences of information. There may also be really different values that arise because we may be looking at very different fish stocks in very different places.

And you really can’t, when it comes to nature, you can’t sort of add up all the groundwater or all the fish and say these are all the same, because we can’t — unlike say oil, where there’s a commodity market and the price of oil is pretty consistent from one place to the next — you don’t have that sort of ability to have an interconnected capital market in the way that we do for a marketed asset like say oil, right? So there is that aspect.

There’s also a lot of just different kinds of values that people place. Some values are going to be directly attributable and find their way into marketed goods and services. So just as a quick example, the use of surface water in urban lakes in Phoenix, for example. That’s a case where we can actually show that these lake communities that draw on different kinds of water sources but have lakes that provide value. We can show how those lakes, the proximity to those lakes actually improves property prices. So regardless of exactly why people value it, we can see that there is a market footprint of that water in the prices of the houses, and then we can sum all that up and get an idea of what that value is. And it’s actually surprisingly high.

MARK BRODIE: That’s interesting. That is Josh Abbott, a professor and director of the School of Sustainability at ASU. More of our conversation in just a moment. And you are listening to The Show.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie. Let’s return now to my conversation with Josh Abbott, director of ASU’s School of Sustainability, about his work to put a value on our natural resources. And I asked, once you come up with the calculations, how do you use them? What is the benefit of knowing the value of groundwater or trees or really anything in nature?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, so I think there are different contexts. At the end of the day, we want numbers because we want to make better decisions, right? And so sometimes the number could be utilized in a decision about should you develop a natural resource or not. So should we cut down a stand of forest in order to create housing or something, right?

And so if we know what the value of that intact forest is, we’re able to then compare that to the value that would be created by disinvesting in it. And that gives us a better sense of not just the value we gain by having the housing — which the policy and markets are really good at telling us that, and there’s plenty of advocacy for that — but what is the sort of hidden value that we’re losing?

And so bringing that to bear can be really important for particularly people in government that are thinking about the management of resources. It can be really important for — again, the fisheries example. If we know what the value of a fish in the water is, we can compare that to the value created by harvesting it. And if the latter is smaller than the former, then that’s a really strong sign that maybe we need to invest more in our fisheries and harvest them a little less intensively. So those are a couple of examples.

One more I might give you really quickly is that if we do this over a large number of different forms of natural capital, we can actually start to create at some sort of a scale — whether it’s municipal, state or federal — we can actually start to create a balance sheet of nature. And those assets are assets just like all the other forms of capital we have as a society.

Like our education. When we educate people, we’re investing in human capital. When we have machines, we have physical capital. If we have a natural capital account — balance sheet, if you will — we can actually say something about what, from one generation to the next, to what extent are we investing in that or are we running it down?

MARK BRODIE: When you talk about value, I can imagine it being, I don’t want to say controversial, but maybe not universally agreed upon. Like the example you gave of the value of the trees in the stand of forest versus the value of harvesting them and building homes, because if I’m a home builder, the stand of trees there is of no value to me whatsoever. If I’m the nearby community, those trees might have great value, and vice versa with cutting down the trees. So I would imagine that you have to sort of balance who’s getting the value, right? Like who you’re looking at is deriving value from either investing in the natural resource or not.

JOSH ABBOTT: Absolutely, Mark. So one of the things we always have to confront when we’re thinking about these tradeoffs that we face is that the benefits and costs don’t all go to the same people, right? And so in many cases, when we have development, there can be some concentrated benefits that occur to corporations, and there can also be some broader benefits to the community from employment, etc.

But then there may be a different scale over which those costs of degrading the environment are felt. And they may be felt somewhat locally. If you knock down a bunch of trees in an area, you may find that temperatures are higher because there’s less evapotranspiration. You may find that air quality declines, and you may find that water retention and problems of erosion or siltation in local waterways may increase. Those may be felt in the same scale as some of the benefits.

But then there are some other benefits, like the carbon that is sequestered in those trees, and that benefit is occurring all over the world, right? That’s a benefit to the climate as a whole. And so when it comes to nature, we often have effects that are felt at all different kinds of scales, and that creates a real complexity when we’re valuing these assets, for sure.

MARK BRODIE: Do you imagine that by putting an economic and financial value on nature — and I’m guessing you don’t love that term — but sort of making it so that people see the financial benefits of nature, that it might get people to look at equations differently and think about conservation differently and maybe make different choices in their own lives?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yes, absolutely. I think it can have influence from individual decisions every day about what kind of food you eat, where you choose to live, all of those sort of things. If you have some — I’m not saying that ever suggesting that people are going to have hard numbers in the back of their head necessarily for the value of nature. But the more people understand the pathways, the ways that sometimes maybe “useless” — kind of air quoting there — seeming nature, like, “OK, well, I value it, but I can’t really see in ways in which it would actually ever figure in anything that would have a market value.”

But if people could actually better understand and have at the front of their mind the ways like the trees preserve soils, right? They reduce erosion, and that has knock-on consequences for the cost of providing water to municipalities. Those kind of things I want people to get.

MARK BRODIE: Can you give an example of sort of how you come up with the calculation for something in nature, of what its economic value might be?

JOSH ABBOTT: Yeah, so in a couple of examples that we’ve pursued, one of those was related to groundwater and to actually what we call fossil groundwater, groundwater that does not recharge really quickly. And we did this in western Kansas, which is an area that’s heavily dependent on groundwater for agricultural production.

And what we basically did is we got a lot of data on the decisions that farmers make. We looked at the ways that they utilize water in their farming. We got estimates of the value that that water creates for crop production, a lot of that corn and soy agriculture. And we then also looked at how those land use decisions feed back and reduce the groundwater table, And in the way to think about that groundwater depletion is that is basically depreciation, right?

And so we make those calculations, and then that gave us the value of an acre-foot of groundwater in western Kansas. And then we were actually able to show that Western Kansas was rapidly depleting this water wealth. And if you’re thinking from a regional economic development perspective, if you are depleting your asset base, you probably need to be thinking really carefully from a regional sustainability perspective about what other investments are you going to make so that this region is a viable concern for future generations.

I’ll give you one more quick example in a very different context. And this was done not by my team, but by a colleague from the University of Chicago that’s done some really cool work in India. And this is a case where there’s a clear linkage between the state of natural capital and human health. And when things start affecting human health, the dollar signs add up really quick.

And in this particular case, there were cattle, and these cattle in India were being treated by a pain-relieving drug. And this pain-relieving drug turned out to be toxic to vultures. And the use of this pain-relieving drug for cattle basically drove to functional extinction the vulture population in India.

And you might think, most people would look around and think vultures — kind of like mosquitoes — like who really cares about, who’s going to miss a vulture? Well, it turned out that that collapse of the vulture population increased the mortality rate of people in India by 4%.

MARK BRODIE: Wow.

JOSH ABBOTT: Because of diseases spread by all the decomposing carcasses of animals —

MARK BRODIE: That vultures otherwise would have eaten.

JOSH ABBOTT: That vultures otherwise would have eaten. So they provide sanitation services for free. We don’t even pay them. And they’re like the garbage men of nature, right? And because of that, this resulted in tens of billions of dollars of damage per year to the Indian economy. And so sometimes even seemingly insignificant or even kind of gross parts of nature have a value that, if we only work at it, we can find.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. That is Josh Abbott, a professor and director of the ASU School of Sustainability. Josh, thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.

JOSH ABBOTT: My pleasure.

MARK BRODIE: There were fewer visitors to America’s national parks last year than in 2024, including at the Grand Canyon. And a new $100 per person fee for international visitors at some of those parks — again, including the Grand Canyon — may be contributing to a slowdown in other aspects of the tourism economy. Bertram Tsavadawa is a member of the Hopi Tribe and offers tours of the reservation through his company, Ancient Pathways Tours. He’s been doing that for nearly 25 years. He also does some consulting with museums and other institutions, and as he told me recently, his tour business has been really slow lately.

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: OK, well, yeah, from the beginnings of the year to this current time of the month of July, I have noticed and seen actually a lower number of visitors coming to our reservation land. The first two months, it was going good and OK, but I started getting cancellations from other individuals and families coming from other countries, just understanding and knowing that there were different other types of fees imposed on the individuals coming from other countries to the national parks.

So like the Grand Canyon National Park, they imposed a fee on top of the entrance fee or the vehicle fee to individuals going to visit the Grand Canyon. And myself, as I mentioned, I’ve been getting cancellations from individuals coming from other countries and that they are not making their travels to the United States as well.

And generally, in our Southwest area of Arizona, we do have the fires going on, so some of that affected some individuals of being outdoors with respiratory problems or issue concerns with the smoke, haze and, you know, the winds picking up, blowing the dust around as well.

MARK BRODIE: Is a big part of your business international travelers?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Yeah, ’cause I do as well have connected with other different travel sites and companies from other countries. And yes, ’cause they’ve been establishing to have, say some of my information on either on their websites or from past publications.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned the international visitors like having to pay higher fees to go to national parks. You mentioned wildfires.

Are there other factors that you think are at play for why fewer people are coming to look around on the Hopi Reservation?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Another one is with, you know, the gas prices, you know, that’s that was, you know, really skyrocketing high from the beginnings of the year and just of all this unsettlement with, you know, these conflicts as the wars that are occurring and happening. So that’s been another kind of toll that’s taken upon as well with the gas prices.

MARK BRODIE: What has this meant for your business? Like are you able to keep doing this?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: That’s one of the things I was already contemplating about within these past two months, ’cause it’s been it has been really slow, and also because of these extreme temperatures, you know, these record-breaking hot temperatures that we’re receiving in our state.

And so I’ve been trying to, you know, work on my being self-employed as a artisan and working on my crafts and that. But pretty much that’s not supplementing, which I do normally kind of, you know, is steady with doing a lot of the guiding and that.

But yeah, again, just within these past even just within the past two months, it’s been a very slow with guiding. So like for this week, I only had one program, and I don’t have another one scheduled until next week, Thursday.

But the past three weeks, you know, I didn’t have anything, so that got me to do my crafts and that. But, but again, I don’t, I’m not always out vending or set up at the say like the main hub of the reservation is the Hopi Cultural Center. I’ve been contemplating I think I just need to apply for a real job.

MARK BRODIE: Well, so you mentioned you have one tour this week. Like in better times, what would be a typical week for you? How many tours would you be giving?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Normally and usually, you know, like when I look at the calendars and that, even just looking at some that I might still have from past years, it was like four or five times out of the week, which was the busy months or, you know, like the summer times. But it does varies year by year.

It’s never always a steady number flow of visitors, you know, each year. It it varies. But this year, again, has been a very, very slow and low-number turnout.

MARK BRODIE: Well, are you able to try to get more domestic visitors, either from Arizona to come up north or other just folks from the U.S.?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Yeah, yeah, there’s been some of that, but again, just with knowing the extreme temperatures, gas prices and, you know, just again, just different factors that there’s not as much. But I do connect and, you know, there are some that have are already pre-contacted me for upcoming months, but, you know, again, it’s not so immediate to have some of this seasonal work.

MARK BRODIE: What does it mean to you personally if there aren’t as many people coming to visit your part of the world?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Oh, it, it does take a drastic toll even amongst, you know, my Hopi people. You know, just still barely coming out of, you know, the the 2020 COVID and all that, it really affects, you know, a lot of the people that are self-employed as the artisans and that, or depending on, you know, if they could sell their crafts and their wares that they create.

MARK BRODIE: It seems like the kind of thing where it’s not like there’s a million other job opportunities in that part of the state, right? If you can’t do this, if visitors aren’t coming, it seems like it kind of puts folks like you in a tough spot.

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, you know, I feel the crunch and everything, and, you know, just doing, you know, the best that I can to still, you know, support, you know, the family and, of course, you know, if you have a vehicle, you got to have gas to, to to get around and and to go to these places, you know, like again for consultations.

But myself as, you know, just personally and my own personal time, you know, being a farmer and member of the Corn Clan, I still been tending to my fields and that, so. But yeah, it it, you know, again, it varies to certain individuals. But, you know, there’s still people that are employed out here on the reservation, having their work or location or whatever of their occupations that they are working and servicing.

But again, with the low number of visitors and visitation on the reservation, a lot of the again, the self-employed artisans and craftspeople are, you know, feeling, you know, that crunch or, you know, not having to be selling the items or having the visitors come.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that the numbers will come back up at some point?

BERTRAM TSAVADAWA: It probably would vary, because even just like, you know, as I mentioned, you know, coming back from 2020 and this COVID era, it’s still been kind of like a slow comeback. It’s not a strong.

Even the one village that regulates their own guided tours with their own village guides is the First Mesa village of Walpi, and just with personal communication with the guides there, they also notice of a, you know, drastic drop of numbers of visitors.

MARK BRODIE: Bertram Tsavadawa is a member of the Hopi Tribe and runs the guiding company called Ancient Pathways Tours on the Hopi Reservation. And this is The Show.

MARK BRODIE: Good morning, it’s The Show on KJZZ 91.5, I’m Mark Brodie. The Gila River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the Southwest. It winds from the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico, all the way across the state of Arizona through deep canyons and cottonwood forests, to eventually join the Colorado River at Yuma.

But today, like many rivers, it’s under threat from drought, climate change, and proposed dams that would irrigate the river’s water for farming or hydropower. And now, a delegation from New Mexico is hoping to pass protections for the waterway, the strongest protections any river can get, in fact.

But those protections are only being proposed for parts of the Gila within New Mexico, so what would they mean for the many miles of it that wind through Arizona? My co-host Lauren Gilger got ahold of Bjorn Fredrickson, conservation director for New Mexico Wild, to find out more, beginning with his work to protect the Gila Wilderness around it.

BJORN FREDRICKSON: The Gila Wilderness was actually first designated in 1924 by the Forest Service, 40 years before the Wilderness Act passed and kind of made it into what’s considered a federal wilderness today that’s legislatively protected. So long before I was born, both of those milestones.

New Mexico Wild is involved in protecting lands and waters around the Gila country in southwestern New Mexico, and it’s really our highest priority landscape in the state, and that’s because of its sort of large, intact wild character, with high-quality wildlife habitat, habitat connectivity, a lot of climate adaptation and mitigation values, and an extreme degree of biodiversity in terms of species diversity.

And so it’s really always been an important landscape, it still is, and so we’re really busy on a variety of fronts to protect this place and working really closely with communities. And the river itself is really special, it’s the last what we call mainstem undammed, free-flowing river at least in New Mexico, if not the Southwest.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Yeah, that’s so interesting. It’s one of the last ones in the in the entire region that’s free-flowing.

So let’s talk about efforts to protect the Gila River. I know a delegation from New Mexico headed to Washington recently and is after this kind of rare, it sounds like, protected status for the Gila River, part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. What would that kind of status mean? What would the protection get for the river?

BJORN FREDRICKSON: Yeah, Wild and Scenic River designation for the Gila under the 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act would essentially protect the Gila’s free-flowing character and prohibit any kind of future dam building projects, diversion projects, other major river development like riprapping or kind of concrete channelization.

There have been numerous proposals, as an aside, over the years on the Gila and some of its important tributaries included in this legislation to dam and divert the river for water use, for pump storage hydropower, things like that. And so these threats are real, they’re persistent, they come around every decade or so, and, you know, the conservation community and the community in the in the Gila region has been successful in beating these back.

That said, we have to win every time to keep the river free and wild, free-flowing. And so, yeah, Wild and Scenic River designation would permanently protect that wild, free-flowing character for the river. It also has requirements around protecting what are called outstandingly remarkable values. These are river values and river-related values like fish, wildlife, scenery, recreation, cultural resources, scientific values, for example, that have to be really rare, unique or exemplary at a, at a regional or national scale. And the Gila has an abundance of these really significant values. I would argue some are internationally significant, such as the Gila trout. So yeah, that’s, that’s kind of the core of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

And you mentioned it’s it’s a rare designation, that’s true. I just want to say that about one half of 1% of rivers nationally are protected as Wild and Scenic, so it really is tremendously unusual. And in New Mexico that drops to about one-tenth of 1%. So, yeah, really requires a special river, and and the the Gila is that, no doubt.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, so you think that it deserves this this protection, obviously. This protection would only be on the section in New Mexico and not the rest of the river?

BJORN FREDRICKSON: That is correct. So we have been working as an organization with community and nonprofit partners in the Silver City area, statewide, and we have some national partners as well for over a decade to protect this river.

So we’ve identified collectively through this effort with these different players about 450 miles of river and stream in the Gila region, that includes the Gila River, that includes major tributaries to the Gila, and that includes a few other scattered but outstanding rivers in the area that are in different watersheds as well.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, if if most of the river, which flows through Arizona and all the way down to Yuma, right, like isn’t under this protection, does it does it make a difference? Does this, you know, impact the river in a different way? Does it make a difference that the the mouth of the river essentially would be protected in New Mexico?

BJORN FREDRICKSON: Yeah, I would argue absolutely yes. I mean, some examples of of why Arizonans should be interested in and kind of support, join us in supporting protecting the Gila River permanently, include things like water quality protections in the headwaters mean higher water quality or or a lack of future degradation for downstream users in Arizona, whether that be for people who who are relying on the river for clean, safe, reliable drinking water, or for farmers, you know. And so protecting the headwaters and its water quality matters for people downstream, including in Arizona.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, this is a pretty, as you said, rare designation for a river, and the the legislation involved in this has been introduced in Congress, I think, four times, it’s never gotten through. What do you think the odds are that this will happen?

BJORN FREDRICKSON: I think it’s a it’s a given. I mean, I, we see it as a matter of when, not if, that this is going to happen. I mean, there’s really strong support in southwestern New Mexico among community members for protecting the Gila. Statewide, there’s been polling that says something like 81%, 82% of people in New Mexico polled support permanently protecting the Gila.

We have an amazing congressional delegation that is kind of full force behind this and kind of working on navigating through the challenges in Congress to see this legislation ultimately pass. We’ve, we’ve seen, yeah, like you said, four Congresses where this was introduced in the Senate, twice now in the House in two different Congresses. And we continue to work with the community and and build momentum and and support our congressional champions.

And I think it’s just a matter of when the window of opportunity opens, I have no doubts that our delegation will be there and ready and and and set to make this happen.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, all about timing. Let me ask you lastly, Bjorn, about the broader context here. Like, you mentioned this is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the region. What what do you think the value is of letting rivers flow freely?

Like, we have seen an effort, especially it seems like in Indigenous communities, to get rid of dams, to kind of revert rivers back to their natural state. What happens to the land, to the ecology around a river when that happens?

BJORN FREDRICKSON: When we see dams removed, what happens, a lot of times you see native species that may be really strained in terms of population level, not healthy, not doing well, really bounce back. Species really quickly return to their historic habitat range when these big barriers are are removed and are blocking species migration, for example. A lot of native plant species return really quickly.

I mean, you could look up to Glen Canyon as an example of this. There’s been a lot of work as Lake Powell has been dropping. And the cottonwoods and the native willows are coming back almost immediately as that reservoir drops. And so it’s really amazing to see how resilient nature is if you give it a chance to kind of come back and remove these like major impediments and impacts.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. All right, well, leave it there. Bjorn Fredrickson, conservation director for New Mexico Wild, joining us to talk about the Gila River. Bjorn, thank you for coming on The Show. I really appreciate you taking the time.

BJORN FREDRICKSON: Yeah, thanks, Lauren. I enjoyed the conversation.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadl

MARK BRODIE: Thanks for listening to The Show’s podcast. The Show is produced by Sativa Peterson, Nick Sanchez, Amber Victoria Singer, Athena Ankrah and Ayana Hamilton. The Show was created by Jon Hoban. Our executive producer is Amy Silverman. You can find more of The Show and sign up for our newsletter at theshow.kjzz.org. You can also find us on Instagram @kjzztheshow.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created for audience accessibility. Transcripts are created on deadline with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, and may not be in their final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio segment.