Water Warriors

What happens when a small, determined coalition of rural Nevadans and Utahns stand up to one of the largest water-export proposals in Western history? And how does their fight illuminate the future of water, culture, conservation and community in the Great Basin?

Register to Join Us!

Please join us on April 21 at 6 pm for “Water Warriors” - the 4th program in our Great Basin National Park 40th Anniversary virtual speaker series. 

Michael Branch’s new book project, Water Warriors, tells the inspiring story of how a colorful and diverse underdog alliance of rural Nevadans and Utahns won a monumental battle in the water wars that will determine the fate of the American West. In 1989 the city of Las Vegas, experiencing explosive growth and realizing that its meager share of the drought-stricken Colorado River was unlikely to keep pace with skyrocketing demand, applied for rights to roughly half of all the unclaimed groundwater in Nevada. Under its expansive, multi-billion-dollar proposal, the Southern Nevada Water Authority would construct a vast constellation of industrial wells to pump up to 800,000 acre feet of groundwater annually from 26 rural desert basins and export it 300 miles through a proposed pipeline to the distant city. This water grab would have devastated both wildlife and rural agricultural and Native communities throughout the Great Basin Desert, if not for a small, determined group of people who banded together to protect their water and their way of life. In this session, Mike will share the opening chapter to his book, which tells the remarkable, inspiring story of how Western Shoshone people fought the water grab in order to protect Bahsahwahbee, their sacred land in Spring Valley, on the western flank of Great Basin National Park.

Our Speaker

An award-winning humorist, nature writer, and teacher, Michael Branch is University Foundation Professor, Emeritus at University of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of more than 300 essays, which have appeared in venues such as CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, Outside, Orion, Ecotone, Pacific Standard, National Parks, The Scientist, High Country News, and many others. He has published ten books, including his trilogy of place-based humor writing from the Great Basin Desert: Raising Wild, Rants from the Hill, and How to Cuss in Western. His creative nonfiction includes pieces recognized in The Best American Essays, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Mike received the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Montana Prize for Humor, and in 2024 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. His most recent book, On the Trail of the Jackalope, has been called “an entertaining and enlightening road trip to the heart of an American legend.” He is currently at work on a new book about the successful 31-year fight by rural and Native people in the Great Basin to protect their groundwater from a massive pipeline project that would have exported that water to the subdivisions, golf courses, and casinos of Las Vegas.