2019 WEco Award Winners

To celebrate water leadership in Colorado, Water Education Colorado annually recognizes two individuals who demonstrate above-and-beyond commitment to water resources stewardship and education. In 2019 we proudly recognized Jennifer Pitt of Audubon with the Diane Hoppe Leadership Award for lifetime achievement in water education and Celene Hawkins of The Nature Conservancy with the Emerging Leader Award. The awards were presented during WEco’s annual President’s Reception on May 3 at Balistreri Vineyards.

CELENE HAWKINS

2019 Emerging Leader Award: At Home in the Southwest

By Greg Hobbs

Celene Hawkins learned to practice law with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. At the University of Colorado Law School, she spent her law clerk summer of 2007 with the tribal environmental programs in Towaoc, drafting oil and gas regulations. She distinguished herself at CU with both a law degree and a master’s in Environmental Studies. Graduating in 2008, she accepted a prestigious job offer from a large Phoenix firm, Snell & Wilmer. Celene had family ties to Arizona. Her mother, Kate, was a Professor of Nursing at the University of Arizona. She grew up in northern California’s Feather River country with her family in a solar-powered house near Quincy. Their backyard was the Plumas National Forest. Both her father, Sim, a custom jeweler, and her mother were volunteer firefighters. “My mother, who possessed a high degree of medical training, was sort of a big deal at the department.”

Within a year of moving to Arizona, Celene was back in southwestern Colorado helping the tribe and all its members. “They have such a long tenure on the land, they pass on information by oral tradition. I learned to listen well.” She tackled everything there was to do, concentrating on environmental, water, renewable energy, and cultural resources protection. From June of 2009 to December of 2015, she had a running load of water and other cases, as many as 30 at a time. Working closely with technical and engineering consultants, the Tribal Council, and Peter Ortego, general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, she waded into the complexities of the San Juan Recovery Implementation Program, the Ten Tribes Partnership in the Colorado River Basin, and water rights for the Animas-La Plata Project.

Celene became a member of the Southwest Basin Roundtable in 2010, helping to formulate the Colorado Water Plan. Since January of 2016, she’s been the director of the Western Colorado Water Project for the Colorado Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, coordinating with community groups and the tribes. Her sense of place for the small town, farmland, river and canyon country of the southwest shows in the way she met her husband, Tim, kayaking on the Animas River in 2007 in Durango. They have a one-year-old child, River, destined, as Celene says, to enjoy “desert moonrises.”

“Keep your head down and do good work,” epitomizes Celene’s commitment to southwestern Colorado and the state as a whole. She’s now a member of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, dedicated to working with the water plan as a “living document in the face of water scarcity, funding volatility, and increasing pressure on the Colorado River.” She sees water conservation, water user security, critical infrastructure, and environmental protection measures as priorities Coloradans must address together.

JENNIFER PITT

2019 Diane Hoppe Leadership Award: Source to Delta Visionary

By Greg Hobbs

Jennifer Pitt made the first long leap to her career on the Colorado Plateau from Manhattan to Mesa Verde National Park in 1990. She’d been working with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation following her graduation from Harvard University in 1988. Her undergraduate studies had focused on how artists and novelists depict urban parks.

Once you’ve been on the river, the river always calls you home. Jennifer’s graduation gift in 1988, planned as a celebration of her mother’s 50th birthday, was a Colorado River float trip in one of Martin Litton’s wooden dories. In the summers of 1990 and 1991 she headed to Mesa Verde National Park to serve as an interpretive ranger. There, in the canyons and the alcoves, she learned how the Ancestral Puebloans had arranged access to water. “I led visitors into Spruce Tree House and Balcony House. On my own time, I discovered springs the people had used and water catchment structures they had built. To survive, they had to learn how to share scarce water fairly with each other.”

Her 1993 Yale School of Forestry master’s program in Environmental Studies took her back to the Hudson River. She concentrated on water quality and land use challenges in a 100-mile reach upstream of the five New York boroughs. This led to Washington D.C. work in the office of Congressman Mike Kopetski of Oregon from 1993 to 1994, then to the National Park Service as a conservation planner from 1994 to 1998. From her Potomac River moorings, she ranged out to the Pacific Northwest organizing technical studies and community meetings for conservation organizations in Idaho. During this time, she helped develop the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s American Heritage Rivers Initiative.

In 1999, she went to work with her finest mentor, Dan Luecke, then the regional director of the Environmental Defense Fund based in Boulder, Colorado. “‘You can be an advocate and have disagreements about values,’ he advised me,” Jennifer says. “‘But never waiver in treating people with respect and dignity. You can have a discussion on their terms and look for alternatives.’” At EDF, she immediately stepped into co-authorship of Delta Once More, an influential report which concluded that modest water deliveries into desiccated sections of the Colorado River Delta in Mexico could significantly revive and maintain critical wetlands and riparian ecosystems. This could be accomplished, said the report, through “cooperation, accommodation and creativity” while respecting the water supply interests of the seven U.S. basin states and two states of the Republic of Mexico within the parameters of the “law of the river.”

How to convince water managers in the United States and Mexico that NGOs had a place at the table suitably involved Jennifer and a 2004 raft trip. In “Water is for Fighting Over and Other Myths about Water in the West,” author John Fleck relates how Coloradan, Bennett Raley, then Department of Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, invited her, “the token environmentalist,” to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon with a group of federal officials and state water managers. In the teeth of what has turned out to be two decades of prolonged drought in the Colorado River Basin, Raley’s goal was to “come up with a much more durable solution” than the federal government could impose. When Sid Wilson, a senior Arizona water manager, began to talk amicably with Jennifer along the river, says Fleck, “a change in attitude had taken place that rippled out through Colorado River Basin problem solving for years to come.”

Jennifer gives credit to many others for the pulse flow of 2014 that brought water into dried-up stretches of Colorado River Delta across the border. Through a highly collaborative process memorialized by Minute 319, Mexico and the United States had agreed to storage of a significant portion of Mexico’s treaty water in Lake Mead for release all the way downstream. Jennifer was there that day in the Delta watching Mexican families play in water they hadn’t seen for a generation. As if by magic, though the release was carefully timed to germinate native willow and cottonwood seeds, Delta restoration through base flows and periodic pulse flows has become an objective of national and international Colorado River water policy. Non-governmental organizations help to lease or purchase water as part of their restoration commitment. Jennifer has especially enjoyed working with Mexican citizens Osvel Hinojosa, Yamilett Carrillo, Francisco Zamora and Carlos de la Parra, along with Peter Culp, who hails from Arizona.

The river also brought home to Jennifer her immediate family. At a Tucson, Arizona water law conference meeting in 1999, she met her future husband, Michael Cohen, then living in Oakland, California. His long affiliation with the Pacific Institute focuses on Salton Sea restoration. Jennifer continues her Colorado River work with the National Audubon Society. Together with their 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, they make Colorado, the headwaters state, their home.

“Jennifer is imaginative, committed, quick, and fearless,” says Dan Luecke. “What she and her bi-national colleagues have accomplished is awe inspiring. It was clear, almost from the beginning, that she was going to make a difference. There are few like her.”