After more than a year of pandemic restrictions, the Gila Conservation Coalition welcomes you back to the Gila for the 17th annual Gila River Festival (Re)Connect with the River September 16 - 19, 2021 in Silver City, NM, the Gila National Forest, and along the Gila River.
This year’s hybrid (in-person and virtual) event explores our connection to Nature and celebrates our connection to one another and to the Gila River watershed. Join us for expert-led field trips that will explore the diversity of connections and interrelationships reflected in the Gila’s natural and cultural history, including birding and bird banding, medicinal plant, geology, rock art, and Wild and Scenic river hikes, horseback riding, fly fishing, and more.
Online presentations and discussions with national and regional thought leaders will spark conversations on our human connection with the natural world and our responsibility to protect the Earth’s ecosystems if we are to have a livable future.
Keynote speaker Kathleen Dean Moore is an author, moral philosopher and environmental advocate. She is an award-winning author and speaker that addresses our responsibility to protect a thriving future from climate chaos. In her first climate ethics book, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, Kathleen gathered testimony from the world’s moral leaders about humanity’s obligation to the future. In Great Tide Rising: Finding Clarity and Moral Courage to Confront Climate Change, she takes on the essential questions: What is our obligation to the future? What is the transformative power of moral resolve? In her Gila River Festival presentation, Kathleen Dean Moore will describe our connections to the natural world and our moral and ethical responsibility to protect the planet.
Speaking from his New York Times bestselling book Nature’s Best Hope, University of Delaware entomologist Doug Tallamy will discuss the connection between the built environment and global insect declines, the impending extinction of one million species worldwide, and three billion fewer birds in North America. Planet Earth cannot sustain such losses and continue to provide for human populations. Tallamy will discuss simple steps that each of us can take to reverse declining biodiversity and will explain why we are nature’s best hope.
A panel discussion with nature writer Sharman Apt Russell, poet Michelle Otero, and environmental activist Michael Casaus will examine the connection between human identity and the natural world.
Other festival events include music, Creatures of the Gila art show with the Grant County Art Guild, films and workshops.
Established in 2005, the Gila River Festival is an annual event that celebrates New Mexico’s last free-flowing river and its important role as the centerpiece in our region’s natural and cultural heritage. The festival provides a diversity of opportunities for participants to experience and learn about the natural and cultural history of the area through the arts, humanities and natural sciences.
Online registration opens August 1, 2021 at www.gilariverfestival.org
To become a sponsor of this year’s festival, visit https://www.gilariverfestival.
To volunteer, please sign up at https://www.gilariverfestival.