Catherine Jaffee

Catherine Jaffee is a journalist whose projects have included investigating water rights wars at the headwaters of the Rio Grande in the San Luis Valley, illuminating the conservation stories of the Okavango Delta River Basin, and interrogating the connection between apartheid and coastal communities’ relationships to their coastlines. Each of these series has won awards and international acclaim. In 2017, she became an audio journalist and founded House of Pod, a community audio production company and storytelling school that shepherded over 50 podcast series into existence. She has since produced over 1,000 podcast episodes for Radiolab, Outside, National Geographic Society, PRX, PBS, Gimlet, SAPIENS Magazine, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, among others.

“Unnavigable: How Ephemeral Waterways Survive” documents how the Sackett vs. EPA court decision unfolds, focusing on the Rio Grande, a 1,885-mile lifeline for Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico that periodically runs dry due to climate, stress and overuse. The project focus is the Rio Grande because states and tribes must assume the responsibility of monitoring and permitting water quality for most of the water that feeds this river, a complex legal and cultural web involving 19 Pueblos, four states and two countries who now must manage a hard-to-litigate, polluted river, burdening resource-poor communities and semi-arid ecosystems.