Sedona News – Join Keep Sedona Beautiful on Wednesday, April 13, at 5:00 p.m. for its monthly Preserving the Wonder™ Speaker Series. This event will be held both live at 360 Brewer Road in Sedona and virtually via Zoom. Please visit the KSB website, www.keepsedonabeautiful.org for details.
Dr. Nancy Steele, Executive Director of Friends of the Verde River will speak about water issues in the Verde Valley. A recent study published in Nature Climate Change reported that the current drought in the southwest was the driest 22-year period since 800 CE. For the Verde, stream gag data shows summertime flows have declined significantly over the last thirty years. What about water quality? One finding from the 2020 Verde Report Card was that we are lacking much information about water quality throughout the Verde system. This talk will focus on what we do know, what we don’t know, and what we are doing to better understand water in the Verde Valley.
Dr. Nancy Steele is the executive director of Friends of the Verde River, which is dedicated to working collaboratively for a healthy, flowing Verde River system. Before joining Friends of the Verde River in 2018, Nancy was the Executive Director of the Council for Watershed Health in Los Angeles for ten years. She co-founded the Arroyos & Foothills Conservancy in 2000, serving as President/CEO through 2011 and as Director of Conservation in 2017.
Nancy earned her doctorate in Environmental Science and Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. She has a degree in zoology from Arizona State University; and a biology degree from Occidental College. Nancy was born and raised in Phoenix and loves being outdoors, especially in the southwest. She and her husband have operated an urban beekeeping business for 40 years.
Bring your own sustainable drinking vessel to the event for complimentary iced-tea and to enter a drawing to win a set of beautiful note cards with photos taken by Sedona’s own Derek von Briesen.
Keep Sedona Beautiful’s monthly Preserving the Wonder™ Speaker Series focuses on presenting a diversity of programs relevant to the unique environment of our region. Fifty years ago, in 1972, Keep Sedona Beautiful was founded in a Sedona living room by people who were concerned about keeping litter and “honky-tonk” signs off the roadsides – sixteen years before the City of Sedona was incorporated in 1988. Once established, and in an effort to counterbalance the effect of a city that straddled two counties and lacked local city guidelines for building homes and landscaping, KSB advocated for landscaping with native plants and sponsored Residential Design Guidelines for Sedona and the Surrounding Red Rock Area home designs.
For the past fifty years, the nonprofit organization has been dedicated to conserving the area’s beauty by opposing ill-considered growth and disregard for maintaining precious resources such as clean water, dark skies, and native plants, as well as noise pollution, etc. To launch KSB’s Fiftieth Anniversary, the Board of Directors has updated its mission statement: To protect and enhance the scenic beauty and natural environment of Sedona and the Verde Valley. For more information about Keep Sedona Beautiful, please visit http://www.keepsedonabeautiful.org/.