If you’re new here —
A lot of new folks showed up after the Colorado River piece.
Welcome.
I’m Len. Diné and Romanian — that’s where the funny last name comes from. I run @nativesoutdoors , make films, and do field reporting on Indigenous sovereignty, water, energy, and public lands. PhD from Carnegie Mellon. Recently named to the @the_explorers_club EC50 Class of 2026. This photo is from hauling camera gear along the Tuichi River in Bolivia documenting illegal mining in the Amazon. I spend a lot of time on rivers.
Some things that will help you here:
I post serious research and I post memes and stupid shit. Sometimes on the same day. I’m Native — the world is stupid right now and humor is how we make sense of it. If that combination messes with your head, fair warning.
I don’t always agree with everything I share. Sometimes things are just funny. Relax.
If you want to push back on something, I’m genuinely here for it. I love other points of view. But do your homework first — I did. Opinions around here run on thought, not vibes. If you bring me something I missed, I’ll change my mind. That’s a real offer.
Read the thing before you react to the thing. You’d be surprised how many people skip this step.
That’s basically it. Be a grown up, don’t grandstand, don’t need everything to be simple. We’re going to get along fine.
Glad you’re here.
Most people navigating environmental work, Indigenous media, conservation campaigns, or academic careers in these spaces are making decisions without anyone in their corner who has actually done all of it.
I have.
PhD in Engineering & Public Policy. Over a decade across environmental policy, filmmaking, expedition leadership, and building a media company outside the institutions that gatekeep this work. I’ve helped researchers reframe dissertations that weren’t landing, filmmakers find the angle that got them funded, and advocates build campaigns that moved things that weren’t moving.
I’m opening a limited number of consulting sessions each month at introductory rates.
• 30 min / $150 — One focused question. Direct answer.
• 60 min / $275 — Strategy, feedback, and real direction.
• 60 min / $500 — Organizational session for teams and nonprofits.
If cost is a barrier, reach out before booking. I’m happy to discuss.
Link in bio.
I’m honored to be part of the Explorers Club 50 — the Class of 2026.
The EC50 recognizes fifty people working at the edge of science, exploration, and conservation. I see this less as an award and more as a responsibility: to keep doing rigorous, grounded work with the people and places that make exploration meaningful in the first place.
Nothing I’ve done exists in isolation. This reflects a team effort across landscapes, disciplines, and communities who believe exploration should serve something larger than ego.
@the_explorers_club
Alaska’s diesel comes from South Korea.
The Strait of Hormuz closed in February. The rest of the country got a six-month inflation story. Rural Alaska got a twelve-month survival math problem — and almost nobody is talking about why.
Most Americans don’t know that Alaska imports a meaningful share of its refined fuel from Korean refineries that depend on a Persian Gulf chokepoint seven thousand miles away. The barge that arrives at a village tank farm in August carries fuel that was refined in Ulsan. When Hormuz closes, that supply chain breaks. The village pays the price for the next twelve months, regardless of what global markets do.
I spent fifteen years on Alaska’s rivers, in the villages, and inside the Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy. New essay at All At Once on what this crisis actually means for rural Alaska — and the country that produces the oil but pays the most for the fuel.
Link in bio.
Look at this güey in the photographs. He is floating the Arctic in a boat that is technically a pool toy, wearing a gun on his life vest like this is a normal configuration for a human body, which in that place, at that moment, it absolutely was, because the Arctic does not operate on the same logic as everywhere else and if you show up there with normal human assumptions about how things work it will correct you immediately and without apology. The river goes where it wants. The bears have a different understanding of personal space. The light at midnight is doing something that should require a permit. And this man — me, I am this man — was so grateful for all of it, for the complete and total absurdity of being a small warm creature in a glorified pool toy with a Glock on his chest floating through something ancient and enormous and completely unimpressed, that he forgot it was also finite. And then the Strait of Hormuz, which is a place, apparently, with the power to restructure the dreams of a Diné guy in Tucson who just wants to go back to a frozen river with his little gun, became an international incident. The flights dissolved. The charters evaporated. The window closed. Qué se le va a hacer. Glockcito is in a safe. The Arctic is up there doing its thing without me. The pool toy is in the garage. Ya estuvo.
l wrote a thing about what happens when you ignore the sign.
At Clay Hills Crossing there’s a parking lot full of rigs and a large sign that says do not go further, waterfall ahead. This is where most people stop. We put 13 people and four aluminum skiffs in the water here and went the other direction. My tent blew away on the first night. I used what remained of it — a nylon suggestion of shelter — for four more nights. Both cameras survived. My dignity did not.
53 miles of river. 40 miles of reservoir. A sediment delta that has moved 4-6 miles downstream since last year. Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines modeled to go dark by October. And an ecosystem that is bouncing back so fast it makes the policy failures feel almost beside the point. Almost.
This is the piece I’ve been sitting with since we got off the water last week. It’s about entrenched meanders and bureaucratic ones. It’s about what a river does when nobody is watching — which is whatever it wants. It’s about the 20-30 people a year who see this corridor and the 40 million who depend on the water leaving it.
It’s called “Do Not Go Further.” I went further. New on All At Once — link in bio.
The floor of my tent separated from the walls at 2am in a thunderstorm and the tent blew away. I did not blow away. I just lay there on the ground in the rain like a piece of river debris with opinions.
I recovered the tent. I then had to use this floorless tent for the rest of the trip. Every night. Crawling into what can only be described as a hovel. A nylon suggestion of shelter. Both cameras survived in perfect working order and I want that on the record.
Lowest San Juan — Clay Hills to Lake Powell with @returningrapids . Quick geology lesson you didn’t ask for: the San Juan carries enormous amounts of sediment into Powell, and as the lake drops, that delta moves downstream. We floated through canyons that were under a hundred feet of water not long ago. The reservoir buried them sixty years ago and now they’re back. We did photo matching — same angles, decades apart. The changes are staggering.
Why this matters if you don’t spend your weekends reading Bureau of Reclamation reports (normal behavior): the water system 40 million people depend on is being renegotiated this year. The rules expire this fall. Seven states couldn’t agree. The feds are stepping in. Powell could end 2026 at 18% capacity and lose hydropower by winter. Worst snowpack since ’86.
People have been figuring out how to live with this river for a very long time. The petroglyphs along this corridor are proof. We’re just the latest ones who think we get a say. The river has never once asked for our input.
What a crew.
Fresh off two low water runs of rivers returning to Glen Canyon. And so much uncertainty, where we think about the future carries the weight of water.🌀
Full story on Wild Words. You don’t need the Substack app to read it. Subscribing is free and stories like this show up in your inbox (no scrolling required). I’ll be increasingly spending my energy on Wild Words as I work on my forthcoming book, Riverside (Torrey House Press 2027). Hope to see you over there.
#coloradoriver #riverside #restoreglencanyon
Len Necefer, Ph.D., has spent years documenting landscapes and communities. Working across a variety of landscapes – deserts, rivers, and Arctic tundra – has shown that environmental challenges rarely fit into neat storylines.
On Wednesday, May 27 at 6:00pm, @lennecefer will present reflections from his experiences in “From Field to Frame: Lessons in Environmental Storytelling” at the Bears Ears Education Center (567 W Main St, Bluff, UT 84512).
This talk explores the gap between lived reality and the narratives often presented to the public, and how better storytelling—rooted in place, observation, and humility—can deepen understanding of land, water, and environmental change. The focus is on practice: what it means to tell environmental stories responsibly in an era of oversimplification.
Join us! This event is free and open to the public. Check out our website events page for more upcoming events and opportunities.
