- Just ahead on "This American Land."

- We believe once you can connect, you can care.

And once you care, you can make change.

- Raising the alarm for the most endangered whale on the planet.

Getting people to step up and boats to slow down on the Atlantic Coast.

- I wouldn't go down there.

- The fight for groundwater in Arizona is causing these massive fields of fissures.

- Someone can drill a well, pump as much water as they want, and there's no restrictions.

- This is where all the magic happens.

- It takes the right rancher with the right attitude to experiment in these dry times.

Conserving water takes root along the Colorado River.

- What we're doing here at the Science Center is educating a mile a minute.

- Try to keep up with some great conservation stories ahead.

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪ Funding for "This American Land" provided by the Walton Family Foundation, the Horner Family Fund.

- Welcome to "This American Land."

I'm your host, Ed Arnett.

And each week, we'll introduce you to the people that are dedicated to making conservation work for all of us.

In our first story, an enormous challenge along the East Coast waters, North Atlantic right whales could be extinct within a generation.

Scientists are tackling their two big killers, ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.

Marsha Walton looks at the intense effort to save these creatures in waters from Florida to New England.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ - A quick glimpse of the world from a right whale's perspective.

Meet Smoke, a 29-year-old female.

A camera and underwater microphone are attached with a suction cup to track her movement and her behavior for a few hours.

- With 350 individuals left in the population, our biological kind of outlook for these guys, it's looking grim.

- Chantal Audran is executive director of the Tybee Island Marine Science Center near Savannah, Georgia.

The center adopted Smoke in 2012 as part of a right whale research program.

- And so this is really great footage that we finally get to see at least the top of Smoke's head.

[laughs] We saw for the first time Smoke move.

And so it was a really sweet, emotional moment for the Science Center staff.

At this time, she was pregnant.

She hadn't calved yet.

And she was swimming with another individual named Caterpillar.

- Chandler, look in there.

- Right now, it's a big focus on the ship strike and collision rule.

And what we're doing here at the Science Center is educating a mile a minute.

- That means getting people to relate to a marine mammal the size of a school bus.

Sharing Smoke's story helps that happen.

- We will bring our inflatable North Atlantic right whale, Smoke, and do a Smoke Goes to School session.

We believe once you can connect, you can care.

And once you care, you can make change.

What that anthropomorphizing can do, make this human care that all of these whales are dying.

- Right whales were nearly wiped out from hunting, finally banned in 1935.

Most deaths now come from ship strikes.

Of 19 calves born this season, four were struck and killed, mostly by pleasure boats, not huge cargo ships.

- Never ill intent from the individual.

They don't know that they could possibly hit a whale while they're out there.

We partner with groups like Georgia Conservancy and IFAW who are trying to get signage at the marinas.

- There's a move now to lower speed limits for smaller boats in whale-safe zones and $82 million from NOAA Fisheries to try to reduce these collisions, for technology, like cameras, that can detect speeding vessels.

- These are all of the ships that are coming into port right now or moving out.

And you can see we have two speeders.

- And a grim but important tool, what Audran calls Whale CSI.

- This is imagery from when we necropsied Pilgrim's calf on the coast of Tybee.

And it was quite clear that this was a blunt force trauma case from a ship collision.

If we can determine the cause of death to be human interaction, then those kind of bits of evidence for a case can be something that changes policy.

80% of the population has entanglement scars on them.

[somber dramatic music] - I got him.

He's in.

Get the boat ready to go over.

- Teams that protect these whales are special kinds of heroes.

♪ ♪ - Think everything came off.

Whoo-hoo!

- It's very dangerous for them to go out and save these animals, so it's an enormous amount of bravery.

And each case is very emotional.

♪ ♪ - Fishing gear entanglement is the other whale killer.

Some fishing crews in the Atlantic are proving they're serious about co-existing with whales.

- We're going the extra mile to try and sustain the fisheries and the wildlife.

- On-demand or ropeless fishing gear dramatically decreases the chance of deadly entrapment.

Innovation from black sea bass crews is paying off.

Their use of safer gear has led to fewer federal restrictions on where and when they can fish.

- It's exciting to know that we may be able to contribute towards people's livelihoods in a meaningful way and in a way that allows us to still protect the North Atlantic right whale from entanglement.

- Thousands of miles away in Puget Sound, Washington, a Coast Guard program known as the Cetacean, or Whale Desk.

They collect data on whale locations and share it in near real-time with commercial vessels.

- Knowing where whales are allows mariners to take mitigating actions such as changing course or slowing down in order to avoid striking or disturbing whales in their vicinity.

- Ships and individuals can also report whales they spot using an app, phone, or radio.

It goes to one database shared by ships, the U.S. and Canadian military, and marine scientists.

If you're a pleasure boater in any whale territory, download the apps so you can avoid these animals and help others do the same.

The tools exist for us to watch for, listen for, and radically reduce human impacts on these smart, inquisitive animals.

But will we?

- And so for the planet and our biological web, every life is very necessary.

We're all connected.

♪ ♪ [dynamic music] - And now, new efforts to protect America's most familiar wildlife, birds.

Climate change and habitat destruction take a huge toll on them.

So do collisions with buildings.

Glass and shiny surfaces can disorient birds in flight, and collisions are usually fatal.

Bird-lovers and communities are doing a lot to lessen this threat.

More than two dozen cities have adopted bird-friendly building strategies.

That can mean using materials other than glass for the exterior or adding a stunning array of color to the structure.

- I think the real tragedy of the problem is that it is entirely preventable.

Architecture has a complicated relationship with the environment.

I mean, buildings, from an ecological standpoint, use up a lot of resources.

And if architects want to do something that's pro-environment, it's actually a real challenge.

But preventing bird collisions is one of the few things that's incredibly simple to do.

And there's a lot that architects, designers, builders can do to prevent the problem.

They can, at the start of the design process, make a decision to use fritted or bird-safe glass.

I mean, they can use retrofit solutions.

So right here behind me, you see an example of a retrofit that students here designed in order to prevent collisions with this portion of the school of architecture.

The spacing in the pattern is designed to confuse birds.

It prevents them from colliding with the window.

- Designers can use a big bird on their windows so others will steer clear.

When it's done during a building's design phase, bird-safe construction doesn't add much cost.

The American Bird Conservancy says retrofits can also be reasonably priced, usually by adding window films, patterns, etchings, or colors to existing structures, from skyscrapers to bus shelters to homes and apartments.

Now we take you out west.

Our correspondent Brad Hicks has spent a lot of time in the Colorado River basin in the last year.

He's met some interesting people facing a lot of different challenges.

- They definitely provide a conduit for, you know, pollutants and other things that you wouldn't want to get in your groundwater.

- In parts of the desert Southwest, an unusual phenomenon is happening to the Earth.

It's opening up in places, huge cracks that can extend for miles.

As Brad shows us, we know what's causing it, but no one seems certain about a solution for stopping it.

[suspenseful music] - There's something out here Joe Cook wants you to see.

- Yeah, we don't really trust that ground at all.

- A sort of portal into the underworld.

- I wouldn't go down there.

- We're 45 minutes east of Phoenix... - This is one of the deeper spots.

- Where a field of fissures fans out for two miles.

- You can go from a real narrow crack that no one notices to something like this literally overnight.

- The depletion of groundwater is causing entire aquifers in Arizona to collapse.

- If you lower the groundwater table hundreds of feet, you're going to get tens of feet of subsidence at the surface.

- And when the surface subsides, it cracks open.

- We've mapped almost 200 miles of these kinds of fissures throughout the state.

- Most are in rural areas, and the finger is usually pointed at nearby farms, thirsty nut growers out of California, massive dairies from the Midwest, and a Saudi Arabian alfalfa operation near the biggest fissure of all.

- Arizona has experienced an influx of industrial-scale agriculture, which winds up hastening the depletion of the aquifers.

- But Sarah Porter, a water policy expert at Arizona State University, says the finger may be pointed in the wrong direction.

- Those companies, which have been somewhat vilified, came in and did something perfectly lawful.

- Because when groundwater rules were established in 1980, they bypassed thinly-populated parts of the state.

In rural Arizona, groundwater is a free-for-all.

- Someone can drill a well, pump as much water as they want, and there's no restrictions.

- We essentially have no protections here.

- A decade ago, a huge dairy farm drilled deep wells near Steve Kisiel's home.

His well has been going down ever since.

- It's been dropping between 5 and 5 1/2 feet a year.

- What's the solution?

- Your question assumes that there's a consensus that we shouldn't let aquifers be depleted.

I don't hear a clear cry from rural parts of Arizona saying, "Please bring regulation to us."

- Come on, cattle!

- Down the road from Steve Kisiel, rancher Sonia Gasho led the call against a local proposition that would have slapped strict controls on groundwater.

- The biggest concern was private property rights and the idea that someone from the government, whatever level, was going to tell you how to farm.

- What we're really talking about is changing people's freedom to use their land.

There's a strong ethos in the American West, and that is a big deal.

- But draining aquifers comes with other concerns: collapsing roads, toxins seeping into the water table, and lasting damage to the landscape.

- They basically capture all the water that would otherwise flow across this landscape, and so you get additional erosion on the upslope side of the fissure.

And you get basically abandonment and plants die and the ecosystem suffers on the downslope side.

- But in rural Arizona, where independence outweighs the will to save groundwater and farmers grow the food we all want, Joe Cook will keep finding new fissures.

- We're adding to that number, you know, pretty regularly.

It's kind of hard to keep up with sometimes.

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪ - It takes a leap of faith any time farmers and ranchers change the way things have been done for generations on their land.

On another part of the Colorado River basin, our correspondent, Brad Hicks, and his crew found a rancher leading the way to save water for his crops and livestock.

Let's go to Northern Colorado.

[metallic scraping] - Scrape by scrape, Paul Bruchez digs into the unknown.

He's experimenting with a plant that has never been domesticated.

- There's not a lot known about this particular plant.

- For this rancher who's been shaking things up along the Colorado River for years, it's right on-brand.

[cow moos loudly] Bruchez is a fifth-generation rancher.

Much of the year, his livestock feeds on the wild range, but in the winter, they need forage crops grown with Colorado River water.

But after urban areas and industrial farms take their share, Paul and his ranching neighbors get what's left.

And in most years, it's not much.

But instead of complaining, he came up with a way to reconfigure the river near his ranch, making it better for his fellow ranchers and for fish.

- This is where all the magic happens.

- People started to take notice.

- I just couldn't extend enough gratitude to somebody like Paul for stepping into the leadership role that he's in to try new things.

- Since then, he has built relationships across the Rockies with urban areas and environmental groups.

- We all share this resource, and we need to figure out how to be as responsible as possible with it.

- Which is why he's planting these silphium seeds.

On this day, an experimental crop research center from Kansas is giving him a head start with seedlings.

If they grow, they'll look like small sunflowers.

- We're trying to figure out how to take it from, like, a wild plant to something we can just grow in a field.

- And they had no problem finding the right rancher eager to give it a try.

Silphium has deep roots, so it requires a lot less water.

and it's rich in protein, so it could replace other crops that his cattle eat.

If it works, his experiment could save ranches across the Rockies and beyond and demonstrate once again collaboration, not conflict, is the way to manage water.

[dynamic music] - Now a big milestone for us to report on in the Rocky Mountains: veterans groups, Indigenous people, and outdoor lovers are celebrating the creation of the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument.

The Vet Voice Foundation worked to protect this harsh but beautiful terrain.

It's where the U.S. Army's elite 10th Mountain Division prepared for combat in World War II.

One of those young recruits was Francis Lovett.

Before his death at age 101, he worked passionately to protect this land.

He spoke with Afghanistan veteran Brad Noone.

- The experience with the outdoors was for me one of the most gorgeous times of my life.

I would give anything if I could go again out into all these woods and mountains and just look, see, and feel and smell.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so interested in having this declared a national monument.

I'm in favor of protecting every acre we can.

- Also in Central Colorado, the Department of Interior has announced the Thompson Divide mineral withdrawal, protecting 225,000 acres of public lands from mining.

Let's meet some of the folks who work so hard to honor these places that highlight the strong connection between veterans and our public lands.

[peaceful music] ♪ ♪ - It's beautiful out here, huh?

- [chuckles] - Yeah.

- Wilderness areas are the most untrampled places that we have of nature.

- Hi, cameras.

♪ ♪ - It's the place where you could truly go and get away from society.

My name is Garett Reppenhagen.

I'm the Rocky Mountain director of Vet Voice Foundation.

♪ ♪ I came to Colorado and I fell in love with this place as a sniper in the U.S. Army that fought in Iraq.

If it wasn't for places like this, I wouldn't be here today.

♪ ♪ - My name is Bradley Noone.

I'm a 10th Mountain veteran.

In my time in the service, I incurred personally a number of injuries, the most marked, I believe, being my traumatic brain injury.

- So this is basically the footprint of Camp Hale that we're standing in.

During World War II, we realized that there was going to be a fight in the mountains and that we needed to train up some soldiers to prepare for that fight.

They chose this place outside of Leadville, Colorado, as the area that they were going to train soldiers to go fight in the Alps.

[geese honking] The Continental Divide Wilderness, Recreation, and Camp Hale Legacy Act, it'll protect a large area all throughout the Continental Divide in Colorado, adding wilderness areas, recreational areas.

One of the key things out of the 100,000 acres of this bill, almost 29,000 acres will be Camp Hale.

And it will create a special management area called National Historic Landscape, which will be the first of its kind, which emphasizes not only on the natural beauty that's around us but also on the history of the 10th Mountain Division and how they used this place to prepare themselves to fight in World War II.

- And bring some vets out and see what the feedback is, see what they think, and see how we run it.

Coming out here into Camp Hale itself and surrounding wilderness areas, it gives us a place of solitude.

It gives us a place to reflect on the issues we may be having, the readjustment back into civilian life.

♪ ♪ - These are the headwaters of the Eagle River.

What I love about the Continental Divide Recreation, Wilderness, and Camp Hale Legacy Act is that it's so big that even its name is big.

To my right is the Holy Cross Wilderness area.

My name is Susie Kincade.

I work with Wilderness Workshop in Eagle, Colorado.

♪ ♪ Our wildlands are disappearing really quickly.

The desire for people to build here, live here, has put so much pressure on through rampant development.

I think what's special about this bill is that so many diverse communities have had a voice.

♪ ♪ So we have snowmobilers here who may not have the same interests as hunters... [Velcro rips] Who may not have the same interest as Nordic skiers, who also may not have the same interests as mountain bikers.

And they use different types of terrain and different places.

And all of that input needs to be considered.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ - Mountain biking is an incredible sport.

♪ ♪ My name is Ernest Saeger.

I'm on the board of directors of the Vail Valley Mountain Bike Association.

Mountain bikers, we want our access.

We want to be able to ride our bikes.

We want to be able to recreate.

And I think there's enough land and enough wilderness for everyone to really have the access that they want.

We know as mountain bikers that we don't want to go out and ride everywhere.

We want to ride on mountain bike trails and sustainable trails.

And we want to make sure that there is land that's conserved for the future generations to come.

[indistinct chatter] - To give you an idea of how all this fits together, here's Vail and the Vail ski area up here.

The Copper Mountain ski area is over here.

The proposed act that we're supporting is this area through here.

I'm Donny Shefchik, senior guide with Paragon Guides in Vail, Colorado.

♪ ♪ Our main activities in winter are backcountry ski touring, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing.

- There we go.

That was fun.

- Today, I met with a group I've had out before on a multi-day trip.

They came in kind of neophytes.

And I think they've really come to respect and understand the outdoors in winter.

- It's really important to keep these areas protected, not only for those of us that just live here, but for other people that want to come and visit this state.

It's a really amazing area.

♪ ♪ - The outdoor recreation industry is incredibly important.

- Whoo!

- Our industry depends on this influx of people who want to enjoy the wilderness areas, the backcountry.

If it was not here, I'm not sure very many of us would be here.

- The area that we're in right now, the heart of the Rocky Mountains, is very populated.

It has huge ski resorts, Vail, Breckenridge, Aspen, a lot of tourism and travel.

- No worries there.

- In Colorado, outdoor recreation accounts for $29 billion of consumer spending.

And with that, it also creates 229,000 jobs, year-round jobs, most of them.

One of the things that we've done in populating our mountain states is that we have built sort of huge obstacles for the wildlife.

They're called Interstate 90, Interstate 80, Interstate 70, Interstate 40, all the way from north to south.

Those are giant barriers for the animals, so the land over I-70 will be protected.

It's a land bridge that goes over a large tunnel.

[peaceful piano music] We have to create this balance between recreational use, summer and winter, wildlife and their needs, our outdoor industry, and still maintain and steward this land that is the reason everybody wants to come here.

[turkey call squeaking] - Turkey hunting, for me, is a solitary hunt.

I'm out here not just hunting the birds.

I'm out here getting away, breathing again, getting the weight off my shoulder that I might have from my workday life, my stress.

My name is Rick Seymour.

I'm a United States veteran.

I'm a grandfather, a hunter, and an angler.

[turkey call squeaking] Hunting is what I've always done, and fishing.

I don't do it just to go ahead and kill something, catch something.

I do it for the peace and tranquility of myself.

[stream babbling] This wilderness area that is surrounding us encompasses part of the 660 million public land acres that we have in America.

[imitating turkey call] This public land is your land.

It's my land.

I like it to stay that way.

I use the red arrow for my practice.

With this bill, especially in the Camp Hale legacy area, you have world-class hunting, the Blue Ribbon fishing.

What more could you want?

The people that come there are the tourists that help our economy.

My own children, as an example, they take their kids to the forest where they belong, where they can go ahead and feel.

[takes deep breath] Like that.

It's so relaxing.

- Over there.

- Hmm?

- Is that a dog?

See?

- You know, I want to see the places that I swore to defend have a legacy, and carry on for future generations.

- Yay!

- My son, Ocean, should have the ability to play and have fun in these spaces just as I did and his children and their children's children.

So I want to make sure that these incredible areas, these national treasures, are there forever.

[dynamic music] - That's it for today's show, and we'll see you next time on "This American Land."

- And you can watch us any time on PBS Passport.

[dynamic music] ♪ ♪