In an essay of the same name, Aldo Leopold famously proposed “thinking like a mountain” as a way of reckoning with wildness, but in the West, we would be better served by trying to think like a watershed. Whatever precipitation falls in the watershed stays in the watershed, thanks to the laws of gravity—though technology has allowed exceptions to these laws. The watershed is the most logical organizational concept for the region politically (though it’s a little late for that) and geographically.

For many thousands of years, Indigenous communities in the West lived largely on the resources naturally occurring in their watersheds, and the same can be said for early settlers. Then came the likes of William Mulholland, who captured every last drop of water from the roughly two-thousand square-mile Owens River Watershed for the present and future inhabitants of Los Angeles. The capturing, storing, selling, borrowing and stealing of water across the West quickly gained momentum, and today’s modern metropolises would be impossible without it. Water is our most important resource, which is why it is a key coverage area for High Country News, the only regional magazine serving the western United States.

The Colorado River gets a lot of media attention, given that nearly 40 million people in seven western states, thirty tribal nations and Mexico rely on it for drinking water. But twenty other rivers in the West have interstate water compacts. The Rio Grande, Snake, and Yellowstone rivers are also divvied up across state lines. Rarely have tribes been included in these compacts, even though many hold senior water rights. And states like Arizona have found ways to avoid delivering the water to which the tribes are entitled. These are the kinds of stories that High Country News is committed to telling, looking past the well-covered communities and stories to those that have gone under-covered or undetected by other outlets.

With a mission to cover the issues that define the West, High Country News’s editors have water on the mind every single day. As part of a remote team, we each observe how water issues play out in our respective communities; we read coverage produced by local and national outlets; and we plan our own unique coverage. As a regional magazine, we fill the gaps between the reporting done by local outlets and national reporting on the West—most of which is produced by writers and editors from outside the region. We also serve a vital role as a source of coverage for the growing number of communities in the West that no longer have a local news outlet.

Some of those so-called news deserts occur in desert communities—communities that would not be possible without the plumbing of our watersheds, requiring massive works of hydro-infrastucture such as dams and aqueducts. These architectural wonders are of strong interest to High Country News readers, not just because of the vital water they store and deliver, but also for their relative reliability to function as designed. Glen Canyon Dam is a perennial topic of interest, as the amount of water stored in Lake Powell drops precariously close to the level at which the dam’s hydropower penstocks will cease to function. What happens next is a subject of much speculation, but surprisingly, not a lot of planning. It’s worth remembering that William Mulholland was also responsible for one of the biggest civil-engineering disasters in history: the failure of the St. Francis Dam, which killed more than 400 people in LA and Ventura counties. A related matter, and something our editors are reckoning with across the region, is the fact that much of this hydro-infrastructure was not designed for today’s climate, much less the increasing weather extremes we are rushing toward as we continue to emit carbon into the atmosphere unabated.

One story that every westerner ought to be following—an antidote, of sorts, to the doom—is the rebirth of the Klamath River on the California-Oregon border in the wake of the largest dam removal project in US history. A year after four dams on the Klamath were removed, the salmon are returning in numbers that have surpassed predictions, and some recently reached the headwaters of the Klamath for the first time in more than a century. The Hupa, Yurok, Klamath, Shasta and Karuk tribes led the process, with the intent of restoring once-historic salmon runs and revitalizing cultural traditions. This is one of the most exciting and inspiring stories happening in the West. Downriver from there, 73 square miles on the eastern side of the lower Klamath are the site of the largest LandBack project in California history. This large swathe of ancestral lands is now known as the Blue Creek Salmon Sanctuary and Yurok Tribal Community Forest, owned and managed by the Yurok Tribe.

These are local stories that hold huge significance for the future of our region, which are the kinds of stories that High Country News is dedicated to telling. We look for stories that have educational, informational, and inspirational value for our readers and the communities we serve. When it comes to water in the West, there is no shortage of subjects to cover—drought and flooding, agricultural use and misuse, melting glaciers, green energy development, data centers, boating and angling, water law and policy, groundwater, wetlands, estuaries, urban waterways, flora and fauna, point-source and cross-boundary pollution, LandBack, and traditional ecological knowledge and stewardship.

As far as resource management goes, High Country News also covers forests, minerals and fossil-fuels, but water is the more valuable commodity. We don’t need oil to live. Some countries even consider access to clean water a human right (though the United States is not among them).

On the philosophical side, High Country News is covering efforts to advance ecological personhood for rivers and watersheds in the West. At the heart of this movement lies a question: How would we treat our rivers, and the hydrological services and resources they provide, if we regarded them as persons—wetter, more slithery persons, but equally endowed with the right to exist? Answering this question would require the ability to empathize with rivers, to consider their needs. The best way to approach this question, it turns out, is thinking like a watershed.

Jennifer Sahn is editor in chief of High Country News, a magazine about the West. She previously served as executive editor of Pacific Standard and as editor of Orion before that. Her editorial work has been recognized by numerous organizations, including the National Magazine Awards, Pushcart Prize, Longreads, and the Best American Series anthologies. She lives in Santa Barbara.