Hi, it's Terry Gross, the host of Fresh Air. We bring you in-depth long-form

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Listen to our Peabody Award-winning Air Podcast from W. HY and NPR.

Hey, this is Antonia Sirejido.

You're listening to Imperfect Paradise from Allea Studios, the show about hidden worlds and messy realities.

My colleague, a correspondent on this show, Emily Garen, used to be a beat reporter covering the environment for our station at

elaist and she recently partook in a tradition that only audio journalists

that have been in the game for some years get to do. Listen back to a story you did earlier in your

career and mercilessly judge yourself. In 2018 she reported a story about how

climate change is drying up the Colorado River.

So I'm standing at Lake Mead right now and the bathtub ring, which is this really big white band that shows how far the lake has shrunk. It's about 130 feet tall, so that is how

low the lake is.

Lake Mead is a huge reservoir that sits behind the Hoover Dam.

It supplies water to cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego and tons of farms.

Recently, people have been panicking about the possibility of the reservoir drying up so much

that no water makes it to those places. It's what we call Deadpool. And the bathtub ring

is a symbol of that. It tells you just how far the water level has dropped.

That's why Emily was there, back in 2018, walking back and forth along the Hoover Dam and talking to herself in a microphone.

Testing, one, two, three, testing.

So I'm walking along the edge of Lake Mead.

So I'm standing at Lake Mead right now,

and the back... So I'm standing at Lake Mead right now and the bath

...