Humble Water Goddess

It took a wanderer's existence to help Lisa Shipek realize she wanted roots, and now she's putting them down deep in Tucson and soaking them with harvested rain water.

The 29-year-old executive director of the local nonprofit Watershed Management Group (WMG) has spent time in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Nepal - and very little of that time was spent lounging on the beach or scouting discos. Passionate about bridging connections between people and the environment, Shipek and her husband, Catlow, a hydrol- ogy technician with the Southwest Watershed Research Center and one of the founders of WMG, spent eight months on the road a few years ago. Along the way, they lived in rural Costa Rica for three months, working with local farmers on sus- tainable water projects and reforestation in a landscape that had been degraded by intensive ranching and pineapple farming.