As floods rage with rainfall and snowmelt, one has to wonder about high water yet to come, and also to reflect on floods we’ve endured.

On February 20, 1986 I lived ten long blocks from the American River, but still a full story beneath the level of floodwaters brimming Sacramento’s levee. At a riverfront park I climbed to the top of the skinny pile of rock that—as a levee—constituted the city’s tenuous defense and, with water lapping at my feet on the other side, I watched angry flows sudsing toward sea. Turning back the other way, I looked down on the roofs of the city.

California’s senior U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein recently passed away after 31 years in the U.S. Senate. To say that she was influential on California water matters would be an understatement. I’ve prepared some personal recollections for Friends of the River.

Senator Feinstein’s introduction to high-stake water and rivers games came when she was still the mayor of San Francisco. In 1987, the year that I joined the FOR staff, President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior Don Hodel floated the idea of restoring Hetch-Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. She soon paid her first visit Yosemite and was calling O’Shaughnessy Dam and Hetch-Hetchy Reservoir “San Francisco’s birthright….”

California is at yet another critical point in its struggle toward a sustainable water future, and yet we’re still talking about the wrong solutions.

Sites Reservoir is the latest in a long line of proposed dams that promise to end our cycle of water insecurity. However, Sites will add very little to California’s water portfolio, and its harm to the Sacramento River, Delta ecosystem, and communities that rely on them will be irreversible and ongoing…

A recent poll found that people today, especially younger people, feel helpless when it comes to fighting climate change.

Here’s the thing: That’s exactly how polluting corporations want you to feel.

We who have loved and lost wild rivers like the Stanislaus live with memories of their moods. In our hearts the living waters still flow high and exciting or murmur by in perfect peace. And we suffer, knowing we’ll not experience such intimate places again in this life.

It is our hubris that has made some of us vulnerable to the challenges of this wet year. It is our hubris that has permitted many to experience the trauma of having their lives upended by floodwaters. It is our hubris that has left so many of our floodplain neighbors without flood insurance and the real ability to recover from flooding.

In a February 8, 2023 op-ed, the president of the Board of Directors of Nevada Irrigation District (NID) writes that an appeal to the US Supreme Court by NID could have “severe impacts” to NID and the community it serves. The op-ed omits the key facts on which the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last August. It also exaggerates the impacts to NID and obscures the issues.

The California Fish and Wildlife Commission made the Shasta snow wreath species a candidate for endangered species status under the California Endangered Species Act in 2020, and this month it was fully listed.

Friends of the River and its coalition partners have challenged the Del Puerto Canyon Dam project in court. On Halloween 2022, Stanislaus County Judge John Mayne gave nature lovers a small treat that will significantly stall the project.

Friends of the River and its four coalition partners have been in a long-running legal struggle with the licensees of several federally licensed hydropower projects. These licensees have taken to the courts to reduce state authority to protect and manage their waters.

On February 13, 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that waives the rights of the environment in favor of agriculture. This executive order follows the shortsighted claims that come every year there is a flood in California, that water is being wasted by letting it flow through its natural riverways and out to sea.