Like Jack Nicholson axing his way through the door to announce that he’s home in “The Shining,” the Delta Conveyance Project – aka the Delta Tunnel, nee the Peripheral Canal – has returned to once again threaten the health of California’s rivers and the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary…

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…

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.

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.

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.