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…

It’s difficult to believe that it really happened, but during the summer of 2022, the Merced River, the 14^th largest river in California, ran completely dry for four months near its confluence point with the San Joaquin River. The river, which serves as essential habitat for listed species including spring-run Chinook salmon and steelhead, originates in Yosemite National Park. It was completely dry and impassable for four miles…

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….”