When President Trump hit the ground running in late January with a slate of executive orders and other measures, no one was surprised to see federal environmental protections, services, and agencies strongly targeted. But his explicit linkage of federal disaster relief to radical changes in California water policy stood out even in the fire hydrant fountain of proposed actions. And Governor Newsom’s response – or lack of one – has also stood out…

Late Sunday afternoon, January 26, while most of America was watching football with Taylor Swift, President Trump released an Executive Order water and fires. However, it does very little for the fire victims or LA water, will primarily benefit wealthy irrigators in the Central Valley, poses unprecedented threats to state law, and endangered species protection, creates risks to clean drinking water for millions of Californians, and initiates an onslaught of harassing interventions by federal agencies. OPEN TO LEARN WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP…

FOR Program Director, Gary Bobker, breaks down President Trump’s recent tweet that wrongly blamed California water mismanagement for the fires in Southern California.

As Halloween approaches, one’s thoughts naturally return to movies with a disturbing supernatural theme — perhaps Night of the Living Dead and its zombie apocalypse spawn. Here at Friends of the River, of course, we have struggled with the animated corpses of dead dams walking. Among them are the distinctly creepy proposed Auburn and Temperance Flat dams and the Shasta Dam raise, and though we have knocked them down, it is not clear that they will not rise again. It is, after all, what zombies do.

Recently, a prominent U.S. politician apparently expressed his strong belief in his ability to reanimate the creepiest zombie the U.S. west has ever “planned”…

Governor Newsom’s Administration continues to push forward Voluntary Settlement Agreements in lieu of updating the decades-late SF Bay/Delta Water Quality Control Plan…