In this Issue

Upcoming Events - CA River Awards and Guide Activist Training
Currents: Victories and Threats
FOR Submits a Brief in the U.S. Supreme Court
March 2023 Currents - Threats and Victories
Wild and Scenic River Anniversaries
Further Reading in Headwaters

Upcoming Events

California River Awards

Rivers need friends. The California River Awards is our most important fundraiser of the year. Friends of the River is at the forefront of driving change in California water and saving the rivers you love. We need your help to continue our important work on hydropower reform, sustainable water storage, restoring river flows, and using flood waters to restore river health and recharge groundwater. You make it all possible.

Please buy tickets, sponsor, or donate.

See you there!

Guide Advocate Training

FOR is bringing back our annual whitewater guide training this summer. This will be a Guide and Activist Training to equip participants with the skills they need to safely take people down rivers and build FOR’s base of activists. You’ll build and strengthen your leadership abilities, gain competence on the river, and learn how to save rivers all at the same time. Please forward this opportunity to anyone who may be interested.

More information and application here.

HEADWATERS Online - A Revival

In January of this year, I signed up as a volunteer for Friends of the River to edit and publish Headwaters, a bi-annual newsletter that had not been published since the spring of 2020. Before we moved forward, we asked ourselves an important question, 'how could Headwaters be reshaped and modernized to better fulfill Friends of the River’s mission to inspire citizen action?'

By late February I was putting the final touches on a brand-new website that I personally crafted to answer this question. I am excited to introduce you to the new Headwaters, a vibrant online magazine. Headwaters publishes long-form articles, creative writing, and visual art by a broad community of writers and artists whose work speaks to FOR's mission. Headwaters aims to inform and inspire its readers to speak up for California’s rivers.

Headwaters will also be the online home for River Advocate stories. This new platform gives you, the reader, the ability to comment on stories and engage with each other about issues that matter to you.

I hope you enjoy Headwaters and I look forward to connecting with you there -- Sarah Vardaro

www.headwatersonline.org

Currents: Victories & Threats

FOR submits a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court - by Ron Stork

It’s not often that one of our legal cases results in a brief filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, but here we are. Here’s the road we took.

We are intervenors with a group of environmentalists in the federal relicensing proceeding of the Turlock and Modesto Irrigation District’s giant Don Pedro Dam on the Tuolumne River. The ongoing proceeding is taking many twists and turns, but one twist is the lawsuit by the Districts arguing that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) should throw the state of California out of its responsibilities to certify that the relicensed project will comply with state water quality law under the Federal Clean Water Act (i.e., FERC waive the state’s CWA §401 authority).

FERC had refused to issue the waiver of certification (we filed siding with FERC arguing against waiver). The districts sued in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (we intervened and submitted arguments there), the D.C. Circuit sided with FERC and us, and the districts appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. So last week we submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing why the court should not take the case (grant certiorari). The State of California and FERC also submitted similar briefs.

Perhaps the Supreme Court will turn the case down. But, we still have a series of cases in “defense of the Clean Water Act” in federal and state court, with years before we see the end of them. That’s not to mention our other litigation efforts. If you would like to help with these or other lawyerly tasks, please consider a donation to Friends of the River.

See the State of California’s and FERC’s briefs to the Supreme Court.

March 2023 Currents - Read all the Current News for the Month