Green River, Labyrinth Canyon above Bowknot Bend in Utah © Courtesty of Glen Canyon Institute

Why Give to RFA?

Think of the great rivers of the Americas—the Yukon, Columbia, Colorado, Mississippi, the Usumacincta, Azul, and Coco, the Orinoco, Amazon, and Parana. Now think of the millions of people who live, work and play along side these rivers. Such rivers and hundreds of others are the life-sustaining arteries of the Earth. Sadly their pulse is weakening.

The once stable life-sustaining arteries of the Americas are now clogged and hurting. In many areas they are in grave danger of stroke and collapse. The gradual demise of our rivers threatens the integrity of the land they sustain:

• Most years the Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of California. The Colorado Delta and estuary, which only 80 years ago was glowing with a wealth of fish and fowl, is now a nearly lifeless dry stretch of salt covered desert.
• The Mississippi River carries and delivers so many pollutants through its arteries that the water discharged by it producesa huge biological "dead zone" in the heart ofthe Gulf of Mexico.
• The fires ignited to clear the Amazon rainforest wreak havoc on the water supply and are so massive that they can be seen from space.
• Through the persistence of dams, diversions, developmentand pollution, the lives and cultures of native peoples from the Arctic Circle to the Tierra del Fuego are threatened.
• Economic improvement in the Willamette River valley in Oregon from 1995-2000 nearly doubled legal discharges of poisonous chemicals to over 8.5 million pounds annually. (Source: Under the Surface: Willamette Riverkeeper's State of the Willamette, 2000. More info at Willamette Riverkeeper)

The wonderful biodiversity of life many take for granted is in danger of living only in our memories and history books. Even the simple, yet vital ability to provide our children with clean and healthy drinking water is impossible for approximately 100 million people in the Americas and more than 1 billion people around the world.

This is where the Rivers Foundation of the Americas steps in. RFA employs extensive knowledge of ecosystem protection, human health and social justice issues, and river watershed organizations to implement strategic objectives through discerning grantmaking. The "Watershed Approach" guides the Foundation's activities. This method recognizes that threats to a river's integrity can come from a variety of sources: roads and automobiles, dams and reservoirs, urban runoff, agriculture, natural resource extraction, inefficient energy use, population growth, political inequities, and the cumulative effect of legal industrial effluents among many other threats.

By looking at the big picture, the Rivers Foundation of the Americas can fund and leverage a variety of programs that traditional riverbank approaches would not have recognized. The Foundation works closely with a diverse network of experts and watershed and other conservation groups to address the problems that diverse modern societies place on river ecosystems. RFA is dedicated to promoting and funding the protection and restoration of rivers in the Americas.

Three Major Catastrophic Trends

Our ecosystems are being overwhelmed by three trends resulting in massive ecological disruption:

• Human population growth
  Worldwide population hit six billion people in 1999 with projections of another two to six billion people by 2050, depending on various catastrophic scenarios.
• Pollution runoff
  Polluted or poisonous runoff is the greatest source of water quality problems in the United States. Poisonous runoff includes: Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, animal waste, salts from evaporated irrigation water, and silt from deforestation runoff from land and flow into ground and surface water. Agriculture is the most extensive source of water pollution, affecting 70% of impaired rivers and streams.
• The chemicalization of the land
  In 1960, prior to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, roughly 3.3 pounds of pesticides and herbicides were used perperson in the United States. The population of the UnitedStates has nearly doubled since 1960 . . . in 1990 weapplied over 8 pounds of herbicides and pesticides perperson in this country. (See Our Stolen Future, Theo Colburn, John Peterson Myers, Diane Dumanoski.) We have now chemicalized our soils to a level that is almost inconceivable resulting in the loss of the soil's vibrancy.