RFA Programs

RFA's programs include two major initiatives: our Global Water Policy Initiative and our Clean Water, Biodiversity and Environmental Justice Initiative. These initiatives focus on river-related issues in our target areas of North, Central and South America.

Why RFA?

• Our team has an extraordinary record of producing results throughout the Americas and around the world. We know how to leverage funds for huge results.
• Restoring the health of our rivers requires a systems perspective. We've found that single topic actions often don't work. Like ecosystems, policy decisions are interconnected and a one size approach doesn't fit every situation.
• RFA supports innovative approaches to protecting and restoring large ecosystems by supporting people and organizations working for clean water, human health, population stability, biodiversity protection, and social change.

RFA -- Catalyst for Change

No other foundation does what we do. We develop and bring new sources of assistance to organizations in carefully selected regions where our resources make a significant difference in ecosystem protection and restoration.

We focus on the Americas because this is the interconnected area of the world in which we live, and where we believe our team can make the most difference. By example, we can amplify our effects elsewhere.

Vast areas of our hemisphere are under tremendous ecological pressure -- and the health of these ecosystems is intimately connected through wildlife migration, and from resource extraction and development activities of multinational corporations and our new global economy. Bird migration flyways intertie with water pathways, large wetlands, and animal migration pathways.

These connections are glaringly obvious in some cases, linking:

• the largest concentration of nesting shorebirds in North America in the Copper River Delta of Alaska
• to a key migration stop on Sauvie Island in the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon
• to the split delta of the Colorado River on the Gulf of California in Mexico and the Salton Sink of California
• to habitat in Central and South America all the way to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego.

Our Framework: Systems Analysis, Indigenous Peoples, Mega-Linkages

People are to rivers what they are to their own heartbeats. A strong pulse brings energy and life while a weak pulse foreshadows disaster for the veins and arteries it powers. This is as true for rivers as it is for people. The interconnected relationship of rivers to people and their surrounding lands has long shown the best way to ensure permanent river health is to work with people who care about specific rivers - and who have the vision to use diverse strategies to protect and restore those resources. Our strategies include:

Systems Analysis: Clean Water, Biodiversity, Human Health

All people deserve to breathe clean air, live on pristine lands and drink clean life-bestowing water. A healthy environment helps lead to healthy, happy and prosperous people. We believe that in many areas throughout the Americas human health, population and quality of life concerns must be integrated with biodiversity protection and ecosystem restoration. To put it another way, until we address clean water, biodiversity protection, population and human health problems, in many areas there is no way to ensure environmental health.

River protection and restoration is not just dam fighting or riverbank protection - it is largely about land use in the watershed. Protecting rivers means that effective river organizations can expect, over time, to address nearly every environmental degradation problem. By looking at the big picture, the Rivers Foundation of the Americas can support a variety of opportunities that traditional riverbank approaches might not have recognized. We are making the connections between the parts and the whole.

Indigenous Peoples

We support efforts by indigenous peoples and organizations for ecosystem conservation, protection and restoration of rivers and their watersheds. Indigenous peoples have been disproportionately affected by environmental pollution, destruction of natural areas critical to their way of life, and loss of their ancestral homelands, languages and culture.

We do not support indigenous environmental efforts out of a naive belief that everything indigenous, native or Indian is an unalloyed environmental or social good. We act out of the roots of ecology - a word that derives from the Greek 'oikos' or dwelling. The best single word defining ecology is "respect." Respect for the earth and its occupants. We seek to encourage and support indigenous environmental restoration and protection efforts that address historical injustices while protecting and restoring ecosystem and human health for many generations to come.

After all, as Copper River Delta native and Eyak tribe member Dune Lankard of the Eyak Preservation Council often says, "we are all indigenous to the earth."

Conservation Biology, Mega-Linkages and Re-Wilding

Our work is grounded in the best conservation and restoration science. We, by necessity, look at a very big picture. Why do we say that? Simply put, scientists have, over the past 20 years, recognized critical "megalinkages" in biodiversity conservation.

The history of conservation has progressed over the last century from the first designations of 'monumental' great places like Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, and the pretty river canyons of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Scientists and policy makers then realized that protection of 'biodiversity' - the great sweep of plant and animal species on the earth - could not be done through the designation of parks and monuments alone.

Protection of species diversity and all the benefits of fresh air, clean water, productive soils, nutritious food, valuable medicines and other products derived from species diversity had to include protection of a wide variety of habitats and ecosystem types.

Conservation biology and the effort to protect large unmanaged wilderness landscapes in North America evolved from these ideas in the 1920s and 1930s. Those roots, in turn, led to Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic ("A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community") and the efforts to call for an end to government policies that persecute large predators. Groups like the Nature Conservancy arose to preserve first, individual species and then a variety of habitats and species. Regulatory measures also arose by the 1970s, including the Endangered Species, Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

Fragmentation

Next came the understanding that small isolated populations of animals and plants were highly vulnerable to accidents of population shifts, genetic limitations, climate fluctuations and incremental development and destruction. Connecting these 'islands' of biodiversity was seen as necessary for genetic and demographic rescue and for viability of wide ranging species.

We subsequently learned that even areas as large as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem could not provide sufficient resilience and protection for animals such as wolverines and grizzly bears - the "keystone" predators whose role in healthy landscapes and biodiversity protection is only recently becoming understood. Suburbanites well know the ecological and economic damage caused by the proliferation of deer due to the absence of large carnivores like wolves and cougars.

More dramatically, even in the protected 'wilderness' of Yellowstone - as wolves were eliminated, large populations of elk overgrazed river banks, driving out beavers who had nothing left to eat or build dams with - thus drastically reducing their role in creating and moving wetland habitats and sustaining aquatic diversity. In the few years since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, elk herds do not dally as long near streams, beaver have begun to re-inhabit large valleys, and plant and bird diversity is returning.

Keystone Species: Organisms whose influence on ecosystem function and diversity are disproportionate to their natural abundance.

Recent studies in South America documented by The Wildlands Project show that construction of a large Venezuelan dam caused flooding of a vast area and creation of isolated, though protected, islands. Many of the islands lacked large predators (jaguar, puma, harpy eagles) and on those islands the reproduction and replacement of many species of canopy trees came to a halt. On middle sized islands, though 60-70 species of trees coexist, only a handful of species are represented in young recruits. Scientists note that because herbivores (leaf eating monkeys, ants, rodent seed predators etc.) became superabundant due to the loss of the large predators, the entire island ecosystem began crashing.

Another frequent consequence of the absence of large predators is a remarkable bird-killing increase in the number of small carnivores including house cats, foxes, and opossums, which cause severe declines in many songbirds and other small prey animals.

Re-Wilding

Re-wilding then, calls for reintroduction of keystone species on a landscape scale. Often this means the reintroduction of large predators over large areas, and changes in governmental policies and public attitudes toward these predators.

RFA's Mega-Linkages

At the Rivers Foundation, we look at continental mega-linkages in the context of large river basins in North, Central, and South America. We are implementing the science developed by the Wildlands Project and others and putting it into practice.

The Rivers Foundation began by constructing a program of mega-linkages in North America. As we roll out our efforts over the next decade, the structure we have undertaken in North America will expand to embrace Central and South America. Our North America work includes four critical major watersheds and two initiatives...