Young Girzzly at Abercrombie, Copper River, Alaska © Pete Lavigne

Clean Water, Biodiversity, and Environmental Justice Initiative

This initiative links RFA's policies of supporting indigenous peoples, drumming home the common sense linkages between clean healthy water for human use, strong biodiverse and healthy ecosystems, and environmental justice for indigenous peoples and economically disadvantaged people throughout the Americas. Continue reading below for more about this initiative, or go to Global Water Policy Initiative to learn about RFA's other main initiative.

Clean Water, Biodiversity, and Environmental Justice are three critical elements present in all our work in our first three great watersheds: the Copper River basin in Alaska; the Columbia River and the Pacific Northwest; and the Colorado River in the United States and Mexico. We will expand this work to the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence watershed, and then to the Pantanal - the world's largest freshwater wetland system, in the Parana-Paraguay river watershed in South America.

1) Copper River Watershed in Alaska

RFA provides fundraising assistance, small directed grants, along with organizational, policy and planning consultation with an indigenous nonprofit advocacy organization, the Eyak Preservation Council, and fundraising and occasional other assistance to the multi-stakeholder Copper River Watershed Project.

• Clean Water: public awareness will be raised with production of an independent documentary film, "Cultural Survival: Oil, the Arctic Refuge and the Copper River Delta".
• Biodiversity: the Copper River Delta is an enormously important bird nesting area, nursery for salmon and other fisheries, and a relatively unspoiled wilderness area with keystone predators including wolves and grizzlies.
• Environmental Justice: supporting the Eyak Preservation Council in formation and operation of the Native Lands Conservancy, to help regain control of ancestral tribal lands and work for their permanent protection.

Copper River Summer Sojourns:

As a special event, our annual raft trip to the Copper River wilderness brings journalists, donors and activists to the watershed and raises funds and support for the Rivers Foundation and the Eyak Preservation Council.

2) Pacific Northwest: Columbia River in the U.S. and Canada

The Columbia River watershed is a critical link in the mega-linkages of the Pacific flyway and predator migration corridor. It is the nerve center for salmon restoration; world security and nuclear waste safety issues; crossroads for world trade and agricultural policy; and one of the world's most highly manipulated and damaged great river systems. The challenges and opportunities here are huge.

• Clean Water: RFA is working closely with the national Clean Water Network, and local organizations including Willamette Riverkeeper to support a strong federal Clean Water Act and to encourage effective state and local implementation of clean water regulations. We also take an active role in support of critical issues throughout the Columbia River basin including cleanup of combined sewer overflows on the Willamette, participation in various efforts regarding the cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia, forest policy and timber harvest controversies throughout the region, water quality and quantity initiatives including energy and agriculture policy, and other important regional environmental issues as they arise.
• Biodiversity: RFA is opportunistically supporting a variety of efforts to restore damaged ecosystems, protect and restore endangered species, and educate both the general public and watershed management professionals, in addition to working with the Oregon Conservation Network on state and regional legislation and policy initiatives.
• Environmental Justice: RFA coordinates closely with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission and other organizations on salmon recovery, public health impacts of toxic pollution, and ratepayer impacts of legislative and corporate policies.

The Encyclopedia of Restoration of Northwest Ecosystems, edited by Dean Apostol and written by a distinguished team of over 30 ecological restoration scientists and environmental lawyers, will be published by Island Press in 2005. The Encyclopedia is perfect example of our mega-linkage focus with its concentration of information covering a diverse series of ecosystems and restoration challenges. It will provide practical, how-to information about restoring our regional ecosystems, with coverage of special topics such as invasive species, traditional ecological knowledge, stream restoration, and others. This will be the first attempt to cover the whole range of restoration activities in this region.

3) The Colorado River Watershed in the U.S. and Mexico

Top among our goals are restoration of the three major symbols of dams run amuck, and their wonderful and critical ecosystem resources - Glen Canyon, Grand Canyon and the Colorado River Delta. We support public awareness of siltation problems, and water lost to evaporation, caused by the Glen Canyon Dam and reservoir operation policies driven by the Colorado River compact and policies of the Bureau of Reclamation. We are also excited by our ability to sponsor the San Diego, California GreenMap Project headed by RFA supporter Suzanne Michel with funding from Colorado River water user the Metropolitan Water District of San Diego. Other innovative approaches to watershed education are in the works and we are constantly open to strategically placed partnerships and other opportunities.

• Clean Water: in the Colorado River basin in the United States and Mexico, we are working to provide a new approach and catalytic ideas to the 'Gordian Knot of Water in the West' - the grossly inequitable, unsustainable and horrendously complicated mismanagement of the Colorado River.
• Biodiversity: we support groups educating the public regarding the 100 years of dams and ecological calamity in the basin, especially focusing on the damage from the cold and widely varying water releases from Glen Canyon dam that are destroying the Grand Canyon's ecosystem. Conversely, wasteful evaporative losses from the Glen Canyon reservoir (Lake Powell) and problems with the enormously inequitable and complicated "Law of the Colorado River" starve the ecosystems of the Colorado River Delta and the Gulf of California.
• Environmental Justice: the Colorado river water system is rife with inequity. RFA's goal is to play a catalytic role in the establishment of just and accurate division of the use of the water of the Colorado among all parties to the river, including the upper and lower basin states, the sovereign nations of native tribes, the United States and Mexico and the needs of critical ecosystem components. We act in part to focusing attention on damage to the Colorado River Delta caused by inequitable sharing of the river between US, Mexico, and the Cocopah Indians and other tribes.

RFA supports the Glen Canyon Institute (based in Salt Lake City), whose goal is restoring Glen and Grand Canyons. We also support other regional entities, including various transboundary and southern California water groups.

As in other areas of our work, we are researching and issuing reports on topics relevant to each region and to our mega-linkages. Recent releases include work on environmental governance and cultural attitudes including "The Movement for American Ecosystem Restoration: Quagmire, Diversion or Our Last, Best Hope?" published in the Tulane Environmental Law Journal Winter 2003; "Watershed Councils East and West: Advocacy, Consensus, and Environmental Progress" in the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy Spring 2004; and "Concrete Results" in the Natural Resources Law Journal of the University of New Mexico School of Law, Summer 2004.