Year-end Colorado River Update: Rivers Are The Ribbon Of Life

Hi Friends of the Colorado River!

It’s your support that keeps us working hard. We are propelled into 2022 with your generosity.
You can donate online by clicking here: https://savethecolorado.org/donate/

First, Rights of Nature for Rivers campaign continues to make news. Water Education Colorado highlighted our work amidst the chaos around growth and climate change in Colorado in this report last week. We continue to argue — to everyone who will listen — that keeping rivers alive is a benefit to the non-human world and the human world. We’re trying to expand the concept of “prior appropriations” to include the concept that rivers themselves were the original water rights holders for millions of years.

Rivers are the ribbons of life — for biodiversity, wildlife habitat, and ecosystem health — throughout the Colorado River basin. We’ll be expanding our Rights of Nature for Rivers program in 2022 and we look forward to helping local communities protect the rivers that flow through their towns.

Second, the Arizona Daily Star newspaper highlighted our work as the only group in the Colorado River basin that keeps track of, and fights against, all the proposed new dams and diversions. The story is about the overuse of water by the states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and notes that the exact same states are trying to get more and more water out of the river with new dams, diversions, and pipelines.

A recent report by our friends at Utah Rivers Council catalogued the overuse of water, and detailed how climate change is going to make that overuse worse while also increasing the chaos around the management of water in the entire Colorado River system.

Third, in 2022 we are ramping up our campaign around removing Glen Canyon Dam. The “Dam The Status Quo” conference led by Tick Segerblom has inspired a larger movement around removing the dam. As climate change grips the Colorado River basin, the “one dam solution” — of saving Hoover dam and Lake Mead, and draining Lake Powell — continues to pick up steam. Get ready to hear more and more about this in 2022!

Finally, if you’re looking for river-protection inspiration, look up north in Canada. Senator Mary Jane McCallum of Manitoba gave a hard-hitting speech about the anti-environmental impacts caused by hydropower in Canada and across the planet. Senator McCallum’s speech was a part of the Canadian governments “climate crisis” publicity effort in which she called for an immediate moratorium on megadam hydropower due to the climate impacts caused by dams.

You can read the Senator’s full speech here or watch the video here. Stay tuned in 2022 as our campaign ramps up highlighting how dams and hydropower make climate change worse.

We greatly appreciate your support.

Thank you and have a Happy New Year.