Rivers, Lakes, and Streams

Once among the world’s richest salmon rivers, today the Columbia is the most dammed river system in the world and is managed as an “organic machine.” The capstone of the dam-building era was the Columbia River Treaty (CRT), negotiated in the 1950s...

While 2019 was overall a great year for the environment in the Washington State Legislature, unfortunately, there were a few important jobs unfinished in 2019. Among these include important regulations needed to protect the rivers and streams that...

On June 26th, the State Court of Appeals ruled that Washington’s new instream flow rule failed to protect recreational and aesthetic uses of the River. This ruling marks twenty years of advocacy to protect Spokane River flows, and provides a...

Pat Sumption was a consummate environmental activist. She was dauntless, persistent, strategic, and unerring in her sense of the right thing to do, especially for Washington’s rivers. She worked for decades for the protection of the Green River,...

At the end of last July, Washington State Department of Ecology and Chelan County held public meetings to discuss a suite of proposals from the Icicle Working Group (IWG), called the Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS). The...