By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

The deluge of rain over the weekend flooded streets and damaged infrastructure across California. One place that didn’t flood? The Los Angeles River.

That, of course, is by design. It’s exactly why local officials starting excavating the river and lining it with concrete 85 years ago, and ever since, most of the LA River’s 51 miles from the Santa Susana Mountains to the San Pedro Bay have served primarily as a flood management system.

But a changing climate and changing ideas about how Angelenos want to live with nature are now sparking a debate about LA’s relationship with its straight-jacketed river. Is it too late for a better way?

The rewilding argument

A nonprofit called The River Project says no, and is advocating for restoring the original river ecosystem Angelenos enjoyed 100 years ago.

The River Project’s founder, Melanie Winter, dreams of the LA River as a natural, uninterrupted public space void of steep, concrete walls. She’s referred to one such section as LA’s version of Central Park.

A version of that dream actually already exists at the Sepulveda Basin in Encino. There, the river is a naturally babbling brook weaving around rocks and between trees.

“It has become the place that I bring people to talk about the river,” Winter says. “We're sitting in the middle of a 2,000-acre, undeveloped, federally-owned piece of property that's designed to flood.”

It smells like mud and wet plants, and during a 50-foot walk from a nearby grassy lawn to the river bank, the temperature plummets 10 degrees.

“If you allow the water to slow down, you're going to get healthier soils, you're going to get groundwater recharge, you're going to get richer habitats, you're going to get reduced fire risk, and because you're allowing the river more space within this vast open space, you're going to get more flood detention capacity,” says Winter.

LA County officials say community members have told them they want a more natural, open river with trails and trees. The River Project submitted a proposal that reimagined the river in the Sepulveda Basin and prioritized its historic natural behavior.

A case for concrete

But today, most of the river is still lined with concrete and the current plan is to keep it that way. Changing it would mean a complete overhaul of our decades-old urban environment. After all, the city originally prioritized flood management for a reason.

When it rains, rivers flood. The extra room the river needs to do that is called a floodplain, and the LA River’s concrete channel has allowed thousands of people to build their homes safely in that floodplain.

The river “needs to flow to provide these adjacent communities with the protection that they need, so that they're not worried about floodwaters damaging their property, their infrastructure, or their houses, and then also their lives,” says Genevieve Osmena, a senior civil engineer with LA County’s Department of Public Works. “The river would have to be widened anywhere from three to seven times to provide that more natural river I think that folks might be really wanting,” she says.

“The urban community that we have, was allowed to thrive and sprawl up through the last century because of the flood protection that was provided.”

So now we’re stuck. Returning to a natural river would mean relocating miles of neighborhoods along the river’s course. “It would be called displacement,” Osmena says. “It's a sacrifice that I'm not sure all communities or all neighborhoods would be willing to accept or volunteer for.”

Changing climate, changing needs

Winter says she’s heard that argument before, but it’s a conversation worth having as the climate crisis worsens storms and flooding.

“These communities that you say would be displaced by floodplain reclamation will be displaced in a much more violent way if we don't do something,” she says. “These engineering marvels have a shelf life. And sometimes they create more problems than they solve. … The entire system is not built for what we're facing.”

Scientists have run the numbers, and in a 1000-year atmospheric river flood, cleverly named an ARk storm, the LA River could overflow, forcing thousands of people living in its natural floodplain to evacuate and face devastating damages. Osmena says as the climate crisis makes extreme weather more common, the county is aiming to design the river to withstand a 100-year storm. 

Winter calls that inadequate. “We're looking for more open space in communities that lack them. We're looking to secure local water supply,” she says. “There's never been a better opportunity to show how important the river is to a climate-resilient Los Angeles.”

So stakeholders are faced with this question: do you make the best river for the planet’s health, or the best river for the safety of the people living near it?

“There's something in the middle.”

Candice Dickens is the CEO of Friends of the LA River and lives in Downey, right on the river, in the floodplain. She sees room for compromise.

“We don’t believe that nature-based solutions and safety are mutually exclusive,” she says. “And it's tough to go to the table with the city and be like, ‘So when are we going to get these folks to move?’ That's a little tough to do.”

As an alternative, Osmena points to an area in Long Beach about a dozen miles before the river meets the ocean. An old water quality detention pond sits next to the concrete channel where the LA River flows in damp times. In the late 90s, LA County officials engineered this area into a wetland. If a big storm hits that risks flooding, the water can go back to the concrete channel. 

But most days, the water flow is low enough that officials can divert it through the wetland.

“We have it meander through these channels that go back and forth with carefully selected plants and vegetation that will clean the water and improve the water quality, as well as foster habitat and ecosystem. It attracted I think, a lot more biodiverse range of animals, birds. I think people come here to watch birds,” Osmena says.

Having access to the land to do this kind of thing is rare, but in Cypress Park and Glassell Park, and where the Rio Hondo meets the river on the edges of Downey, South Gate and Lynwood, LA County has already found a few other chunks of the river to try out bringing nature to the parts of town that need it most.


Caleigh Wells wrote this article for KCRW.


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Missouri's duck-hunting season runs through January, and many enthusiasts are concerned about how plentiful their future quarry will be because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

It's been six months since the high court removed protections for most wetlands in the nation.

Zack Morris is the president of the Conservation Federation of Missouri and said the Sackett vs EPA case dealt with identifying which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act.

This affects the quality of upcoming duck hunts. Morris said without thriving wetlands, the sport won't be able to carry on.

"It's hard to say how many of those unprotected wetlands are going to be plowed under or how fast," said Morris, "but that's certainly, I think, a reality that we'll face is significant wetland loss over the next 10 years or so and declining duck numbers as a result. "

Wetlands are also the primary habitat for 200 at-risk plants and animals in the state.

Morris said most of the ducks that migrate through the Midwest on the central or Mississippi flyways hatch in small pothole wetlands in North and South Dakota, Iowa and Canada.

Duck habitat is expected to decline for the U.S. portion.

Conservation groups in Missouri say protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Dana Ripper is co-founder and executive director of the Missouri River Bird Observatory and said wetlands are critical to Missouri's way of life and Missourians need to reach out to their legislators to gain protections.

Ripper said wetlands protect us from flooding and provide us with clean drinking water. They are key for fish and the millions of ducks and shorebirds that migrate through the state annually.

"They are some of our most biodiverse ecosystems here in Missouri - all throughout the Midwest," said Ripper. "They also provide water filtration. We have had devastating floods just in the last 15 years or so. And our wetlands are really important for helping to mitigate the effects of flooding. "

As many as 127 million acres of wetlands existed when settlers arrived on this continent. Today, more than 50% of those wetlands are gone - and without protection, thousands of acres will be
lost each year in the United States.

Of the original 2.4 million wild acres of forested lowlands in southeast Missouri, less than 60,000 acres, or 2%, remain today.




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States like Illinois are dealing with the fallout of a Supreme Court decision made earlier this year.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively removed federal protections for over half of the wetlands across the country. The case, Sackett v. EPA, dealt with which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act. Conservation groups said in Illinois, protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Paul Botts, president and executive director of the Chicago-based Wetlands Initiative, said the problem needs a congressional fix, but it is unlikely to happen soon.

"Congress, of course, is completely melted down and dysfunctional now, and this issue just simply is not going to rise to the top and cut through the partisan divide that we have," Botts acknowledged. "The chances of the Clean Water Act being updated are just pretty close to nil."

As Botts put it, the Clean Water Act is the reason Illinois waters are no longer on fire or used as open sewers. The landowners from the original case call the ruling a "victory for property rights."

Botts contended both of the state agencies dealing with wetlands in Illinois have a poor track record. He fears many of the state's pristine waterways will return to the poor condition they were in 50 years ago.

"We have an Illinois EPA, and then of course, we have our state Department of Natural Resources," Botts outlined. "Both of those agencies are starved for staffing resources, frankly, to carry out programs and to do things like issue permits in a prompt manner so that landowners can get an answer."

For almost 30 years, the rule the high court overturned served as the underpinning of the Clean Water Act. Along with investments made in wastewater treatment, Botts noted the safeguards afforded by the law resulted in enormous benefits for people and communities. Today, he fears conservation groups will be unable to keep up with the decline of waterways.

"Audubon estimates that tens of millions of acres have been made newly open to development by the Sackett ruling," Botts stressed. "It's just an estimate; it would be years of work to try to go around and use state wetlands inventories to figure out an exact figure."


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An Arizona water expert said the state faces a challenging situation with the Colorado River being overallocated, compounded with what she calls a historic drought.

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said Arizona's water system is in distress.

She explained access to water from the Colorado River depends on what she called a "hierarchy of water rights." Certain Native American communities and farmers enjoy "senior rights," while other towns and cities have to get by with less.

Sorensen noted Arizona is blessed to have significant groundwater aquifers, so management of these aquifers is paramount.

"The water was laid down over tens of thousands of years, and it isn't annually renewed at any significant rate," Sorensen pointed out. "If you pump too much of it, you're basically 'mining' that groundwater and depleting it, meaning that there will be less available for future generations."

While Arizona has taken significant steps to conserve water, Sorensen said the work and innovation must continue, from improving use of reclaimed water to finding ways to augment water supplies. In a poll earlier this year, Arizonans said they believe the state should be doing more to regulate groundwater consumption, as well as prioritizing conservation and restoration projects.

As Arizona continues to grow, Sorensen stressed water demands are much more closely related to land use than to population growth, with the agricultural sector using about 70% of the state's water. She said some crops require as much as six acre-feet of water per acre of farmland. An acre-foot of water equates to about 326,000 gallons.

"Whereas urban developments actually use much less water, probably more like one to two acre-feet per acre," Sorensen stated. "So ironically, as our population has grown and we have converted what used to be farmland into urban uses, there has been a sort of natural water savings."

She added in the future, experts predict Arizona will be hotter and drier, so it is important to understand land use choices are meaningful and will have a direct impact on water availability.


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