Today is World Rivers Day! NED FRITZ’s work with rivers is less known than his forest efforts. So let’s celebrate it for World Rivers Day!
He was nationally lauded as a pioneer in promoting non-structural floodplain management—using methods to slow, capture, and absorb stormwater instead of shunting it downstream at high velocity with levees. He was on the national board of the American Rivers Association and mentored the former director of The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment.
More than leading a coalition to save the Trinity from channelization into a barge canal, Ned saved multiple rivers and creeks from destruction. His first was preventing a dam on the Paluxy at Dinosaur Valley State Park. Imagine such a thing!
He pushed back on plans to dam a number of creeks and rivers in East Texas and saved the largest freshwater marsh in Texas. He lost the fight to prevent damming the South Sulphur River for Jim Chapman Lake aka Cooper Lake, but forced the federal government to obtain 25,000 natural acres in mitigation land.
Ned threw his organizational acumen into the fight against the original outrageous Texas Water Plan in the ’50s-60s (!) which would have dammed dozens of rivers and shipped water to West Texas. He and Texas Committee for Natural Resources, now Texas Conservation Alliance, forced the “water hustlers” to scale back and abandon plans as Ned’s research showed one after another to be an economic boondoggle and environmental travesty.
Ned is as much river as forest. The Neches River National Wildlife Refuge, just two hours from Dallas, just added 250 additional acres, a testimony to Ned training a new generation of water defenders.
Discover the activism of Ned that benefits you every day at Ned Fritz Legacy. Please support the project with your donations.
Photo of sabal palms in the bottomland of Gus Engling Wildlife Management Area by Daniel Koglin.
