Stop Trying to Tame the River—Let It Roar

For over a century, we’ve treated rivers like problem children—something to be controlled, confined, and made to behave. On the Gila River in New Mexico, that philosophy is finally giving way to something radical: letting the river be a river.

A new study in Hydrological Processes by researchers Ellen Soles, Martha Cooper, and Laurel Saito shows something counterintuitive but powerful: rivers need their floods and their messy floodplains to survive the dry times. Martha Cooper, now The Nature Conservancy’s freshwater program director for New Mexico, spent years living with her family at the Gila River Preserve and Lichty Ecological Research Center in the Cliff-Gila Valley, literally wading through the landscape to understand how it works. What she and Soles discovered was elegant: when high flows carve secondary channels across a floodplain, those channels stay alive underground as groundwater highways, feeding native cottonwoods, willows, and other vegetation even when surface water disappears. Cooper recalls the moment it clicked—stepping on what seemed like solid ground only to feel water rushing beneath her foot through an old, hidden channel.

This wasn’t always the way. By 1960, generations of Anglo settlers had squeezed the Gila’s active floodplain to less than half its historic width with levees, channelization, and irrigation infrastructure. Native forest cover plummeted to 40 to 50 percent of early 20th-century levels. The river was forced into submission—literally bulldozed into narrow margins. But rivers, it turns out, have a way of reminding us who’s boss. Big floods in the 1980s made humans reconsider. By 1984, people stopped trying to shrink the channel. Livestock were moved off the floodplain in the late 1990s. And something remarkable happened: by 2000, the active floodplain had nearly recovered to its pre-channelization width. Riparian forests came roaring back.

The payoff? Resilience. Long-term data shows that when you let a river be complex and messy, it bounces back better from droughts, floods, and fires. Healthy riparian forests slow floodwaters, reducing erosion during extreme events. Adjacent landowners lost less property. Seeds could germinate in renewed wetlands. During the 2013 floods—when September storms sent the Gila above 30,000 cubic feet per second—the river had room to work with instead of a straitjacket.

Today the Gila faces new pressures. More water is diverted for irrigation than any time since before World War II. The river now runs dry in May or June, sometimes into September or October. That’s hard on native species and even harder on seeds trying to sprout. Climate projections paint a tougher picture: hotter, drier springs and summers, but potentially more intense monsoons creating bigger floods. It’s a volatile future.

Yet there’s a lesson here that extends far beyond New Mexico. Cooper puts it simply: stop thinking in absolutes. It’s not farms or fish. It’s farms and fish. Rivers that retain space to meander, flood, and breathe create multiple benefits—for ecosystems, for downstream users, for people living nearby. The big floods are architects, Cooper says. The mid-size ones keep things alive. She doesn’t see them as angry. Just powerful and beautiful. Maybe it’s time we did too.