WWALS Day of Giving 2023 #GAGIVES

WWALS Mission

WWALS advocates for conservation and stewardship of the surface waters and groundwater of the Suwannee River Basin and Estuary, in south Georgia and north Florida, among them the Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, Little, Santa Fe, and Suwannee River watersheds, through education, awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen activities.

Advocacy

Many other organizations already promote paddling, swimming, fishing, birding, and other water-related activities hereabouts, as does WWALS for fun and education. WWALS exists to assist positive changes and to resist invasive problems, using strategies such as environmental monitoring and tactics such as outings and events in that advocacy.

Conservation

WWALS is fortunate in not having big single-point pollution problems such as plague watershed organizations on single large rivers. Thus we do not have to spend most of our time on preservation and protection, and we can spend more on conservation: connecting our rich local history with new paddlers on the rivers and lakes and streams watching what’s going on, fishing, swimming, boating, and enjoying our marvelous blackwater rivers and exotic vegetation and wildlife.

The purpose of WWALS is not to preserve everything exactly as it always was, for example back at the time of the Alapaha River Trail from the 1970s. Many things have already changed, and conservation may involve adding new things, such as the new, extended, Alapaha River Water Trail, and similarly for the Withlacoochee and Little River Water Trail.

Our problems are more widespread. having more to do with invasive species (some still being sold in local nurseries), waterway neglect (dams of fallen trees due to erosion ending up causing flooding), agricultural runoff (erosion dirt and pesticides), forestry runoff (due to clearcutting and pesticiding of undergrowth), wetlands destruction (cypress swamp clearing for wood use, agriculture, or subdivisions), and sprawling development (excessive impermeable surface causing runoff along with land clearing removing runoff barriers), leading to such problems as Valdosta wastewater overflows. Such problems won’t get solved by suing some big plant, and many of them aren’t pollution at all in the traditional sense.

Stewardship

Conservation doesn’t happen by itself, and WWALS is people taking on stewardship to deal with the pervasive environmental changes people have caused. Our waters support our recreation, agriculture, economy, and our very lives, so we must be stewards of our waters.

Stewardship includes resisting invaders such as the new pipelines, and increasing agricultural land purchases by corporations far away, as well as older invasions such as mercury in our rivers from coal plants.

WWALS practices stewardship beyond protection into conservation: proactive participation in creation or restoration of new ways such as promoting solar power to remove any excuse for such obsolete pipelines or coal plants.

Watershed

The name of the organization is WWALS Watershed Coalition, or WWALS for short. WWALS composed its name as an acronym of some of its better-known rivers, but it is not limited to those rivers nor to their river banks.

WWALS territory as Suwannee Riverkeeper encompasses the entire watersheds of the Withlacoochee, Alapaha, Santa Fe, and Suwannee Rivers and all their tributaries, as well as the Lower Suwannee River to the Gulf of Mexico, plus the Suwannee River Estuary, as well as those parts of the Floridan Aquifer in our watersheds. We also have many members well beyond our formal territory.