Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) -- formerly known as Upper ChattahoocheeRiverkeeper (UCR) -- is an environmental advocacy organization with 10,000 members dedicated solely to protecting and restoring the Chattahoochee River Basin. CRK was modeled after New York’s Hudson Riverkeeper and was the 11th licensed program in the international Waterkeeper Alliance. In 2012, the organization officially changed its name to simply Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK), dropping the "Upper" to better reflect its stewardship over the entire river basin.CRK’s primary geographic focus begins at the river's headwaters in the north Georgia mountains above Helen and continues downstream to West Point Lake, encompassing more than 200 miles (320 km) of the Chattahoochee River and 3,600 square miles (9,300 km2) of watershed. The Chattahoochee River meets the Flint River above Lake Seminole to become the Apalachicola River in Florida. CRK is best known for its legal action against the City of Atlanta which resulted in the city revitalizing their infrastructure to address a major sewage problem, thus ensuring a cleaner river for the community.CRK "actively uses advocacy, education, research, communication, cooperation, monitoring and legal actions to protect and preserve the Chattahoochee and its watershed.
Climate change has far-reaching effects on human and ecological systems, requiring collaboration across sectors and disciplines to determine effective responses. To inform regional responses to climate change, decision-makers need credible and relevant information representing a wide swath of knowledge and perspectives. The southeastern U. S. State of Georgia is a valuable focal area for study because it contains multiple ecological zones that vary greatly in land use and economic activities, and it is vulnerable to diverse climate change impacts. We identified 40 important research questions that, if answered, could lay the groundwork for effective, science-based climate action in Georgia. Top research priorities were identified through a broad solicitation of candidate research questions (180 were received). A group of experts across sectors and disciplines gathered for a workshop to categorize, prioritize, and filter the candidate questions, identify missing topics, and rewrite questions. Participants then collectively chose the 40 most important questions. This cross-sectoral effort ensured the inclusion of a diversity of topics and questions (e.g., coastal hazards, agricultural production, ecosystem functioning, urban infrastructure, and human health) likely to be important to Georgia policy-makers, practitioners, and scientists. Several cross-cutting themes emerged, including the need for long-term data collection and consideration of at-risk Georgia citizens and communities. Workshop participants defined effective responses as those that take economic cost, environmental impacts, and social justice into consideration. Our research highlights the importance of collaborators across disciplines and sectors, and discussing challenges and opportunities that will require transdisciplinary solutions.
Scholars have overlooked the role that rural southerners played in the 1960s environmental movement. The prevailing narratives chronicle the post-1945 activities of American white middle-class Democrats who, wanting to protect their new suburban landscapes, embraced environmentalism. Popular in the North and West, the 1960s environmental movement seemed to have bypassed the South, especially in more rural parts of the region. There, political conservatism, “the persistence of rural attitudes” (according to Samuel Hays), and slow urban growth had supposedly limited the influence of the movement. In western North Carolina, environmentalism struck a chord among men and women who organized to repeatedly oppose the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plans to build dams to control floods long after the New Deal was over. These rural residents—from farmers to birdwatchers—maintained that their livelihoods and rural communities depended on the preservation of the French Broad River and its floodplain. Nor did political and fiscal conservatives shun environmentalism. Republicans, sharing a common enemy and a genuine concern for the environment, aligned with environmentalists and helped found the Upper French Broad Defense Association. Together, green conservatives and liberals joined forces. They marshaled a local battle with little outside assistance to halt the march of high modernism in the rural Sun Belt.
