The Riverkeeper's Guide to the Chattahoochee

The Riverkeeper's Guide to the Chattahoochee
Author: Fred Brown
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2007
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9781580720007

The Chattahoochee is a prototypical American river-from its headwaters in the Blue Ridge Mountains to where it flows into Apalachicola Bay, one of the most productive estuaries in North America. This entertaining, fact-filled guide covers the Chattahoochee's entire 500 mile course and 8,000 square mile watershed. The guide divides the river into ten sections, each of which includes a brief natural history and information on: camping, hiking, fishing, boating, and other recreational pursuits bodies of water that feed into the river cities and towns with river frontage manmade structures such as bridges, dams, and historic ruins environmental threats and preservation efforts Entertaining sidebars throughout highlight the people, history, culture, wildlife, and geography of the entire river valley. Understand the "Hooch," say those dedicated to its conservation, and you will know more about all of our country's waterways. This guide is the place to begin.

Keeping the Chattahoochee

Keeping the Chattahoochee
Author: Sally Sierer Bethea
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2023-07-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820364347

Sally Sierer Bethea was one of the first women in America to become a "riverkeeper"-a vocal defender of a specific waterway who holds polluters accountable. In Keeping the Chattahoochee, she tells stories that range from joyous and funny to frustrating-even alarming-to illustrate what it takes to save an endangered river. Her tales are triggered by the regular walks she takes through a forest to the Chattahoochee over the course of a year, finding solace and kinship in nature. For two decades, Bethea worked to restore the neglected Chattahoochee, which provides drinking water and recreation to millions of people, habitat for wildlife, and water for industries and farms as it cuts through the heart of the Deep South. Pairing natural and political history with reflective writing, she draws readers into her watershed and her memories. Bethea's passion for the natural world-and for defending it with a strong, informed voice animates this instructive memoir. Offering lessons on how to fight for our fundamental right to clean water, Bethea and her colleagues take on powerful corporate and government polluters. They strengthen environmental policies and educate children, reviving the great river from a century of misuse.

Keeping Time

Keeping Time
Author: Peter N. Carroll
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820337927

At once memoir and meditation, Keeping Time records one professional historian's struggle to live in history even as he studies it, writes about it, and teaches it. Exploring the omnipresence of the past in American life today, Peter N. Carroll weaves into his autobiographical narrative a wealth of provocative observations on the practice of history, the connections between “small” lives and large forces, and the relationship of personal choice to public activity. Carroll feels compelled to view the past in a different way—not as something remote from the present, but as a vital current in everyone's life. He strives to popularize history, reminding us that the particulars of ordinary life are indeed historical, that all human beings, however “obscure” or “important,” exist in time, and that each must live in history.

Sound Wormy

Sound Wormy
Author: Andrew Gennett
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2010-07
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0820337870

Set in what remains some of the wildest country in the United States, Sound Wormy recalls a time when regulations were few and resources were abundant for the southern lumber industry. In 1901 Andrew Gennett put all of his money into a tract of timber along the Chattooga River watershed, which traverses parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. By the time he wrote his memoir almost forty years later, Gennett had outwitted and outworked countless competitors in the southern mountains to make his mark as one of the region's most seasoned, innovative, and successful lumbermen. His recollections of a rough-and-ready outdoors life are filled with details of logging, from the first "cruise" of a timber stand to the moment when the last board lies "on sticks" in the mill yard. He tells how massive poplars, oaks, and other hardwoods had to be felled and trimmed by hand, dragged down mountain slopes by draft animals, floated downstream or carried by rail to the mill, and then sawn, graded, and stacked for drying. He tells of buying timber rights in a land market filled with "sharp" operators, where titles and surveys were often contested and kinship and custom were on an equal footing with the law. Gennett saw more than potential "boardfeet" when he looked at a tree. He recalls, for instance, his efforts to convince the U.S. Forest Service to purchase undisturbed areas of wilderness at a time when its mandate was to condemn and buy up farmed-out and clear-cut land. One such sale initiated by Gennett would become the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness in North Carolina. Filled with logging lore and portraits of the southern mountains and their people, Sound Wormy adds an absorbing new chapter to the region's natural and environmental history.

From Swamp to Wetland

From Swamp to Wetland
Author: Chris Wilhelm
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2022-08-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0820362409

This book chronicles the creation of Everglades National Park, the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States. This effort, which spanned 1928 to 1958, was of central importance to the later emergence of modern environmentalism. Prior to the park’s creation, the Everglades was seen as a reviled and useless swamp, unfit for typical recreational or development projects. The region’s unusual makeup also made it an unlikely candidate to become a national park, as it had none of the sweeping scenic vistas or geological monuments found in other nationally protected areas. Park advocates drew on new ideas concerning the value of biota and ecology, the importance of wilderness, and the need to protect habitats, marine ecosystems, and plant life to redefine the Everglades. Using these ideas, the Everglades began to be recognized as an ecologically valuable and fragile wetland—and thus a region in need of protective status. While these new ideas foreshadowed the later emergence of modern environmentalism, tourism and the economic desires of Florida’s business and political elites also impacted the park’s future. These groups saw the Everglades’ unique biology and ecology as a foundation on which to build a tourism empire. They connected the Everglades to Florida’s modernization and commercialization, hoping the park would help facilitate the state’s transformation into the Sunshine State. Political conservatives welcomed federal power into Florida so long as it brought economic growth. Yet, even after the park’s creation, conservative landowners successfully fought to limit the park and saw it as a threat to their own economic freedoms. Today, a series of levees on the park’s eastern border marks the line between urban and protected areas, but development into these areas threatens the park system. Rising sea levels caused by global warming are another threat to the future of the park. The battle to save the swamp’s biodiversity continues, and Everglades Park stands at the center of ongoing restoration efforts.

Rich Man's War

Rich Man's War
Author: David Williams
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2011-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820340790

In Rich Man's War historian David Williams focuses on the Civil War experience of people in the Chattahoochee River Valley of Georgia and Alabama to illustrate how the exploitation of enslaved blacks and poor whites by a planter oligarchy generated overwhelming class conflict across the South, eventually leading to Confederate defeat. This conflict was so clearly highlighted by the perception that the Civil War was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" that growing numbers of oppressed whites and blacks openly rebelled against Confederate authority, undermining the fight for independence. After the war, however, the upper classes encouraged enmity between freedpeople and poor whites to prevent a class revolution. Trapped by racism and poverty, the poor remained in virtual economic slavery, still dominated by an almost unchanged planter elite. The publication of this book was supported by the Historic Chattahoochee Commission.

Divided Planet

Divided Planet
Author: Tom Athanasiou
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 1998
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780820320076

Global warming. Soil loss. Freshwater scarcity. Extinction. Overconsumption. Toxic waste production. Habitat and biodiversity erosion. These are only a few of our most urgent ecological crises. There are others as well and, despite the popularity of good-news environmentalism, few of them are going away. In this wide-ranging, grimly entertaining commentary on the environmental debate, Tom Athanasiou finds that these problems are exacerbated, if not caused, by the planet's division into "warring camps of rich and poor." Writing with passionate intelligence, Athanasiou proposes a simple yet radical solution--stop indulging easy, calming fantasies in which everything seems to change, but nothing important changes at all. Instead, do what needs to be done, now, while there is still time and goodwill. The bottom line, he concludes, is that there will be no sustainability without a large measure of justice. Without profound political and economic change, he argues, there can be no effective global environmental action, no real effort to save the planet.

Chattahoochee Cats

Chattahoochee Cats
Author: Jennifer Guberman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781954805088

A family of kittens and their friends travel the world and beyond in a series of wild adventures. The mischievous kittens tumble into trouble and learn to solve problems and to help each other and their animal friends. They also learn to understand the importance of listening to their mother! The kittens' adventures include stowing away on a blimp, exploring the Amazon and the Alaskan wilderness, and closer to home, their local zoo-along with a little help from some magic. Join these Chattahoochee cats and travel around the globe and beyond!

Bamboo Fly Rod Suite

Bamboo Fly Rod Suite
Author: Frank Soos
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2011-08-15
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0820342599

After he was handed an old broken-down bamboo fly rod, Frank Soos waited several years before he cautiously undertook its restoration. That painstaking enterprise becomes the central metaphor and the unifying theme for the captivating personal essays presented here. With sly wit and disarming candor, Soos recounts fly-fishing adventures that become points of departure for wide-ranging ruminations on the larger questions that haunt him. Coming to terms with his new rod in “On Wanting Everything,” Soos casts a skeptical eye on the engines of consumerism and muses on the paradox of how a fishing rod that becomes too valuable ceases to be useful. “The Age of Imperfection” begins as a rueful account of his botched repair work but soon changes into an insightful reflection on the seductiveness of perfection and finishes as an homage to the creative power that comes from mistakes. In “Useful Tools” Soos takes a decidedly pessimistic look at the age-old quest to combine the good with the beautiful and concludes with an eloquent appreciation of a good tool put to an unintended use. “On His Slowness” offers fresh new perceptions about the human costs of the ever-accelerating pace of contemporary life and the increasingly hard work of resisting it. More than a meditation on suicide, “Obituary with Bamboo Fly Rod” engages the issue of individual human responsibility and the ultimate question of “How to be” with equal parts humility and wonder. This elegant volume is handsomely illustrated with the full-color paintings of Alaskan artist Kesler Woodward. Rich in wisdom and physical appeal, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite is a distinctive and rewarding book with wide-ranging appeal.

Emblems of Conduct

Emblems of Conduct
Author: Donald Windham
Publisher: New York : Scribner
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1964
Genre: America
ISBN:

Seven articles on growing-up in Atlanta, Georgia which have appeared in "The New Yorker", are included in this expanded version on the same subject.