Keeping the Chattahoochee
Reviving and Defending a Great Southern River
Title Details
Pages: 232
Illustrations: 16 b&w images
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 05/01/2025
ISBN: 9-780-8203-7451-2
List Price: $20.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 07/15/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6434-6
List Price: $24.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 07/15/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6432-2
List Price: $24.95
EPUB
Pub Date: 07/15/2023
ISBN: 9-780-8203-6433-9
List Price: $24.95
Imprint
Wormsloe Foundation Nature BooksSubsidies and Partnerships
Published with the generous support of Wormsloe Foundation Nature Books
Related Subjects
NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection
Other Links of Interest
View the trailer for the feature film Saving the Chattahoochee
Keeping the Chattahoochee
Reviving and Defending a Great Southern River
The Chattahoochee’s riverkeeper shares over twenty years of river conservation stories
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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.
—Shirley Franklin, former mayor of the City of Atlanta
—Janisse Ray, author of Wild Spectacle
—Laura Turner Seydel, co-founder of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, board trustee of Waterkeeper Alliance, and board chair of Captain Planet Foundation
—Tim Palmer, author of Lifelines: The Case for River Conservation
—Charles Seabrook, author of The World of the Salt Marsh: Appreciating and Protecting the Tidal Marshes of the Southeastern Atlantic Coast
Short-listed
Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award, Southern Environmental Law Center