Water heroes water heroes everywhere: Expedition Blue Planet joins forces with local riverkeepes

© Blue Legacy/Ali Sanderson

We’ve been busy as bees the past two days at water village street fairs in Charleston, South Carolina and Charlotte, North Carolina organized by local riverkeepers. (Make sure to check out Ali's awesome flickr gallery of the people that came out)

The set-up is always pretty much the same: Our bus parks in town and is surrounded by a hub of tables of local environmental organizations, aquariums, parks, nature centers and NGOs chock-a-block with brochures, pamphlets, petitions and stickers. We pass out cards and talk with people about our expedition, Alexandra signs posters and meets locals, and best of all, we get to catch up with the people on the ground who fight to protect their waterways. There’s usually a smattering of neat natural history items, say a large skull of a loggerhead turtle or a raccoon pelt. If we’re lucky there are some live critters kicking around, like Pliskin the corn snake from the Reeds Creek Nature Center in North Carolina, Dudley the great-horned owl from the Carolina Raptor Center or Five, the five-legged toad with the Charlotte Nature Museum who all hung out with us today in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Yesterday the star of the show was Cyrus Buffum, founder and visionary behind the hip Charleston Waterkeepers, water watchdogs of the storied South Carolina town. To get an idea of Cyrus’ dedication to his cause one only needs to look at the Charleston Waterkeepers logo that he designed, which carries more meaning than a medieval crest of arms (think: Poseidon's trident and civil war crests for South Carolina among other triple entendres of symbolism).

Cyrus studied physics in university but wanted to pursue something that combined water, people and science. Then he read The Riverkeepers by John Cronen and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “It lit a fire under my ass,” he told me from the water street fair on College of Charleston's campus yesterday.  In September 2008 he founded the Charleston Riverkeepers, the 183rd organization within the worldwide movement.

Today he busies himself and his 200 members with battling industrial polluters (there are 40 NPDS permits on the Cooper River alone), raising awareness about the hazards of storm water runoff, lobbying for a cleaner port (Charleston sits on the biggest port on the East coast) and connecting with recreational users of Charleston’s waterways. 

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources also had a table set up at yesterday’s water village. They’re running a monofilament recycling program that collects fishing debris from fishermen and sends it off to get recycled into grey plastic blocks of artificial habitat for lakes. 

South Carolina has the nation’s eighth largest number of recreational fishermen and that’s not per capita, that’s just in absolute numbers. So there’s a lot of fishing line to keep off the shores and out of the water.

Speaking of which, the South Carolina Sea Grant needs volunteers for their Beach sweep/River sweep coming up September 18th. Sign up! Or else!!

In other news, Alexandra has just been invited to join the Waterkeeper Alliance leadership council by Bobby Kennedy Jr.! Expedition Blue Planet is looking so forward to expanding their collaboration with them in the future.

If you want to learn more about these champions of water we’ve met so far, here’s some link love to direct you to their sites.  

• Kate Ross, Portland, Oregon – Willamette Riverkeeper
• Gary Wockner, Fort Collins, Colorado – Poudre River
• Paul Orr, Baton Rouge, Louisiana – Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper
• Chandra Brown, Savannah, Georgia – Ogeechee Riverkeeper
• Casi Callaway, Mobile, Alabama – Mobile Baykeeper
• David Merryman, Charlotte, North Carolina – Catawba Riverkeeper
• Cyrus Buffum, Charleston, South Carolina – Charleston Riverkeeper