Join Us in Supporting Healthy Water

Everyone is invited to attend the Altamaha Riverkeeper’s annual meeting on Sunday, October 30 at 3:00 at the Ashantilly Center in Darien.

The Ashantilly Center, known as “Old Tabby,” was the mainland home of Thomas Spalding, early Georgia planter, legislator, and McIntosh County landowner. The original home, circa 1820, burned in 1937. Today, the Ashantilly Center is a non-profit educational and cultural historic site, organized and founded by William G. Haynes, Jr., artist, small letterpress printer and founder of Ashantilly Press, and protector of the Altamaha.

It’s Halloween and the trick is on us. Our river is being polluted with ghoulish and stinky water and it’s really scary.
The annual meeting program is on the biggest threat to the Altamaha - pollution from Rayonier.  The Altamaha Riverkeeper objected in 2008 when the Environmental Protection Division (EPD) entered into a Consent Order with Rayonier giving the company 10 years to clean up half of their color pollution in the Altamaha River.

 Three years later, Rayonier’s pollution is worse than ever and ARK is redoubling its effort to require Rayonier to clean up its act and become the “good neighbor” that our world class river deserves.

In summer 2012, over 300 people will paddle down the Altamaha River near Jesup with Paddle Georgia. Help ARK make sure they don’t experience what Coosa Riverkeeper, Joe Cook, describes below.

“For all its wildness, the Altamaha is regrettably fouled like no other river I have ever seen in Georgia. At Jesup, a paper plant operated by Rayonier devastates it. The plant’s blackwater discharge filled with suspended solids and the stench of the paper manufacturing process transforms an inviting stream into a cesspool of industrial waste.

It doesn’t really recover until about 20 miles downstream from the plant. The discharge pipe at Rayonier looks benign, but what it belches transforms the river.

There are few places left in Georgia where the sights and smells at the end of a municipal or industrial discharge pipe leave you fighting mad. This is one of them. I hope somewhere out there, a Rayonier stockholder reads this. What is happening on the Altamaha in Jesup is shameful—a tragedy in a land of immense beauty.  And if you have a soul, it’ll make you fighting mad.”

“Please join the battle; ARK’s goal is to raise $100,000 to clean up Rayonier’s polluting discharge. We are off to a great start; we have received a $10,000 contribution and a challenge to our members that will match your contributions to double ARK’s work to clean up our river, “ says Executive Director, Deborah Sheppard.   

Please make a donation online or send your donation to ARK, P.O. Box 2642, Darien, Georgia 31305. 

Donations of $500 or more will receive a signed copy of Janisse Ray’s new book, Drifting into Darien, A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha Riverwith a personal message from Janisse

Your contributions support the Altamaha Riverkeeper’s work to protect and restore the habitat, water quality, and flow of the mighty Altamaha— from its headwaters in the Oconee, Ocmulgee, and Ohoopee— to it terminus at the Atlantic coast and estuary.

Please make a contribution online or ARK, P.O. Box 2642, Darien, GA,  31305.