Partner Love Letter: Cahaba River Society.

Cahaba River Society is an educator, expert resource, and collaborative partner working to protect and restore the Cahaba River watershed and its rich diversity of life.

The Cahaba River is vitally important to the communities in its watershed, including parts of Alabama's Jefferson, Shelby, Bibb, Perry and Dallas Counties. The Cahaba is also the main drinking water source for the Birmingham Water Works Board service area, which serves about one-fifth of Alabamians. This “peopleshed” of residents and businesses who depend upon the Cahaba River encompasses over a million people.

Dear Cahaba River Society, we love in so many ways…and we are long overdue for an enumeration of these ways.

We love your mission to honor and protect Birmingham’s natural landscape. We love how you have expanded that mission to include the local communities inside the city.

We love how you list countless ways that families and organizations can volunteer to help and support make the Cahaba River Watershed a better place.

We love learning that the Cahaba River has more fish species per mile than any other river of its size in North America. And we love learning this with data, facts, and maps.

We love Katie Shaddix for her constant energy, hope, and creativity in advancing the mission and managing the challenging roles of communication.

We love the Save the Cabaha River license tag and one of the Magic City Board Members loved it so much she went and got her own.

We believe everyone should get their own tag and help support the work you do locally.

Beth K. Stewart, Executive Director, Cahaba River Society

We love discovering Beth Stewart at underground poetry open mics in Birmingham—we appreciate so much how she reaches out to embrace words, language, art—all the avenues of communication to convey the important of this watershed for our lives and future. We believe in her inclusive, passionate vision.

Follow Cahaba River Society on Instagram and see all the wonderful things our friends keep doing.

We love the online Cahaba Blueway Map that makes the stream accessible for paddlers, fisher-folk, and humans seeking to commune with the river from various places. We love that our use and experience of the river is not outside the mission of what you do and hope.

Stay tuned for this event in May 2020.

And don’t miss the contributions of MCPF’s 2019 Eco-Poet Tina Mozelle Braziel, as she works with our partner organization to tell the story of the river in its poetic form while also educating young people about water quality, ecology, and the beauty in which we are fortunate to live—if we learn to appreciate it.

Every inch of this planet is the poem we make of it…..