Saving The Pascagoula… Again
November 30th 2007
My Thanksgiving column in the Hattiesburg American was about South Mississippi’s natural treasure, the Pascagoula River system. As everyone who knows me is of hearing, the Pascagoula is the largest, unimpeded (or nearly so) river system in North America. It is a place of wonder and history and of legend. We have this remarkable piece of wild river only because of the foresight and tenacity of a small group of people who in the early seventies were dedicated enough, smart enough, and stubborn enough to transform the shared dream of an old swamp rat and a privileged young hippy into reality. This story was masterfully told in Don Shueler’s Preserving the Pascagoula. If you haven’t read this book, do so. If you haven’t read it in a few years, do so again. Preserving the Pascagoula and Shueler’s masterful Handmade Wilderness are the very best of Mississippi conservation writing.Among the lessons this book delivers is a realistic view of the constant threat that our remaining scraps of nature face and will continue to face. In the mid-seventies Herman Murrah, Graham Wisner, Dave Morine, Avery Wood, and Bill Quisenberry literally saved the Pascagoula from being clear cut and divided into hundreds of small parcels.Ten years later the river system was under attack again, this time from dioxin leaching from the Leaf River pulp mill in Beaumont. This time the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and residents along the River joined the battle that led to a change in the company’s bleaching process. The river’s aquatic life slowly recovered.The nineties found many of us local conservationists opposing the building of a large dam here in Hattiesburg. During this fight between economic development and conservation we found that we had allies across the state and beyond. The lasting result of the struggle was a coalition of public and private groups that still studies, promotes, and watches over the river.Now, in a new century the river is in danger again. The Richton Salt Dome has been approved as a new oil reserve repository. This will entail hollowing out a huge cavern in the salt dome deep beneath the surface by forcing water into it. A lot of water—fifty million gallons of water per day for five years! And where will they get this water? Correct—from the Pascagoula River. And there is more bad news. After the water is injected into dome it will be piped across Perry, George, and Jackson Counties and across the Mississippi Sound, out past Horn Island to be dumped into the Pascagoula ship channel. This water will be up to 600 times the natural salinity of the Gulf and will kill every marine organism in its path. And this is what will happen if everything goes right—if there are no droughts, no pipeline breaks, no ship collisions.Get ready, people. It’s time to save the Pascagoula. Again.
