If you’re an old canoe paddler like me, Florida offers a delightful assortment of rivers to navigate or just plain contemplate. They range from the laidback Blackwater in the Panhandle to the northward-flowing St. Johns to the world-famous “River of Grass” in the Everglades.
But only one is mentioned in our official state song: the Suwannee.
That body of water flows southward from Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, working its way through some 250 miles of North Florida wetlands, rapids, and channels, at last cascading into the Gulf of Whatchamacallit. It drains a watershed of more than 11,000 square miles and its flow is fed by more than 300 freshwater springs.
And it just received a rare piece of national recognition. Hooray! I’m so proud, aren’t you? Maybe we should go all out with a celebration.
Wait, what’s that? What’s the recognition?
Oh. The Suwannee was just named one of the 10 most endangered rivers in America.
Guess we'd better cancel the ticker-tape parade!
Most online resources refer to the Suwannee as relatively unspoiled compared to others across the South. But here’s what America’s Rivers says:
“The Suwannee River is famous for its springs, which ensure a consistent flow of clear, clean water. The river’s flow nurtures fish and wildlife and provides world-class recreation opportunities. But pollution and excessive water withdrawals are contaminating the river and causing vital springs to dry up.”
I contacted several experts about this, including the person who nominated the Suwannee for this dubious honor: Haley Moody, director of the Florida Springs Institute.
“The Suwannee’s got a lot going for it,” she said. “And a lot going against it, too.”
Even blunter was John S. Quarterman, who’s been the Suwannee Riverkeeper for a decade. He told me, “It certainly IS endangered.”
Sheesh! Having your state’s most famous river classified as endangered is like having the governor’s limo towed because it’s a clunker. It reflects badly on all of us — especially whoever sits in the driver’s seat.
Way down upon this particular river, there’s a surprising fact: The composer of our state song never set foot in Florida. The Pittsburgh songwriter never laid eyes on the river he praised.
Stephen Foster picked the Suwannee for his “Old Folks at Home” lyrics for the sound of the word, not the actual waterway.
Florida has struggled to make this 1851 song fit modern sensibilities, even rewriting its racially offensive lyrics. My favorite modern version, by the way, is the upbeat one by Florida man Ray Charles, titled “Swanee River Rock.”
Despite Foster’s lack of a Florida connection, he’s actually got a state park named after him, the Stephen Foster Culture Center State Park. It’s located in White Springs, which at one point was a popular tourist attraction.
In the early 1900s, so many wealthy tourists flooded White Springs seeking a medical cure from its waters that 13 hotels and a railroad line catered to them. Among the visitors: presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
The owner of the mineral spring built a four-story spring house around it to give patients access to “treatments” for their rheumatism, indigestion, dandruff, and insomnia. Yes, that’s right — our original tourism industry was run by medical quacks touting a phony cure. It’s very on-brand for this sunny place full of shady people.
The spring house still stands in White Springs, but visitors are scarce. The last hotel closed in 2013. The spring once gushed up from the earth at the rate of 32,400 gallons a minute, but now it’s just a glorified mudhole.
Pumping from a nearby phosphate mine drained so much water from the aquifer that the spring’s flow slowly petered out.
Unlike the spring, the phosphate mine, owned by a company called Nutrien, is still going strong. According to a list of water users Moody shared with me, it slurps up 30 million gallons of water a day. Its state permit allows it to take double that amount.
Those permits are a big problem. Despite four decades of declining spring flows, the Suwannee River Water Management District — the state agency in charge of protecting its namesake river — continues issuing these permits for water withdrawals. The word “no” doesn’t appear to be in its vocabulary.
In 2016, the Florida Legislature took steps to protect 30 of the state’s outstanding springs from this kind of problem. It ordered the state Department of Environmental Protection to adopt new water permitting rules by 2017 that would prevent people or companies from pulling so much water out of the aquifer that it would cause “harm.”
Instead, the DEP has repeatedly put off doing what the law requires. Imagine if you did that with paying your taxes. “Yeah yeah, I’ll get to it, don’t bug me,” you’d tell the Internal Revenue Service. That wouldn’t end well, would it?
When I wrote about this in 2020, I checked how many water-use permits the Suwannee River Water Management District had issued in just one year. The answer was 22 new permits to suck water out of the aquifer and it renewed another 16.
One of the largest drains on the Suwannee: Jacksonville. Water from the Suwannee is being pumped out of the ground to benefit folks who live nowhere near the river.
The water district has a plan to fix this. But it’ s so controversial, Quarterman said, that all the counties in the Suwannee River basin are opposed to it.
The cover of the American Rivers report on the 10 most endangered rivers in America is an image of the flowing Suwannee.
Smack dab in the middle is a pipeline dumping waste into the river. Quarterman identified the pipeline’s owner as Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken processing plant in Live Oak.
According to the water management district, the solution to the Suwannee’s dwindling flow lies in building a bigger, longer pipeline, this one stretching all the way to Jacksonville.
Although it’s called “Water First North Florida,” this project does not, in fact, involve water. It involves treated wastewater.
“The project will carry wastewater from Jacksonville, almost 90 miles east of Suwannee, through a pipe to be treated in facilities and natural wetlands before being sent into the aquifer,” WUFT-FM reported in February.
When completed, it would bring 40 million gallons of treated waste a day to inject into the aquifer, boosting the natural flow. One flaw in the flow restoration plan: Lots of unanswered questions.
“Pipes would be constructed to carry the water from across the state, but an exact location where pipes will take the reclaimed water has yet to be determined,” the radio station reported. “The project would take 15 years to complete and cost around $1 billion.”
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “A billion dollars to flush 40 million gallons a day of treated poop water into the aquifer where everyone gets their drinking water? Who would support such an idiotic idea?”
So far, the answer is: Nobody who’d be drinking the water, that’s for sure.
“Almost everyone attending a Suwannee County GOP town hall on Feb. 5 again opposed a plan to recharge the Floridan aquifer with treated Jacksonville wastewater,” WUFT-FM reported after one public meeting.
The Columbia County Observer, covering a different meeting on the project, noted that the crowd saw it as big city folks dumping their poopy problems on good country people. That’s why they say no to the flow.
“The Water First North Florida rollout has been a disaster,” the Observer observed.
“Five county commissions and the town council of Branford thus far have passed letters or resolutions in opposition,” Quarterman wrote in a letter he sent this month to the water district. “The twelve-county River Task Force has also passed such a resolution, as has its parent body, the North Central Florida Regional Planning Council.”
I talked to the chairman of the river task force, Madison County Commissioner Rick Davis. Count him among the opponents of this plan.
“My county was the first one to pass such a resolution,” Davis said. “There’s not been nearly enough research on what the negative effects might be.”
He named a number of harmful chemicals that wouldn’t be scrubbed out by the sewage treatment that the district is proposing.
“For our environment, our tourism, and our health and safety, this is just the wrong choice,” Davis told me.
Nevertheless, the water district — with financial assistance of the St. Johns River Water Management District and the city of Jacksonville — is still pursuing its poop water plan.
Water district officials insist it’s the cheapest alternative to help the dwindling water flow. Quarterman and Davis both told me a better solution would be for Jacksonville to build a desalination plant and get its water from the Atlantic Ocean. That way, the city wouldn’t need to pump so much from under the Suwannee.
As for the expense, Tampa Bay Water built the biggest desal plant in the state in the early 2000s and it cost $198 million. I’m no math whiz, but I believe that’s less than $1 billion.
Still, if Jacksonville insists on shipping its poopy water to the Suwanee, I wonder what that’s going to do to the river’s endangered status.
Especially since the river is already reeling from pollution woes that were shipped in from elsewhere.
In 2023, PBS ran a special on the Suwannee that called it “one of the last wild rivers in America.”
But it’s not so wild that it’s free of the same contamination plaguing our urban waterways. The Suwannee has an excess of nitrogen pollution, that stuff fueling all our toxic algae blooms.
Records from the water district show that the Suwannee has twice as much nitrogen pollution as other nearby rivers, according to Ryan Smart, executive director of the Florida Springs Council.
“The nitrate pollution in the Suwannee is out of control,” Smart told me.
In other places, the nitrogen comes from excess fertilizer and leaking septic tanks. In the Suwannee region, much of it comes from runoff from dairy farms.
One cow produces the waste equivalent of 30 people, according to Moody’s institute, and the Suwannee River dairies boast more than 80,000 cows.
The dairy farmers mooooooooooooved their cows (sorry!) into the Suwannee region after being evicted from the land around Lake Okeechobee, Smart pointed out. That was part of an effort to clean up the big lake.
But it didn’t solve the dairy pollution problem, he said. It just relocated it northward. You can see why he’s got a major beef (sorry!) with the state over this.
I asked the water district’s spokesman for a comment on the American Rivers designation of the Suwannee as endangered.
“We agree that the Suwannee River is an iconic treasure to our region and beyond,” Troy Roberts, a district spokesman, told me via e-mail. “We trust the work of our minimum flows and levels (MFLs) program to protect these important waterways and ensure a sustainable water supply for both nature and people, not just for today, but into the future.
Smart told me the problem with Suwannee’s MFL program is that it doesn’t see any problem with the Suwannee. It’s as if the MFL program is Kevin Bacon in “Animal House,” repeatedly telling everyone amid the chaotic parade aftermath, “Remain calm! All is well!”
Except it’s not doing well at all.
When I was 5 or 6, my parents took me camping by the Suwannee River.
One morning while they were busy cooking breakfast, I wandered down to the riverbank. Without asking permission, I took the first step onto a small stone in the riverbed.
My goal, of course, was not to cross the river. Instead, when I got about halfway, I contrived to have an “accident.” Oops, I fell in! Sorry, Mom and Dad! They weren’t fooled, of course, but they didn’t punish me either.
I call that my Florida Baptism, a quick dip in the cool water of the state’s most famous river.
As a result, I tend to pay attention to what’s going on with the Suwannee. Over the years, I’ve tracked the stories of boaters battered by leaping sturgeon and read up on the discovery of ancient shark teeth in the riverbed.
Maybe this is the key to saving the river, too.
I hereby propose that whenever the water district board or, for that matter, any local governments convene to debate the future of the Suwannee, they should be required to do so while standing in the river. I doubt you could stand to harm the river while you’re standing in the river.
And to start off every wade-in-the-water session, everyone has to sing the Stephen Foster’s song. I’d require ’em to sing that peppy Ray Charles version.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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