THE FIRST VICTORY
Bailey Thompson

When Tom Singley moved his young family to Pascagoula in 1971, he bought a boat - then he went looking for a house. "I got my priorities right," he said. He had grown up enjoying the woods around Meridian, hunting and fishing and earning Eagle Scout rank. But he had never been on the Pascagoula River. "It was an amazing sight," he recalled recently. "It took me a long time to learn what we had here."

Fresh from his medical training, he also learned how politics had dictated the river's use, especially around the highly industrialized eastern channel. Growth trumped nature. If some important person or interest needed, say, a channel dredged, a call to a county supervisor usually was sufficient.

Even later, after the federal Clean Water Act and other laws stopped the worst abuses, development schemes kept surfacing. "There was a mind-set then among corporate industry around here that they could do anything they wanted to," Singley said.

The young physician, eager to preserve what he considered to be a priceless heritage, decided that emotional pleas wouldn't work. So he went hunting for facts to support his arguments. Meanwhile, he and other friends of the river began learning how to organize. Public officials took notice when they showed up at hearings.

The tipping point came in 1988 when Mississippi Power

Co. announced it wanted to barge coal about 12 miles up the eastern Pascagoula to its generating plant on Gray Bayou. The company also intended to dig a half-mile canal on its property so it could unload the coal.

Shipping coal by river instead of by rail made economic sense, Singley said, as he showed me the power plant one July morning from the bow of his wooden boat. We had come up the proposed barge route to this isolated, tree-covered area. But the plan also called for destroying about 11 acres of freshwater swamp on the company's property. Moreover, it played down potential harm, such as stirring up the layer of saltwater at the river's bottom or eroding banks with the barges' wake.

Though some powerful people gave their blessing to the proposal, the company met a barrage of public opposition. Leaders emerged within a new organization called "Save the Pascagoula."

Singley was in the thick of it. "It was intense for about a year," he said.

Singley and his group mounted a flotilla of 30 vessels to protest the barge plan. They gathered names on a petition and hired a consultant, who warned that increasing the salinity of the water would harm freshwater trees and other vegetation.

Up to 600 people packed a hearing on Feb. 6, 1990, at Gautier when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies sought the public's views. Only five people spoke for the project.

About a month later, Singley learned from a company spokesman that the barge project had been shelved. Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor, who represented the area in Congress, praised Mississippi Power for listening to citizens' legitimate concerns.

For its efforts, "Save the Pascagoula" was honored as Conservation Organization of the Year in 1991 by the Mississippi Wildlife Federation.

Singley savored what he saw as a change of sensibilities. "For years, it was get over one [fight] and get knocked down by another one and have to climb up the hill again," he remembered. Now groups such as Save the Pascagoula had learned to join forces. And over the next few years, they would gain national allies such as the Nature Conservancy and the National Audubon Society, all intent on preserving the Pascagoula as the largest free-flowing river system in the lower 48 states.

The next big challenge in the eyes of Singley and some other activists is a proposal by Jackson County to withdraw a larger volume of water from the river.

But first, how did the Pascagoula's lush bottomlands, teeming with wildlife and biological diversity, escape the chain saws to become a paradise for hunters, fishermen and other nature enthusiasts?

The first victory

Graham Wisner was a 23-year-old refugee from his parents' privileged status in Washington when in 1973 he heard that the Nature Conservancy, a conservation group, might be interested in protecting 32,000 acres of swamp along the Pascagoula River. Members of his extended family and other stockholders owned the property. The young man had found peace within the solitude of his family's river camp and in the company of a nature-wise game warden named Herman Murrah.

"I would swim across that river with a dog, and Herman would scoop me and put me in front of a campfire and say, 'Boy, do you know what you have here?'

" Wisner recalled.

More conventional thinkers among the stockholders were ready to cash in on this hardwood bonanza. Masonite Corp., one of the world's biggest timber companies, was a prime suitor.

What followed is a remarkable story of how the Conservancy, working with some far-sighted public officials, pulled off the largest state purchase of land in the nation's history to that time. And they did it in Mississippi, the last place many people among the Eastern elite would have looked for enlightened conservation.

The story is chronicled in Donald G. Schueler's book "Preserving the Pascagoula," which the University of Mississippi republished last year. Schueler interviewed the principal players to re-create the cliffhanger. Much of the action revolved around the skillful negotiation of David Morine, then vice president of the Nature Conservancy, and the determination of the late Avery Wood, the eccentric director of the state Game and Fish Commission.

The victory has been sweetened since by the state's acquisition of 3,000 more acres from the International Paper Corp. and management of a big tract controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Pascagoula now runs mostly wild through about 50,000 protected acres along 50 miles of the river's 81-mile route.

I asked Morine what this acquisition meant for conservation. "This one project changed everything - the way we did business," he replied. After the Pascagoula purchase, the Nature Conservancy could go to other states and persuade their officials to act while there was still time.

The Mississippi experience also demonstrated that some of the best conservationists are people who like to hunt and fish. They may not call themselves environmentalists, but they want the land and water protected, Morine said.

Before the Pascagoula land purchase, the Game and Fish Commission managed only about 22,000 acres. Yet the state sold more than 600,000 hunting and fishing licenses for a population of about 2 million people. Outdoor recreation generated about $150 million in business each year and accounted for $7 million in taxes.

The state wasn't investing wisely in this outdoors enterprise, Morine argued. Sports enthusiasts needed more land. Meanwhile, agriculture and urban sprawl were gobbling up tens of thousands of acres and natural streams were being channelized.

He had sympathetic allies when on Jan. 16, 1975, he met with the Mississippi Heritage Committee, which Wood had helped establish to supervise land acquisitions. Its most lustrous member was John H. Vaught, famed athletic director for the Ole Miss Rebels. He had saved his team from a disastrous season in 1973 by coming back as head coach and whipping Tennessee 28-18.

At one point, Morine warned in his clipped Boston accent that the Pascagoula prize might slip away to another buyer. Vaught sized up Morine -Amherst College, Class of '66 - and then drawled, "Son, I reckon you just don't know how we work in Mississippi. Down here, son, we go for the touchdown at every play."

After some hard play with the owners and some heart-stopping fumbles, the game plan finally worked. The Legislature authorized $13.5 million in general obligation bonds for the purchase, and on Sept. 22, 1976, the Conservancy served as the middle man for transferring title to 32,000 acres. Stockholders who surrendered ownership of the land, meanwhile, including members of Graham Wisner's family, took losses in the transaction that amounted to a $3.4 million contribution toward the project's success.

"It changed the way conservation was done. It was unbelievable," Morine recalled 27 years later.

Wisner, who is now a Washington lawyer and a board member of the River Network, another national conservation group, agreed that the Pascagoula purchase was a milestone. It launched the Nature Conservancy's protection of river systems, particularly in the South, and focused attention on preserving biological diversity.

What concerns him now about the Pascagoula?

"My constant fear is that when the state has no more revenue, it will think about cutting timber, and that would be a terrible short-term sacrifice," he replied. "It haunted Herman Murrah in his life."

Instead, the state needs to buy more land to protect the river from clear-cutting of timber and other threats and continue cracking down on polluters, he said. "This is an internationally important project. I hope one day the United Nations will designate the river a treasure."

He predicted that once Europeans discover the river, with all the first-rate hotels along the Coast, Mississippi will lose its negative image among many outsiders and attract droves of eco-tourists.

Urgency to preserve

State Sen. Tommy Moffatt, a retired engineer, represents the urban areas along the lower river. He describes himself as a pro-business conservationist. He wants the Pascagoula to remain free-flowing and clean of industrial and other pollution.

But as a member of both the environmental protection and the finance committees of the Senate, he doesn't see much interest among his colleagues in buying more land to protect the river and its basin. Other priorities take precedence, particularly when Mississippi, like so many other states, suffers from a budget crunch.

Such fiscal realities put more pressure on the nonprofit sector to raise money for purchasing land. The Nature Conservancy in 1999, for example, acquired 3,273 acres of bottomland near the confluence of the Leaf and Chickasawhay rivers, which form the Pascagoula in northwest George County. It named the tract after Charles Deaton, an attorney in Greenwood who, as a state legislator, was a key player in the state's purchase of land downriver. Three years later, the Conservancy honored the late Herman Murrah when it dedicated to his memory another tract it had purchased nearby, which brought the total acreage in the area to about 5,000.

Becky Stowe manages this preserve for the Conservancy. I joined her one afternoon in June at a country store and café in Bexley for a tour. She was with her husband, Read, an archaeologist, who taught her at the University of South Alabama. Now retired as a professor, he has a consulting company and continues to find and interpret native American sites.

Becky Stowe grew up roaming woods in the area with her father and grandfather. Twenty-five years ago, she said, when much of the land belonged to large timber corporations, there seemed to be no end to hunting. But those opportunities were slipping away. Just behind their house in Lucedale, for example, land that Scott Paper Co. once owned was subdivided recently and sold in tracts as small as six acres.

If the old ways can't be maintained, she said, then many local people want to see land preserved by the state or nonprofit groups such as the Conservancy. "We want our kids and grandkids to experience it the way we did."

We turned off U.S. 98 and drove over back roads. From an old two-lane bridge, I could see where the Pascagoula began just upriver at the confluence. Read Stowe, whose flowing white beard and weathered fatigues lend color to his stories, narrated the history of the place.

We explored where the logging town of Merrill thrived before floods forced residents to seek higher ground at Lucedale, eight miles away. Merrill bestrides a railroad that once hauled lumber harvested in the deep woods. Only the foundation of the town's sawmill remains, but houses are scattered around. People hold on to the small lots they have inherited or bought. One house has dozens of deer antler racks nailed to a utility building. The owner might dislike being called a tree-hugger, Becky Stowe said, but he loved the land and wanted to protect it.

High water prevented us from entering the Murrah Preserve, so we headed back to U.S. 98, where there was an entrance to the Deaton Preserve. The tract previously was a pine tree plantation, and the former owner cut some of the timber. The Conservancy is restoring the land with cherry bark oak, cypress and other hardwoods that grew here when white settlers arrived.

Becky Stowe drove the pickup into a meadow where wild hogs had torn up the ground with their tusks. These beasts, descended from domestic stock the Europeans introduced, can rip up seedlings faster than crews can plant them. But the hogs also spread seeds through their excrement, as evidenced by young persimmon trees flourishing in the open space. We also saw cactus with yellow blossoms. Indians ate this plant, Read Stowe said.

Indians settled in this part of Mississippi about 9,000 B.C., according to evidence unearthed about 15 miles away. Typically, they preferred to dwell on sandy soils. These places were healthier, and the Indians could hunt in both kinds of habitat, Read Stowe said. Most of the larger villages were along the Coast, but there was a sizable Indian settlement at the confluence, according to a map dating to around 1701.

Over a rutted trail, we reached a little boat landing on an oxbow lake, into which flows a stream. Two hundred years ago, great stands of cypress towered to 100 feet, creating a cavelike canopy overhead. Read Stowe said Indians probably settled on this spot, trying to hide from Europeans.

The French came up river to trade back then, but they could be rough customers. Some of the explorers were part Indian themselves, and they knew the customs and often spoke several languages, Read Stowe said. To learn more about the area, they might have left a cabin boy with a tribe for a year. He would either have perished or become invaluable as a translator and go-between with the Indians.

On the way out of the preserve, Becky Stowe stopped to show me where gopher tortoises had dug their dens. The animals, protected by law as a threatened species, are making a comeback.

Once the Conservancy brings back the natural flora and fauna, the next step probably would be to organize hunting by young people as a way to encourage their connection to the land, she said.

Pipeline dreams

Success stories such as I saw on the upper Pascagoula energize the conservationists. Yet they still bemoan missed opportunities. Singley and other members of Save the Pascagoula had hoped, for example, that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would purchase more sensitive areas along the river.

The Corps received money from Congress to buy high-quality wetlands in Mississippi to compensate for areas it destroyed during construction of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which it completed in 1985. Under pressure from local activists, the Corps bought about 5,000 acres on the lower river, expanding an area already under protection. The Corps could have bought more land on the river, Singley said, but Gov. Kirk Fordice persuaded it to purchase property around Tupelo instead.

Meanwhile, Singley and other conservationists are worried about what they see as a new threat to the river's natural flow, this one coming from public rather than private interests. Jackson County's supervisors propose to withdraw an additional 3.2 million gallons of water a day now and perhaps much more later from the Pascagoula River. Opponents argue that industries don't need additional water and that withdrawal could interfere with the river's natural processes.

In 1991, news stories began appearing that warned Jackson County, the state's most industrialized area, was about to run out of ground water. At that time, the county had a paper mill, a refinery, shipyards and chemical plants. Some used ground water and also water piped from the Pascagoula and Escatawpa rivers.

The state had refused since 1986 to allow new drilling on the southern end of the county. There was concern that pumping more water from wells would encourage saltwater to seep into underground sources. Attention focused instead on building a new treatment plant with another pipeline from the Pascagoula River.

In 1998, the same year the state learned that the ground water was not in danger, the federal Environmental Protection Agency granted $4 million to begin planning for what was now called the Pascagoula Industrial Pipeline Supply Project. The new pipeline would supply industry and residents with water drawn from the river at Cumbest Bluff, about 15 miles north of Pascagoula.

The project has a staunch friend in Republican U.S. Sen. Trent Lott. He told the press it was necessary to maintain existing industries and attract new ones.

The project also has support from the area's Democratic congressman, Gene Taylor, who has followed the issue since1988, when he was a state senator. He helped secure the federal funds for the project, which is partly in place now. New intake valves and the permits to use them have increased the county's ability to remove water from the river from 50.4 million gallons a day in 1980 to 78 million gallons per day.

Taylor, a fisherman who is known for being sympathetic to conservation, said he supported the project because Jackson County may not need the new pipeline now but it has to look to surface water for its long-term supply.

Why? Using surface water is easier on the environment than drawing down aquifers, he said. To compensate for dry periods, the Pat Harrison Waterway District, which helps supervise the Pascagoula River's use, could release water from one of its impoundments, such as the reservoir on the Okatibbee Creek, north of Meridian.

Opponents counter that local industries are not clamoring for more water and some former users, such as International Paper on the Escatawpa, have departed since planners envisioned the pipeline. True, the project has since been scaled back, but who's to say there won't be more than one new pipeline? Singley asked. Is Mississippi going to deplete its rivers as states out West have done?

Some scientists are concerned that altering the river's flow, even that far downstream, could affect many species throughout the system. For example, the saltwater wedge at the bottom of the river around its mouth might move upstream if the flow were lessened.

Stephen T. Ross, a fish expert at the University of Southern Mississippi, said decreasing the amount of fresh water flowing over the river's marshes could diminish the bounty of seafood that originates in those brackish nurseries. It also could interrupt the migration of species, such as the federally protected Gulf sturgeon, which enters the river from the Mississippi Sound.

Eco-tourism

One industry with potential to grow is eco-tourism, provided the river remains healthy and wild. Advocates agree with Graham Wisner that visitors to casinos and other attractions on the Coast might be persuaded to extend their stay for nature tours.

Already, Moss Point is working with the National Audubon Society to build a community nature center. The Pascagoula would be the project's back yard, said Bruce Reid, deputy state director for Audubon Mississippi.

Moss Point looks out on a natural treasure, Reid said. The river and its habitats have global importance for migrating birds. The center could become a source of community pride, as well as a way to connect people, particularly children, to nature.

Two brothers who want to help kids and other people get on the river have started a small tour company. Lynn and Benny McCoy cashed in their retirement savings to outfit a custom-made boat that can seat about two dozen tourists comfortably.

The brothers, now in their 40s with graying beards, lost good jobs they had held for a long time when their employers shut down. They had families to support but few prospects.

"So we just decided to do this," Lynn McCoy said. "Hey, this might be a blessing... . If you can make a living doing what you love to do, you can't ask for a better life than than that."

They got part-time work to help pay the bills. Lynn catches alligators that are nuisances and releases them in the wild. Meanwhile, the brothers did their homework. Lynn earned his captain's certificate from the U.S. Coast Guard, while Benny welded a frame for an awning over the new 24-foot aluminum boat.

Lately, business has been improving. But they need more customers. They want to work with schools and offer classes in nature. And they want to tap the influx of tourists visiting Coast casinos. Those establishments send people instead to the half dozen or so outfits that prowl the Pearl River.

"We've got everything the Pearl has and more," Lynn said. "I hope and I pray we can get enough people on board to stop anything from happening to this river."