Take me to the river; Wash me down

When Al Green sang those words, do you think he pictured baptism in a stream sullied by mine run-off or pesticides and manure lagoons?

Do you think a few small fish—say, varieties of shellfish, darters, minnows, madtoms, chubs and more—aren’t important in the overall scheme of things?

Think again.

Tennessee’s watersheds are intricately co-dependent biospheres in which every fish—every water-filtering mussel, crawdad, frog, hellbender and salamander—plays a role. This life cycle links every creature, one to the next.

Besides being the environment of so much aquatic diversity, these are the lakes and rivers where you fished or swam as a child. These bodies of water were the setting of so many special moments in your own life—where you experienced the serenity of being in a kayak on a misty morning on the Holston. Or lived through the hair-raising excitement of whitewater rafting down the Ocoee.

There’s history running through our rivers. These waterways were crucial to early explorers like Hernando de Soto and Robert Cavalier de la Salle. They were marveled at by naturalist Henry Timberlake and the longhunters like Daniel Boone who depended on Tennessee’s abundance of rivers to venture into the wilderness.

In the centuries prior to settlement by Europeans, the rivers were the lifeblood of the people who had always been here—the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Shawnee.

It was the Union Army’s ability to rapidly move troops and supplies on the Mississippi, Cumberland and Tennessee rivers during the Civil War that doomed the Confederacy’s control of the state.

In the last century, the Tennessee Valley Authority became the inaugural program for the New Deal—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s revolutionary social program to pull us out of the Great Depression. In 1936, TVA’s network of 29 dams began with the impoundment of the Clinch River at Norris, a few miles north of Knoxville in East Tennessee.

Now, we are at another crossroads in history—one that won’t give us any do-overs if we pick the wrong route. Environmental protection rollbacks and budget cutbacks threaten to undo all the benefits from the Clean Water Act of 1972. Pollution, coinciding with the erratic patterns of drought and floods due to climate change, threatens the health of entire watersheds all across Tennessee’s three Grand Divisions.

Working against these odds, Conservation Fisheries, Inc., a Knoxville-based non-profit group of researchers, biologists and aquatic experts, has developed techniques to propagate more than 65 nongame fish, including some of the most imperiled species in the Southeastern U.S. Restoring these populations literally saves the life of our rivers.

The purchase of this map directly aids in the preservation of the state’s creeks and rivers. Twenty percent of the profits from Rivers Flow products goes to Conservation Fisheries to support their invaluable work.

— Jack Rentfro