Build that trust

After nearly three decades, Alabama conservation legend Beth Stewart retired from her post as Cahaba River Society’s executive director this summer.  

Beth was a pioneer in the U.S. water conservation movement. Her career focused on keeping metro Birmingham’s drinking water safe and placing Alabama’s world class rivers and biodiversity on the map. A cornerstone of her legacy is putting people and relationships first, focusing on education and partnership as the foundation of her stewardship.  

SELC sat down with Stewart to talk about building trust, and her hopes for the future of conservation work in Alabama. 

Tell me about the Cahaba River Society and the water conservation movement in the 1990s. How has this work changed since then? 

When I started at Cahaba River Society in 1995, there were a handful of environmental groups working on water issues. Cahaba River Society was already one of the most active, well-organized, well-supported water protection groups at that time. The Cahaba is a recreational and spiritual focus for people, including those who play in the river, fish on the river, and live around the river.  

Founders like Don Elder, the first executive director, and the wonderful photographer Beth Maynor Finch had already gained national attention for the river’s beauty, and we expanded on that. The Cahaba River Society was a manifestation of that love for the river. 

In ‘95, I was invited to the second nationwide gathering of people involved with River Network. Now, River Network’s annual river rallies have 400 to 500 participants. But back then there were 18 of us, representing most of the executive directors of water-based environmental organizations in the U.S.  

The Alabama Rivers Alliance helped birth many local water protection groups, and that mirrors the expansion of groups happening across the nation during that time. Protecting water resources was really significant to local communities and became a focal point for environmental advocacy and action. Now the Alabama Rivers Alliance has more than 100 member organizations.  

What role does cooperation and partnership play in getting communities, including local and state governments, to support water conservation work? 

We wanted to make sure we were building a base of understanding and communication throughout what we call our “peopleshed.” That philosophy has been critically important to the success of the Cahaba and the Cahaba River Society.  

The biggest pushback we received was in the early 2000s when the Regional Planning Commission, Cahaba River Society, and others were partnering in the upper Cahaba watershed planning process. The idea was to identify some common policies that all the stakeholders could adopt to help protect the river, but the communities weren’t ready.  

It took quite a while to build those relationships, build that trust, but we got there. That has made a big difference in us being at the table, helping local governments find better solutions toward the river that are also compatible with growth goals. We wanted to take a collaborative approach, so it was clear that we were there to be a resource and to work together to find solutions that were going to work for the development and business, for local government, for residents, and for the river.  

Over the years, Cahaba River Society has partnered with SELC when there were serious threats to the Cahaba River and it was a lot harder to get that seat at the table with local leaders. Can you tell me more about those cases? 

Our policy at Cahaba River Society is that we use the full quiver of all the different arrows that one can use in our work, from education, advocacy, to legal. Legal is the last arrow we pull out. It’s our last resort when we’ve tried everything else.  

That was the case with conserving the Birmingham Water Works Board land. Having 7,000 acres protected all at once is the largest single land protection initiative that’s ever occurred in the Birmingham metro area. 

The Water Board had made a legally binding commitment in the early 2000s to permanently protect their Cahaba and Lake Purdy drinking water source lands with conservation easements, but they had not fulfilled that. We worked with SELC for three years to help explain to the water board what a true conservation easement would be, but eventually legal action was necessary. We’re just grateful that our settlement with the Water Board achieved the land protection that we believe customers deserved, and the Cahaba needs, but that was also compatible with the board’s goals for their land. 

That protected 7,000 acres of forest is like a sponge. It soaks up rain and lets it go slowly to the river while cleansing it along the way, and it’s a protection against floods and drought. It makes sure that there’s base flow coming into the river during long dry spells. The land is critically important to keep our drinking water clean and affordable. 

One of your final acts as executive director was working with SELC to end a sewage consent decree with Jefferson County. I understand creating the original consent decree was also one of your first jobs in the ’90s, is that right? 

I was a part of those negotiations to address crisis level raw sewage overflows throughout the county, not just in the Cahaba.   

It took some time, but once the county got the sewage system on track to be a professionally run system, they did just a brilliant job. We started having annual meetings with the county where they would walk us through not only the repairs and operational improvements that were underway, but also in-depth monitoring of flow and modeling of outcomes under different scenarios to identify priority cost-effective projects. 

What I am still so proud of about the settlement is that we also got one of the largest and most impactful Supplemental Environmental Projects in the nation that created the Freshwater Land Trust and secured $30 million to protect lands along creeks and streams. Since 1996, the trust has protected 12,000 acres in multiple counties across Alabama and has built public access and trails.  

Learn more about Beth Stewart’s work.

What are your hopes for the future of water conservation in Alabama? What needs to happen to continue your good work? 

First of all, we still have a long way to go to protect the river. The biggest challenge for the Cahaba is that forest is being converted to paving and roofs. Runoff, including rain deluge because of climate change, has a massive impact and is destabilizing the riverbanks and causing erosion and bank collapses. With all of the impacts to biodiversity, recreation, value, and property safety, it is a tremendous challenge to be able to work with local governments, developers, and residents to have solutions across the board that will protect the river. We’re still developing strategies, we’re still developing relationships, and we’re not there yet. 

We need to continue efforts to gain recognition of Alabama’s biological diversity — particularly Alabama’s aquatic diversity — as globally significant and worthy of investment. There’s a lot of money that goes from all over the country to protect the Great Lakes or the Colorado River or California’s water resources. We just aren’t getting the same level of investment from national sources in Alabama. I think that it’s critically important to keep knocking on those doors, to highlight just how incredibly important Alabama’s biodiversity is.