Keeping the Chattahoochee: Reviving and Defending a Great Southern River

“Keeping the Chattahoochee” is the memoir of an environmentalist, but it is also a book about what makes advocacy and reform effective. It’s explains how a small group, working in the right ways, forced a city to take on a problem its leaders absolutely did not want to deal with, the polluting of a river. The city and river? Atlanta and the Chattahoochee.

Sally Bethea was the founding director of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper.

The big ideas for Urban Atlanta:

1. The book makes clear why good advocacy is important and how it works. Good advocacy builds credibility through observation and research. It is persistent, finds creative ways of pointing out problems to citizens and leaders, creates alliances and makes friends easily, and is willing to work toward solutions.
2. The book also shows why good advocacy needs strong organizations. Chattahoochee Riverkeeper was effective because it was good at things like communications, volunteer management, fund raising, events, lobbying and media relations.
3. Riverkeeper’s work was in service to a vision of a healthier river and a set of policies and improvements that could advance the vision. This is another hallmark of effective civic advocacy: It has clear goals and can explain why, if the goals are reached, life will improve for many people..
4. The book should leave readers wondering if the Riverkeeper approach to advocacy—through good practices, strong organization, clear vision and goals—could be used to advance other urbanist objectives.