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Philanthropy Journal, stories about bold people changing the world.

The James River is the reason Richmond, Virginia exists.

Richmond resides at the fall line, the point at which the James ceases to be navigable.

The river was a mighty boon to the city, but that came at a cost.

In the 1960s and '70s, it was one of the most polluted rivers in America.

Today things are much better.

Its water quality has gone from the abysmal D- to inspiring B- over the years.

But it didn't get there, and won't stay there on its own.

We're off to explore the James with some of the amazing people and organizations that have come together to protect this life-giving body of water.

[music playing] (SINGING) We hear the ocean, ocean, ocean, ocean ocean, ocean.

lift up The experimental folk band, Holy River's core goal is to spread awareness about the imbalance of humanity's relationship to nature.

They do this through the creation of music, art, and environmental activism.

They also try to embody it in the way they live their lives.

Today they're taking us on a journey to forage for paw-paws within the local park system.

And if we're lucky, maybe a swim.

So what is a paw-paw?

But let's just show you.

I think it's almost better to taste it and see it.

Most kids know the old song.

Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

So we started writing music more intentionally in the first place after this time in our life when we would come down to the James River every Sunday with a group of friends and meditate.

It was called quiet time.

And during those quiet time meditations, we realized that we could call things into our lives through music and through our lyrics.

And I think we're trying to call things in even with the name Holy Rivers, just trying to point out the sanctity of nature, something that is intertwined with our ability to be spiritual beings.

So here we're entering pawpaw land.

These are trees.

We just have to find the right one.

And we're in the middle of the city of Richmond.

We are right in the middle of the city, yep.

Next to the James River picking pawpaws.

So what's great about the James River Park system is it's very much unkept.

I love how intentional and wild this place is.

Oh, here's some pawpaws.

Woo.

Oh, bingo.

Not quite ready.

I'm going to keep looking.

We're looking for a yellowish one.

I'm going to shake this tree, let's see if it comes down easily.

Watch out.

So it's not ready.

I'll look low, you look high.

Where did Jamieson go?

He's in the woods.

Jamieson.

I got some.

This is just like a quarter of what I found.

These are perfect.

So you just break it in half-- OK. --and then you just squeeze it into your mouth like right through the skin.

Right.

They're good.

These are really good man.

It's my first pawpaw of the year.

This is it.

It's like a really good mango.

Um-hum.

And a really bad banana.

[laughter] You've lived here how long?

I have never even heard of a pawpaw until Lainey and Jamieson explained it to me.

And I've been here 25 years.

Is that horrible?

They initially began their work as activists when Dominion Power proposed a mixing zone in the James River that would have dumped tons of coal ash into the river upstream of the city.

This would have Fed into the same system as the municipal water supply.

All the toxins and heavy metals that would be coming out of the coal ash would be going in our bodies.

How do you fight against it?

I organized my first protest, we invited people to come and make signs and take photos of themselves and post on social media just to help people have awareness.

And the James River association, they worked to get an agreement with Dominion that Dominion would filter the water completely and test it before decanting it into the James River.

So you guys were actually able to stop it?

Yes we were.

Not just us, a lot of people-- Everyone, together, yes.

There's a part of a movement that actually-- they were able to stop it.

Yes, they were able to stop it, yeah.

When you start seeing the natural environment specifically through the waterways as all interconnected and all intertwined.

And you realize that not only is this the water that's growing our food, not only is this the water that is going into our municipal system for us to drink, it's like we are a part of these waterways on a cellular level.

My sign at that protest said, the James is my Holy river, I drink it every day, it runs through my veins.

The more I contemplate what rivers are on the Earth, the more amazed I am because they're endlessly old and endlessly new.

Like they're these veins that are carved through the Earth, through centuries, but the actual molecular water in them is technically new constantly, but they're ancient.

[cheering] Wait-- This tree has been providing chicken of the woods for us in a community for years and years.

We've been coming to this tree for six or seven years harvesting this mushroom.

Oh my gosh, it's huge.

Wow.

So this just reproduces, reproduces-- Yeah.

--reproduces.

And we actually just harvested from it a few days ago.

Looks just like coral or something wild.

Can you eat it raw?

No.

[laughter] So you guys forage a lot?

Yeah, we forage, quite a bit on the park system, yeah.

This is awesome.

Look at that.

I know, look at that.

Isn't that great?

It's like so beautiful.

Whoa, that was much deeper than I thought it was going to be.

All right, Craig, catch me.

[laughter] [cheering] This is the mighty James.

Richmond.

The mighty James.

Yeah, there's Richmond right there.

I didn't know there was a city right there.

That's so crazy.

So what are the big environmental things you guys are worried about right now?

Mountain Valley Pipeline.

We fought Atlantic Coast Pipeline and we killed it.

It's done, it's canceled after like six year fight.

Two for two.

We have a good-- Record.

--record right now.

But Mountain Valley Pipeline would cross multiple of the rivers that feed the James.

Already, they're like scraping the mountains.

And the sediment gets in the rivers and it makes it too cloudy for the sea life to thrive.

It affects the whole ecosystem because it's all interconnected.

So how do you fight it?

You try-- you understand it's a lifelong fight and you understand that there are people who need to be doing direct action like the tree sitters.

And then you need people to be in these boring meetings where all of the lifeblood of our environment is being signed away on little pieces of paper and rubber stamps.

Who sits in those boring meetings?

We do too.

We have done that too as well.

We've also caused a ruckus in those boring meetings.

You do what you love so you don't get burnt out.

With any activism, it's a diversity of tactics.

And you need the radical lawyers that are going to sue the companies that are trying to do the extraction, you need folks to create art and to create media and to create music to bring people's awareness to their even being an issue at all.

And it's a way to keep getting folks engaged.

The thing about activism for me is it is like a river.

You can't just do it and done.

Yeah, it's a constant.

It's whatever flows into the process flows out of the process.

It's a renewal of-- The way you live your life.

There's a vigilance.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's not like people who are trying to make money are just going to stop trying to exploit the situation.

No way.

Is it safe to swim?

Oh, yeah-- [laughter] --especially right now.

It looks really clean right now.

And so I think we're really good to swim.

I think it's going to be warm and feel amazing.

All right.

I'm up for you.

[laughter] Let's do it man, let's go.

All right.

We ended the hike with an amazing swim, other than an incident with Earl Schwartz that we won't talk about.

We called it a day and prep for an early morning with the aforementioned JRA.

For more than 40 years, the James River Association has been fighting for the rights of the river in order to restore it to full health.

Some of their team took us out on a pontoon boat to give us a sense of the river and a taste of their youth education programs.

First up, trawling Captain E explained the importance of this much loved education program.

Charles, one of their educators, and Jamie, the River Keeper and director of advocacy for JRA, kept us both on our toes during the program.

We get students from maybe right here in Hopewell who've never really been out on the river.

They drive over it.

They've been told it's sturdy, it's gross, don't go near it.

And then we ask, what do you think is living in the river?

They're going to say, nothing.

Like look at it, it's, muddy nothing's living.

Yeah.

And so we're going to do a troll to show them that the river is alive and it can support life.

And then throughout their study in school, they'll determine how healthy is the river?

You guys get to go to the schools a lot?

It's like a three part process.

So our first process, we will go into the school, introduce ourselves as well as our organization.

And then we do an infield lesson, we'll go back to the school and do a stewardship project.

How important is the education.

Because again, part of being a nonprofit is fundraising.

Are you guys passing the collection plate to these kids at the end of it for donations and stuff?

It's huge.

They are our future advocates.

So hopefully, wherever they go in their future we hope that they have an environmental lens now and they can serve in some aspect to helping our environment.

Awesome.

How many species do you think we'll find today?

I'm saying two.

I'm saying 50.

Somewhere between there maybe, yeah.

Somewhere between-- [laughter] All right, let's try it.

So we made sure that the end of the net is tied so the fish can't escape.

[laughter] You laugh like it's never happened before.

No, I know, it happens.

I think about all the things that you guys do.

So go all the way until the teal ribbons get to the fleet.

That's good, yeah.

Well, let's see-- Yeah, let's see what we got.

Let's see what we got.

A couple sample things we might catch up.

So you'll be expert identifiers.

Wait a minute.

This is more than four.

I will tell you-- I will tell you that-- Oh, my gosh.

Make sure the net and the rope gets into the bucket.

Oh, yep, that's part two.

Just a fore warning, the rope is wet.

Too late.

Yeah, pace yourself.

We got to-- [laughter] It's a marathon, not a sprint.

All the fish will be at the end, hopefully.

Oh, we've got one fish called beer can.

Yeah that's good.

Are you able to identify them all?

Yes, they're all fish.

[laughter] I meant hog chokers.

Oh, nice slime, yes.

A really cool feature of the scales.

If you go this way, super smooth.

All right.

And if you go tail to head, you'll see why they get their name.

The hog choker.

I should have known if you're only bringing three buckets that maybe there's only three species.

[laughter] We have some babies.

Are those catfish?

Yes.

Do you mind?

Not at all.

It does better in water.

It's OK-- Yeah, they can survive a long time-- Yeah, they're evasive.

[laughter] Here we have a Scud, which is a macroinvertebrate, which is a really important indicator to water quality as well because they support all of our fish species, great food source.

And you say it is a good food source, it's going to take a lot of those to get-- [laughter] From the time that we had Jamestown colony, how much has the environment changed?

There's some things that we can only imagine, like how pristine of a river did the Native Americans have before European arrival.

But we know that there have been a lot of drastic changes on the landscape, on agriculture, industrial development, building our cities, the runoff that flows through our city streets, all that has an effect on the river, especially when it rains.

So we just had a lot of rain, you can see the river is brown today.

And so we have those watershed level effects that have transformed the river.

We have a pretty ambitious goal at James River Association.

It's to restore the James River and connect people to it.

And that's a pretty difficult thing to do, but we do it through collective impact.

Charles is educating our next generation advocates.

We have our policy folks that are at the General Assembly educating legislators.

Over the last decade, there have been tremendous investments on farms, in our urban areas, and in our wastewater plants to reduce pollution loads.

And we've seen a response as that plan has been implemented.

Calling Matt Balazik.

This is the Spirit of the James.

Hey, Matt?

Hey, you, where are you at?

There we go.

Hey, we're off Presquile.

We did get your latest message.

Just upstream of Presquile.

And so we'll see you in a minute.

Great, thanks Matt Balazik a.k.a.

the sturgeon whisperer is a research ecologist.

He has a PhD in integrative life sciences, but he'd never tell you that.

His first love is the river and a close second is the Atlantic sturgeon.

It's a prehistoric fish that has survived three major extinction events, the worst of which was caused by humans.

Overfishing and pollution just about wipe them out when the meteor that killed most of the dinosaurs couldn't.

Matt and his older brother Martin dedicated their lives to researching and understanding this amazing species and providing much of the raw data and science that supports JRA in their conservation efforts.

Well, they are a relic bony fish, get confused with sharks a lot.

They've got that pointed snout and all that, but-- How big do they grow?

The biggest one that's been officially documented was 14 feet.

And that-- Fourteen feet.

That was in the late 1800s or early 1900s after all the big ones were wiped out.

So they can get very old.

The oldest one has been officially aged was around 60, but they can probably get well over 100.

Speaking of old, how long have they been around?

6,000 years brother.

Read your Bible.

[laughter] We'll say 6001 for these guys and then everything else was six.

But the estimate is about 140 million years.

And they're very interesting fish, they're almost like a chimera.

We say that they're a bony fish but actually, they have a cartilaginous skeleton, they don't have this on the inside, they have this on the outside though.

Interesting.

This is actually calcium phosphate.

This is called a scoop, they're the only ones that have these.

So this goes along their dorsal side.

They have different types of scoops.

They have one down the middle of their back, a line on each of their sides, and one line on each sides of their belly.

And then they have small versions of these in between.

So they really actually have an armor plating.

And again, you can see the ridge on this-- Yeah.

They will-- Oh my gosh.

--they will cut you.

I mean I've got-- You get an 8 foot sturgeon in your boat.

That's upset because it's trying to spawn.

That's why you bringing Martin?

Yeah, yes.

[laughter] Yeah, he's a muscle.

Hey Martin, we need you over here.

Yeah.

Overfishing began in the 1800s when immigrants from the Black and Caspian Sea region revealed to the unknowing local settlers that Atlantic sturgeon were the only true source of the much coveted and very valuable caviar.

Within two decades, the entire sturgeon population had crashed.

That combined with human caused habitat destruction in the 20th century led many to believe that by the 1960s, there were few, if any left.

And by the 1990s, they were thought to be gone entirely.

The '60s '70s, '80s, there was people who would fish for just one female sturgeon down there at like seven mile reach, they were set for the year.

That was their kids' college, that was their car.

Really?

Black market caviar is thousands of dollars an ounce.

Are people still black poaching?

There's been some poaching but nothing pervasive like it is over in Russia where it's run by the mafia and they kill people who do enforcement.

So I have kids about to go to college.

If I were to be a poacher to pay for their collage, how would I do that?

I think you're more likely to get killed by the person who's buying it from you.

I mean, you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars-- Wow --per fish.

A moratorium on harvesting them for their eggs and a concerted effort to improve the health of the river has allowed for an amazing comeback.

Not only are they not gone, they're thriving.

So Matt, why do you do this?

So right around the corner is actually-- used to be called American chemicals.

And that was the infamous dumping of Kepone into Bailey's Creek.

And all the workers were getting cancers and dying and all that.

And that's one of the things that was brought around the Clean Water Act in the 1970s.

Now, our family lived off of right there on the water and lived off the fish.

And they're like, yeah, you can't eat them anymore.

And it's like you eat this or you don't eat.

James' considered a trash river, no one would even want to swim in it.

We all thought sturgeon were gone and find out that they're coming back on their own.

We didn't do any hatchery work.

It was just a positive thing to potentially be a part of.

And partnered with JRA very early in this.

But we were really just the mules that went out there day after day catching nothing.

Who do you ask?

Everyone who used to catch these are dead.

Custom made nets, like some of the Nets, I had to make with my hand.

We're publishing papers now but this is work that started like 2006, 2007.

Wow.

And it was just back when we would catch one a day, we were going nuts.

And now on a good day, we can catch 50, 60, one or 2.

As long as you're careful with them, you can learn from them, work with them, and they can still do their thing.

Well, as a Virginian who's raising two Virginians, I thank you for what you do.

Well, it's a pleasure.

Our next stop was a local brewery and one of Craig's favorite haunts, Hardy wood.

Hardy wood supports the James River through donations from sales of a beer inspired by the return of the sturgeon to the James.

In addition to Charles and Jamie, we were also joined by Bill street, President and CEO of the JRA and Ben Watson, a climate scientist working in the Chesapeake Bay region.

So we spent a lot of time talking about water because it's important.

This is really the only time that I finally understand how important water is-- [laughter] --at a brewery.

Yeah, right.

It's in beer.

Hardy Wood's been a tremendous supporter.

But really, it takes all of us because we're all drinking the river.

60% of our bodies-- This beer right here.

A little bit more right now.

That's right.

[laughter] So we rely on Matt and other research scientists to feed us the science.

We then try to infuse that into public policy discussions, advocate for the river.

We all benefit from the river and so we all need to give back.

And a lot of people don't realize that.

90% of what we do is education.

Charles, you actually showed us a little bit of the programs that you all do from an educational standpoint, you and Jamie.

So we're extremely fortunate to work with public school systems as well as private school systems to continue the fight to keep the James over claim for our repairing buffer plantings to our advocacy and the General Assembly.

So that is a great starting point.

And then continuing to work with the communities in our watershed.

Charles, we were talking earlier about diversity in this field of environmental science.

There's definitely a lack of diversity in the natural resource realm.

To speak on behalf of that, I feel extremely comfortable in my cohort.

I love the work that I do.

But it would be great to have a representation of all people within the natural resource realm.

First, as far as a solution as making people comfortable, making people welcome, allowing people to be their genuine self within their work field.

And how do you raise the visibility of what you guys are doing in the context of things that seem bigger and harder?

From public health crisis, to economic crisis, to racial reconciliation.

Throwing there, climate change is the fourth major global challenge.

Yeah.

But one of the things that I like to point out is that the river is really a reflection of the community that lives around it.

And I think the river, as Jamie was saying, is a great example of where we have made progress.

Yeah.

Then Bill referenced climate change.

, Then tell us what is your role in this group?

I'm a climate scientist at the Virginia Institute of marine science.

I think when you try and strategize about how to most effectively reach people, it's all about making it local.

It's so easy to start feeling down about the road ahead.

But that said, I mean, you can look very locally to find inspiration, you can look in your own backyard to find stories of environmental change and change for the better.

The river is getting healthier.

Yes, we've got major, major challenges ahead, but people really need something positive.

And the sturgeon, I think, is a great example of something that can encapsulate positive change.

So when we think about the James River-- Yeah.

--it's a place but it's really so much more than that.

It is dynamic, it's spiritual.

And so we've turned it into a verb.

Part of our greeting and Cheers is let's river, and then the reply is river on.

All right.

We'll do it afterwards.

Oh Lord, I just loaded up.

Let's river.

River on.

There we go.

[laughter] Yeah, no problem.

It's really good renewal.

Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.

[laughter] Our waterways are critical to our cities and our lives.

Whether we're fighting to raise awareness, exploring and investigating the waters, working to educate the advocates of the future, or sitting in boring meetings, it will take all kinds of people and passions to protect the James and rivers like it for generations to come.

There's so much more to explore and we want you to join us on the good road.

For more in-depth content, meet us on the internet at THEGOODROAD.TV.

Hear more great stories, connect to organizations, and make sure you download our podcast Philanthropology.

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Proud sponsor of The Good Road.

Toyota, let's go places.

Technology changes the world, but not on its own.

Hardware needs heart, software needs soul.

When we match compute power to instinct, and acceleration to imagination, tomorrow comes alive.

For us, it's not what we achieve alone, but sharing a vision to solve the world's most important challenges.

Because together, anything is possible.

AMD, together we advance.

And by Uncommon Giving, the generosity company.

At Plow & Hearth, we believe that the place you are can become the place you want to be.

Philanthropy Journal, stories about bold people changing the world.

[music playing]