JACKSON, Miss.—Joy Rhoads has always felt connected to the waterways near where she grew up in Jackson. She learned to water ski on the Ross Barnett Reservoir northeast of the city and camped along the Pearl River watershed’s many creeks and streams. The hours she spent outdoors made her feel responsible for protecting the area’s natural resources—an attitude she also observed in the people around her.
“Conservation was a part of how most people behaved,” Rhoads, a history instructor at Hinds Community College in the Jackson metro area, told the Mississippi Free Press on July 25. “We were the stewards of (the watershed) because we were using it.”
She brings that same mentality to her work at Mississippi Water Stewards, or MSWS, a statewide water monitoring and education program made up of citizen volunteers. Several times a week, she tests the reservoir and nearby Crystal Lake in Flowood for bacteria and other quality metrics, delivering vital information on local waterways that residents cannot find elsewhere.
The Pearl River watershed “defines us,” Rhoads said, noting that its rivers and creeks are just as much a part of the area’s cultural landscape as its geography. “If the quality isn’t what it ought to be for families to enjoy it, we need to know it first and then work to figure out a solution.”
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Surveillance of Mississippi’s rivers, lakes and coastal waters is officially the domain of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, which sets health and cleanliness standards for local waterways and enforces them through monitoring. Bodies of water that fail to meet these standards are listed in reports on the MDEQ website.
But the agency lacks the resources to test all state waterways on a regular basis, necessitating additional monitoring at a community level, MSWS representatives told the Mississippi Free Press.
“Our inland waterways don’t have consistent testing at all by any agency,” said Abby Braman, executive director of Pearl Riverkeeper, a Jackson-area nonprofit that helped launch the local MSWS chapter in 2018. “We
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