"Its waters are the home of all manner of creatures and its shores
have given animals, birds and people a living community beyond value,” said
local educator and environmentalist, Sallie Crosby Smith, of her impressions of
Mobile Bay.
The mission of Clean Water Alabama (CWA) is to engage and
encourage the citizens of Alabama to take the necessary actions to ensure that
our water resources (rivers, streams lakes, bays and coast) are protected from
those items that make them unsafe to its citizens, their communities and the
plant and animal life that live within and around. The most important step in
carrying out this mission is to educate citizens, government officials and
businesses.
“Author and Environmentalist Ben Raines refers to one of our
waterways, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, as ‘America’s Amazon’ in his book Saving America’s Amazon. I’m often asked
‘what are the greatest threats to our waterways?’ The answer is simple: us,
each one of us collectively,” says CWA founding member John Manelos. “It is too
easy to solely target industry, developers, etc., when the reality is we are
all consumers of the products they produce. The question should be, what are we
doing to contribute to the degradation of our waterways and what are we doing
to prevent it?”
Recently CWA completed a yearlong project, which involved
producing an Activity and Coloring book for elementary school children. One of
our founding members, Wayne “Coach” Miller, a retired sixth grade teacher,
produced the text and activities for these two publications. CWA enlisted a
talented graphic arts student, Grace Roberts, who was attending Coastal Alabama
College. In April of 2023, with the encouragement and support of Baldwin County
School educators, CWA was able to donate 9,000 copies of the books for
distribution to their elementary students.
“Due to our commitment to educating our youth, who are the hope
for the future, and the overwhelming reception to the Activity and Coloring
books, we have just completed a children’s book Camp Clean Water, which follows the efforts of six young people,
who have submitted their idea for cleaning our waterways at an annual
environmental science camp,” says Manelos.
This new children’s book will be available on Amazon and in select
bookstores both in paperback and hardback. All proceeds will go to supporting
CWA, a 501c3 non-profit. Copies will be donated for classroom use at various
elementary schools. Anyone can support this effort by purchasing the book or by
donating to CWA.
See CleanWaterAlabama.com for further
information on CWA and to support the many efforts to protect Alabama’s
waterways.
