We Might Be One Step Closer to Saving America’s Amazon

Drifting in the channels of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, it’s easy to imagine that you are in some deeply isolated wilderness, far from the motors of man. Even when the city of Mobile, Ala., is visible in the distance.

This teeming oasis of biodiversity — 300 square miles of rivers, bogs, forests, swamps, marshes and open water — is known in Alabama as America’s Amazon. It hums with birdsong and busy insects and gently lapping water. I was last out on this delta in 2018, and what I remember most is the peace of a world that feels untouched by human hands, unharmed by human commerce.

As with all the wild places we have left, however, this breathtaking delta is far from unspoiled. The nine rivers that feed it carry all the usual pollutants we carelessly pour into our rivers, whether directly or through rainwater runoff: silt, microplastics, pesticides, industrial and agricultural waste and more. Like all river deltas, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta acts as a kind of natural filter, but there are only so many contaminants a delta can absorb and still survive.

And as the environmental journalist and filmmaker Ben Raines writes in his magnificent book “Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System,” the state of Alabama “wreaks greater harm on our wild places than any other state.”

The greatest upriver threat to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta is the coal-fired James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, some 25 miles north of Mobile. Since 1965, the Alabama Power Company has been storing coal ash there in storage ponds built in the crook of a switchback bend in the Mobile River.

Coal ash — known in the industry as coal combustion residuals — is the waste that results when coal is burned to produce energy. It contains arsenic, cadmium, mercury, selenium and other heavy metals that pose known health risks to wildlife and humans alike. When coal-ash ponds fail, the results are catastrophic. A 2008 spill in Kingston, Tenn., remains one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States.