Phil Odom

Columnist

My journey into the world of water began in 1958, when my grandfather first took me fishing in the waters around St. Catherines Island, whose tides have shaped nearly every chapter of my life. I’ve played in them, worked in them, and flatout lived in them. Spend that many years wrapped up in a place, and it’ll turn you into a citizen scientist whether you meant to be one or not.

When those waters become both your playground and your workplace, you owe them the courtesy of learning how they breathe and behave.

My path as a citizen scientist started taking shape long before I ever knew the term. In the business of supplying ocean going ships with lubricating oil in the ports stretching from Jacksonville, Florida, to Morehead City, North Carolina, it was during those years of transferring petroleum across the water, under the watchful eye of both federal and state law, I learned real quick that compliance isn’t just paperwork.

It’s understanding chemistry, physics, tides, weather, coastal ecology, and good judgment all braided together. Add a few years as a commercial fisherman harvesting wild game stock out of the Saint Catherines estuary, you learn to stay on the right side of the law, you had to understand the science behind what you were handling, and that responsibility settled into my bones.

By the time 1996 rolled around, my experience in the world of water, pushed me to step forward and make public comment during the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s Sound Science Initiative on saltwater intrusion. That moment marked the formal beginning of my citizen scientist journey.

In 2000, I became a founding member of Canoochee Riverkeeper, serving on its board until 2005, the year the Canoochee Riverkeeper joined hands with Friends of the Ogeechee to form todays Ogeechee Riverkeeper, where I served as a board member till 2008, doing water quality testing in our coastal rivers.

During 2005, I earned my educational sea legs as a University of Georgia Master Naturalist, digging into chemistry, geology, hydrology, and the wild stubborn beauty of coastal ecology. That education didn’t just deepen my understanding; it tied a lifetime of water experience to the sciences that explains why out rivers and coastal systems behave the way they do.

Since 2009, three Georgia governors, in succession, have trusted me to serve as Liberty County’s representative on the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s Coastal Regional Water Planning Council.

From that seat at the table, I’ve worked to help decision makers keep the peace between what our economy wants and what nature can sustain. That balance is never simple, but it is always necessary. Estuaries are nature’s greatest tightrope act, freshwater flowing out, saltwater pushing in, each one keeping the other honest. But decades of groundwater over pumping have thrown that balance off. Freshwater that once flowed from artesian springs feeding the estuary has dwindled to nothing, and the natural order has slipped out of rhythm. This is why the proposed Liberty County Development Authority’s wastewater facility matters. Its discharge into the Saint Catherines estuary is not merely treated water; it is the return of something we have taken away. It is freshwater restored to a system that has been running thirsty for far too long.

Across the coastal counties, Georgia Environmental Protection Division has issued 76 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits for wastewater treatment facilities. The Liberty County Development Authority’s plant at Tradeport East would be the 77th.

Yet these facilities are only a single thread in a much larger tapestry woven across the Savannah, Canoochee Ogeechee, Altamaha, Satilla, and Saint Mary’s river systems. In those watersheds, there are a total of 799 permitted facilities sending treated wastewater downstream into the estuaries that cradles our coastal life before that treated water finally meets the Atlantic Ocean. It is a vast, interconnected system that has shaped our environment for generations.

We all live downstream from someone, and those of us who live where the land meets the ocean live downstream from everyone. Since 1948, our society has built wastewater infrastructure around the old maxim “the solution to pollution is dilution,” a philosophy born when our understanding of wastewater chemistry and natural ecology was still young.

The Liberty County Development Authority’s proposed plant represents a more mature approach, a refinement of that maxim through modern technology and sound science.

It doesn’t abandon the principle; it elevates it, insisting that if we are to dilute, we must do so with precision, intention, and respect for the waters that sustain us. This treatment plant will create water suitable for irrigation and industrial use thus reducing groundwater withdrawal and easing the burden on our aquifers.

I offer this not as mere data, but as a steady truth based upon sound science. I challenge everyone to become a citizen-scientist by joining an environmental organization to learn the sciences of water.