Protecting Life on the Waccamaw
Susan Libes lives on the Waccamaw River and, to an increasing extent, she lives for the Waccamaw River.

Until she bought a house by the river in 1989, Libes was a traditional, ocean-oriented marine chemist. She joined the Coastal faculty in 1983, the year she completed a Ph.D. program in oceanography and ocean engineering offered jointly by MIT and the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1992, she published what is widely considered the definitive textbook on marine biogeochemistry, focusing primarily on ocean-related subject matter.

Living on the Waccamaw and observing the river day after day, Libes was led by her natural inclinations as a scientist to begin making informal records of water quality data such as color, temperature, levels of oxygen, alkalinity, turbidity, etc. In time, the balance of her scholarly interest shifted from the open sea to the river running by her backyard.

“It’s really a natural progression,” says Libes. “There’s an intimate connection between inshore aquatic and offshore marine studies. The problems we have upstream become the problems we have downstream. You can’t study one and not the other.”

For the past five years, Libes has taken water samples from the Waccamaw every other day. Although she says the river is in pretty good shape overall, she and other scientists and conservationists have been concerned about high levels of mercury found in the river’s fish and the threat of ecosystem deterioration posed by the future growth and development of the area.

As her passion for the river developed, Libes began educating herself on environmental management and policy issues related to the river. She also became an active member of several environmental advocacy groups. It soon became apparent that the various environmental organizations in the area—primarily local affiliates of the Audubon and Sierra clubs—weren’t designed to do the kind of watchdog work she and other river-minded conservationists felt the Waccamaw deserved and needed.

“Rather than just react to situations, we felt the most effective approach we could take would be to create a collective, proactive organization that looks at the region from a ‘watershed’ perspective,” says Libes. The watershed, she explains, refers to all the river systems, including swamps and wetlands, that flow into the ocean through Winyah Bay in Georgetown.

In 2001, Libes and other concerned citizens from both South and North Carolina served by the five rivers of the Winyah system—the Waccamaw, Lumber, Little and Big Pee Dee, Black and Sampit rivers—created the Winyah Rivers Foundation, whose official purpose is “to protect, preserve, monitor and revitalize the health of the lands and waters of the greater Winyah Watershed.”

The foundation turned its attention first to the Waccamaw. “Its importance is obvious,” says Libes. “The majority of the people who live along the Grand Strand get their drinking water, in part, from the Waccamaw River, we discharge our treated sewage effluent into it, and the swamps store and filter stormwater runoff. So we have to be very careful about keeping this system in balance. And in addition to serving us, the watershed is home to many unique and endangered species.”

To do right by the Waccamaw, members of the foundation saw that they needed a full-time point person to handle all the public policy matters that are certain to increase as the area’s population—and the stress it brings to bear on the river’s delicate ecological balance—grows. So the foundation’s first project was to establish the Waccamaw Riverkeeper program and hire Hamp Shuping, a former Horry County fire chief and lifelong Waccamaw enthusiast, as the first riverkeeper in June 2002.

The riverkeeper program is licensed by the Waterkeeper Alliance, a national organization chaired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that advocates compliance with environmental laws, responds to citizen complaints, identifies problems that affect the water body and devises appropriate remedies. Several similar programs are in place around the country, and many of them are highly visible community partners that attract lots of volunteer support.

When Libes heard about Coastal’s public engagement project, she felt it was a natural fit for the Riverkeeper program. She devoted a lot of time last spring to working with Shuping to strengthen the program. Most notably, CCU and the Winyah Rivers Foundation have signed a partnership agreement that includes basing the Waccamaw Riverkeeper in the newly remodeled Atlantic Center. They also outlined a prospectus and obtained partial funding for a long-term volunteer-based water-quality monitoring program to be performed by members of the Winyah Rivers Foundation from South Carolina and North Carolina.

“The public engagement concept is definitely a positive step for higher education,” says Libes. “It’s good from a role model standpoint for undergraduates to see faculty applying scholarly endeavors to meet the community’s needs. There will be lots of student independent study and research opportunities through partnerships such as ours with the Riverkeeper. These experiences are critical to our students so they can learn about job options in the regulatory realm, both with government agencies and advocacy groups. We need to think beyond traditional science-based careers, not just to capitalize on a large job market, but also to increase the number of scientists in public policy-making positions.”