Pictures: WWALS Booth at The Happening, VSU Front Lawn 2025-08-28

Many students, some wanting to be interns, and many volunteers, at the WWALS Booth, at The Happening, VSU Front Lawn, Thursday, August 27, 2025.

This is the annual student orientation festival at Valdosta State University. It’s on a summer afternoon with classes in session, so students kept showing up between classes.

WWALS Booth at The Happening, VSU Front Lawn, 2025-08-28

Thanks to former WWALS Water Quality Tester Michael Bachrach and WWALS Board members Russ Tatum, Scotti Jay, and Sara Squires Jones for helping at the booth, along with premier volunteer Gretchen Quarterman, and Suwannee Riverkeeper John S. Quarterman.

Scotti and Sara showed up just in time when I was talking about the 2023 fish kill and the 2025 sewage spill that Scotti discovered on One Mile Branch, the creek that runs through the VSU campus into Sugar Creek and the Withlacoochee River.

Scotti Jay, jsq, Sara Squires Jones, and Russ Tatum at the WWALS Booth

Despite worrying about the weather, Michael and Russ stayed through the end.

Afterwards: Gretchen Quarterman, Michael Bachrach, Russ Tatum

Also, Gretchen appears at about 6:30 and the WWALS booth at about 7:25 in Dexter Sharper’s walkaround facebook video of The Happening.

I found Emily Millet of EcoPaths.org (they do monthly cleanups around Valdosta) baking in the sunshine. Where’s your tent? Under the table. I’ll help you set it up. So we set it up and she seemed much happier.

The EcoPaths tent that jsq helped set up

Treva Gear was holding forth next door at Dogwood Alliance.

Treva Gear, Dogwood Alliance

I also had a long chat with Happy Hippy, the outfitter in Valdosta, but no pictures.

Oddly, I did not see any professors come by.

For more about The Happening at VSU, see:
https://www.valdosta.edu/student/student-life/special-events/the-happening/

For more WWALS outings and events as they are posted, see the WWALS outings web page, https://wwals.net/outings/. WWALS members also get an upcoming list in the Tannin Times newsletter.

-jsq, John S. Quarterman, Suwannee RIVERKEEPER®

You can help with clean, swimmable, fishable, drinkable, water in the 10,000-square-mile Suwannee River Basin in Florida and Georgia by becoming a WWALS member today!
https://wwals.net/donations