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If one thing is agreed upon in north Florida, it is that Suwannee Basin water is in trouble. American Rivers recently named the Suwannee the 10th most endangered river in America, and Quarterman says the fight for its future will require people who do not agree on much else to work together. “I’ve never found anybody who likes to drink dirty water,” he said. “Doesn’t matter your political, religious, or other persuasion.” Protecting rural Florida’s water, he said, “is going to take everybody.”

You’ll recognize many of the names in this story: Dennis Price, Hailey Hall, Robby Robertson, Corey Simon, Chuck Brannan, Hugh Thomas, Larry Thompson, Moses Klepper, Stephen C. Foster, Andrew Jackson, and the notorious Water First North Florida (WFNF).

Other names you may see for the first time. It’s well worth reading.

Stephenie Livingston, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, September 17, 2026, The river we inherited,

In rural Florida, the Suwannee River is both real and imagined. It rises in Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, dark with tannin, then winds south through limestone and cypress swamps to the Gulf of Mexico, one of the last largely free-flowing rivers in the Southeast. Beneath it lies a vast aquifer that feeds more than 300 springs, five rivers, and the wetlands of the Suwannee Basin. The same water supplies much of Florida and southern Georgia, some 11 million people.

Many Americans know the river first as a song—one written by a man who never saw it, who nonetheless turned the river into a national myth.

In White Springs, the myth and the river meet. The riverside town of less than 800 was once home to a famous sulfur spring, where tourists came to bathe in water advertised as healing quite literally any ailment. Today, the old four-story spring house that once served those seekers stands around a limestone pool that is often nearly dry. This year, as the country celebrated its 250th anniversary, the Suwannee Basin was in its worst drought in 25 years. The Declaration of Independence began as a complaint against distant authority. Along the Suwannee, people are asking an old American question, albeit in the language of rivers and wells: What does self-government mean when the very water you rely on is governed from somewhere else?

This year, that question revolved around a proposal to move treated wastewater from Jacksonville into the aquifer system that feeds the Basin’s springs and rivers. Its backers call it restoration. Many in the Basin see a familiar imbalance: a rural region asked to absorb a problem created by a larger, wealthier city.

The river we inherited: the Suwannee River 2026-09-17 –American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Drought and WFNF

There is much more in the story. It ends:

A river is never only water. When it is diminished, it signals an impaired system, and the loss falls hardest on the people who depend on it most: those who know the river’s name because if it flows, so do the crops; if it’s clean, so are the wells; and when it dries up, so does the tourism a song helped create.

To describe the loss, [Pedro Zepeda, a citizen of the Seminole Tribe of Florida,] reached for an Indigenous saying that roughly goes: only when the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, the last fish caught will we realize—

The full version escaped him, but the ending did not.

“You can’t eat money,” he said.