THE RESOURCE THAT people are most worried about is water. “You know how to make an instant environmentalist?” Larry asks me.
“No.” I know it is a joke.
“Just add water.”
The Pinhook Corridor supplies millions of people, mostly Floridians—some of whom already experience saltwater intrusion into the aquifer—with drinking water.
Two great rivers, the Suwannee and the Saint Marys, rise from Okefenokee and drink from Pinhook Swamp and bear their precious burdens southward. The invisible divide between the two river basins is often hard to figure. Area rainfall determines the direction water flows—whether Pinhook gives or receives water from Okefenokee, and which river receives water from the swamp. Between 53 and 58 inches of rain fall annually.
The headwaters of other black-water streams, like Little Suwannee Creek, Moccasin Creek, Gum Creek, and Little River, arise in Pinhook, joining the Suwanee or the Saint Marys in their journeys to sea.
Like the animals, water in Pogo’s Corridor both slumbers and moves. This means that water finds rest in the prairies, sloughs, and lakes, and like migrating hawks, it passes through. Part of saving Pinhook means restoring the movement of water, so that it remains a sheet. As Florida biologist David Dorman has said, “A hundred years from now, you’re going to be able to drop a minnow at the top of the Okefenokee Swamp [sixty miles north] and see it swim all the way to me and keep on going.”