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Adopt-A-Stream
Clean Water, Our Life, Our Future!
What would we do without clean water? How do you use your water? Drink it, wash with it? What about outdoor activities such as; swimming, fishing, boating, watching wildlife? You couldn’t do these activities in polluted water! Because water is important for life, we must keep it clean.
Mississippi is fortunate to have abundant water resources. Streams, lakes and marshes provide homes for aquatic life and help maintain the sensitive balance of nature. Mississippi’s waters are excellent resources for fishing, swimming, canoeing and other recreational activities. Our rivers are a vital source for drinking water, agriculture and industry. The quality of that water is a direct result of the activities occurring on the land that drains into these streams, rivers, lakes or even our oceans. Adopt-A-Stream is a program that teaches you ways to help keep our rivers and streams clean and healthy.
The Adopt-A-Stream program is sponsored by the Mississippi Wildlife Federation (MWF) through a contract with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ). The program promotes environmental stewardship through workshops, outdoor field activities, youth educational programs, Envirothon training, field days, festivals, and conferences. The program informs participants about watershed topics such as stream health, land-use, stream ecology, aquatic life and water chemistry. It also introduces you to possible actions that can be taken to help your local watersheds. A watershed is an area of land that drains to a stream, river, ocean or other body of water.
Adopt-A-Stream educates individual citizens to the fact that their homes are the beginning of a watershed that feeds into stream. Water quality in the stream is affected by what they do in and around their homes. It provides specific projects that interested individuals can implement in their community such as; recycling, litter clean-ups and storm drain marking. The program also remains true to its origin in providing opportunities for evaluating stream water quality for interested individuals. In other words anyone and everyone should participate in keeping MS waters clean. Everyone needs to play his/her part in protecting these resources for the future. Let’s make a positive difference for Mississippi streams.
In the words of the Lorax "Now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." (The Lorax by Dr. Seuss)
Debra Veeder
Adopt-A-Stream Director
dveeder@mswf.org
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