Weekend reading: Fragile waters

Slip through Georgia's unique waterways from the imperiled to the already caged

The mighty Flint / Photo by Virginie Kippelen for the Bitter Southerner

This weekend, make some time for two great recent stories in the ever-excellent Bitter Southerner.

First, Hannah Palmer embarks on a search for the headwaters of Georgia’s Flint River—which run beneath the Atlanta airport. She begins at a “concrete ditch north of Atlanta’s airport — slimy bottom, oily top, bushy edges littered with roadside blowoff,” as she writes. A trough you could jump across. Still, she writes, “I insist on calling it a river.”

Then, the legendary Janisse Ray goes deep on threats to another famous waterway of Georgia, the expansive Okefenokee Swamp—“a gigantic, ethereal, god-touched swamp in southeast Georgia that’s like no other place on earth,” as Ray writes. “It’s a world wonder — nearly 700 square miles of labyrinthine wildness, the largest blackwater swamp in North America and the largest wilderness area in the eastern U.S.” It’s also under threat, as a mining company hopes to extract titan…