James Holland, 1940-2022

The Altamaha River is in mourning.

On the morning on Oct. 13 I received a phone call that James Holland had died. Maybe you knew him. If you didn’t, I’m sorry.

James was the founding riverkeeper of the Altamaha.

James Holland wades among old-growth cypress in Doctor’s Creek.

The Altamaha is a giant river, the third largest flowing from our Atlantic Seaboard. It drains a quarter of the state of Georgia, but the part it drains is the most rural, the most forgotten, and the most abandoned, except for the area at the river’s very mouth, which for a long time was the wealthiest zip code in America—the Golden Isles, including Sea Island and Little St. Simons Island.

James wasn’t your typical environmentalist. He’d been raised poor in Cochran by an aunt and uncle; he’d joined the Marines; he’d come home and become a crabber on the Georgia coast. His wife Sumiko worked alongside him. They plied the waters of Altamaha Sound, motoring in their old boat from float to float they recognized so well. Every trip was a connect-the-dots. James hauled up his traps and harvested the crabs he was allowed to take, returning the rest to forage through delta mud.

James easily would get 1,500 pounds of crabs from 100 traps in a day.

Sometimes he would cut the motor, and he and Sumiko would rest for a minute in the mouth of the Altamaha, watching the water boiling around them, 100,000 gallons of fresh water every minute meeting an 8-foot tide. They watched dolphins rising and pelicans diving. The air was diaphanous with salty mist, like a veil. The sky was constantly changing. A finger of white sand reached out from Little St. Simons as if to calm the waters, and on that arm of firmament shorebirds were crowded—ruddy turnstones, yellowlegs, oystercatchers, willets. On the other side of that lay the wide and faltering ocean.

It was a hard but beautiful life. Then the crab numbers started falling. The poundage was going down every year, until the numbers were 300, 225, 175. James knew that marine life in the estuary was determined by the quality of water flowing out of the river. The estuary was like a tablet, a record of what was happening upstream in Georgia.

“Do you see what is happening?” the waves seemed to be saying in their insistent language.

It was here that an idea began to form in James. The voice of the voiceless (which he had once been) began to speak, and sitting in the rocking boat, eating a tuna sandwich, drinking warm coffee, he begin to listen.

Get up, James, the voice said. Stand up.

You are a big man, you are strong, you have two hands capable of doing anything. You have a great mind. You have eyes to see and ears to hear. But you have something more, James, something special. You have a heart big enough to care, with room enough to love even the blue crab, which every day you hold in your big hands and admire. To watch all this simply vanish is a sin.

When James reached land and stood, the ground trembled.

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First there was a language to learn. This new language had long, scientific, technical, academic, political words, and lots of initials—DNR, EPD, PSP, OVC, SMZ, MOA, BMP. James had to learn it all, although he’d never finished high school and never had a chance to go to college.

During his studies he heard about a movement called Riverkeeper. This river needed one, and he decided to start it. He collected a group of people who met in January 1999, I believe it was, and a vote was taken to organize. I was there. I voted yes.

After that, James traveled up and down the river’s length talking to people, Garden and Rotary and Lions and Hunt clubs, Chambers of Commerce, college and high and elementary classes. He talked to city councils and county commissions. He found people who also cared, who understood that assaults against nature are assaults against human beings, who understood that a river is not a toilet, who knew a river is only as healthy and intact as its forests.

As James traveled, he tested waters with his kits, He tested a creek where a dairy farm ran off. The fecal coliform count was 24,000 colonies per 100 millileters (safe contact for humans is 200). He saw bad things—a blackwater creek ruined by logging, a slough filled with construction and demolition material, a town’s sewage pipe with stringy stuff hanging from the vegetation around it. He snapped photos of all of it.

James tests the waters of a tributary.

He emailed the pictures around. “Y’all be the judge and the jury,” he would say.

He sent pictures of the Rayonier paper mill discharge pipe, images of foam and purple water. A year later he sent more pictures. He met with Rayonier. After many years he sent more pictures—“Still nasty as all hell,” he said.

The pictures kept coming: clearcutting, illegal boat ramps, a beheaded alligator floating belly up, a deer carcass in the water, improper stream crossing during timber operations, deep rutting, illegal ditching, a stream destroyed by a road. “Shame on the person who did this” and “How to ruin a perfect day,” he would say. And, “He needs to be in jail along with his cohorts, and if I can help him get there I will sleep good at night.”

Once he got arrested for trespassing and spent a night in a Cochran jail. But no polluter or destroyer could hide, and when they tried, with beauty strips and backwoods abominations and No Trespassing signs, James took to the air.

Altamaha Riverkeeper began to litigate and to win. A people began to reconcile themselves with their landscape, their home, and with each other. A people began to reconcile themselves with spirit. A river began to win. A river began to flow cleaner out of Georgia.

After a while, as if all the degradation was too much for his heart, James began to send pictures of beautiful things—tiger swallowtail butterflies, wood storks constructing nests, raccoons washing food, gulf frittilaries, roseate spoonbills, sunning alligators, four wood ducklings on a log.

“Even when I was seeing the degradation, I saw that beauty was still there,” he said.

For ten years James was our river’s keeper. Even on his last official day on the job, he called to tell me that the City of Jesup was dumping raw sewage again, the mess visible around the pipe, stringing in the trees. “There were more condoms that you can believe,” he said. “Every year they do it. We talk to them and talk to them and they keep doing it.”

After his retirement, he continued to fly above the river and the coastline, watching, documenting, defending.

Here I am trying to make James cry at his retirement party. That didn’t work.

Here we’re at a book signing at Ashantilly in 2012 for his book of photos, Altamaha: A River and Its Keeper. Ann & Andrew Hartzell are speaking with James.

James’s death was not unexpected. He was 81. He had undergone treatments for two kinds of cancer. I had heard from our mutual friend Deborah Sheppard that he wasn’t well. Here is the article announcing his death in The Brunswick News.

What James Holland gave us was hope. He made us want to fight. He was a warrior and he was fighting and we fell in step beside him. He inspired us. He performed miracles in front of our eyes.

All the people who knew James and worked with him are in mourning. His family is in mourning. The Altamaha River is in the deepest mourning of all.

A crested fringed orchid James photographed in 2019.

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If you would like to make a donation in memory of James, I recommend doing so to an organization he dearly loved in the last years of his life, the Initiative to Protect Jekyll Island. David and Mindy Egan, founders of the movement to protect Jekyll and keep it affordable, were great admirers and friends of James. They erected a memorial bench in James’s honor on Jekyll in 2021. The organization’s address is 308 Old Plantation Rd, Jekyll Island, GA 31527. Thank you.