New RiverWarden loves the outside world

Henry Jackson doesn’t spend much time in the office.

Columbus’ new executive director of the environmental nonprofit Chattahoochee RiverWarden never was much of an indoorsman.

Jackson, 27, grew up in Talbot County, graduated from the Flint River Academy in Woodbury and started studying history at Columbus State University before the call of the wild beckoned him back to the woods and rivers where he preferred to be.

“I get stir-crazy,” he said.

So he left college and hit the road, and the streams, working as a fly-fishing guide in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee. “That was my entryway into an outdoor profession, was as a fly-fishing guide,” he said. He worked on the Flint River here in Georgia and around St. George Island in Florida. “I tried to hit some of the best areas of the Southeast.”

After a couple of years, he learned about a program in outdoor education at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, so he packed his gear and went back to school, this time finishing with a degree.

He calls outdoor education “the use of perceived risk to encourage personal growth – you scare ’em until they act right, is the easy way to say it.”

That means using kayaking, rock climbing, rope courses or other activities that are “safely monitored” but present an apparent risk that encourages personal development, he said: “It may be something as simple as, ‘We’re going to go climb this cliff in order to teach you about geology, or we may use a map and compass to teach geography, something like that.’”

After gaining a degree, he in 2014 went to work in Seward, Alaska, as a sea kayak guide and paddleboard instructor. He also served as a volunteer on a search and rescue team with the National Park Service.

He got engaged, too, and married wife Brooke, whom he’d met here in 2012. She eventually persuaded him to move back to Georgia and settle down.

Here he went to work full-time at Outside World in downtown Columbus, as an instructor and program coordinator, teaching customers how to use the gear the shop sold.

“If you want people to buy a kayak, you have to teach them how to kayak, because a lot of people look at this large plastic thing and think, ‘Oh man, I could never do that,’ when in fact, we have people in the industry who are kayaking well into their 80s and 90s, and it’s a thing that anybody can do, for the most part,” he said.

That work brought him into regular contact with former RiverWarden Roger Martin, whom he’d known about 10 years.

“Environmental advocacy is a very large part of outdoor education, being a guide, being an instructor, being an outdoor facilitator,” Jackson said. “You wouldn’t be working in those jobs if you did not love the natural environment, because those jobs are cold, they’re wet, they don’t pay very well.”

Anyone who didn’t love the work wouldn’t put up with it. He loved it.

“I had been hoping for a while that I would have an opportunity somewhere to move into environmental work full-time,” he said, and that chance came when Martin’s successor, Cassie Renfrow, left for a teaching job.

Jackson applied for the position, and started as executive director on Jan. 3.

“My mission here is to further incorporate the river community with the organization that protects the river,” he said.

Martin built strong bonds with Georgia Power, the city of Columbus, the Columbus Water Works and other entities that have an interest in the Chattahoochee River.

“With that foundation in place, my goal is to maintain that, of course, but then move into the community itself, the individuals, and bring them in to support organization,” he said. That means involving hikers, rafters, climbers, and other outdoor enthusiasts with an interest in protecting the places they love.

Some are familiar with RiverWarden, but not directly involved in it, Jackson said. He aims to recruit them for support.

The environmental advocacy group has big issues to consider, such as the so-called “water wars” in which Georgia, Alabama and Florida are fighting over water supplies. Locally protecting the river requires monitoring the streams that flow into it, to check for pollution from runoff or sewage leaks.

RiverWarden does that through its Adopt-A-Stream program in which volunteers borrow a testing kit to check water quality in area creeks. The information they gather each month goes into a database with which the organization keeps track of problems.

Jackson wants more people to join that program, and encourages them to contact his office via its website, www.chattahoocheeriverwarden.org, or by email, criverwarden@gmail.com.

They also can call Jackson’s office at 706-649-2326, but they’ll likely have to leave a message, because he won’t be there.

He’ll be out somewhere, on the river or one of the creeks that flows into it.

This story was originally published January 11, 2017 at 3:27 PM with the headline "New RiverWarden loves the outside world."