04/17/2026
Most people don’t realize how special this place actually is.
Alabama holds the top rank in the United States for freshwater biodiversity, with over 132,000 miles of rivers and streams and more species of fish, mussels, snails, and crawfish than anywhere else in the country.
Roughly 10% of the continental U.S.’s freshwater flows through this state, much of it through the Mobile River Basin, one of the largest in the nation.
There are species here that exist nowhere else in the world.
And it all connects.
It’s the bay.
It’s the beaches.
It’s the bogs, the creeks, the rivers, the miles and miles of water running through everything.
It’s fishing off the pier.
It’s white sand under your feet and endangered species like the beach mouse living in the dunes.
It’s jubilees rolling in and Spanish moss hanging low.
It’s the sound of cicadas in the summer and the kind of wild that you don’t fully notice until you slow down and look.
We have carnivorous plants growing right here.
Manatees that pass through our waters.
Alligators in our wetlands.
An entire world of life most people never even realize is there.
If you know what to look for, you start to see it everywhere.
And once you see it, you understand why it’s worth protecting.
These Gulf Coast roots run deep.
This is what we mean when we say protect the locals.
Protect our kin.
The plants and animals here aren’t separate from us.
They are part of this place just like we are.
