In Search of the Pearl River

When I moved back to Jackson, Mississippi in 2021, it finally sank in for me that this place is a river city—just like Little Rock, Memphis, Chattanooga, Huntsville, and New Orleans. The Pearl River is almost 500 miles long and the fourth largest source of freshwater that discharges into the Gulf of Mexico. It begins in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and flows just a mile away from my own front door, ending at the southernmost point between Louisiana and Mississippi. 

You can trace the Pearl River down to Louisiana and into oyster beds, or follow the migration of  Gulf sturgeons as they travel the South. Still, the naming of a place or thing doesn't necessarily bring you closer to comprehending its muddy glory. After all, if you can go from the steps of the state capitol to ankle-deep in a remote river in less than 10 minutes, things in our city must be more fluid than they initially appear.

Like many things in this region, the river flows through a divide. For decades, developers have been attempting a controversial plan to dam up the river to create a lake that would destroy both wetlands and current river access points in Jackson and impede the freshwater flow to towns downstream. In March 2026, stakeholders championing this plan (locally known as the One Lake or Pearl River Revitalization project) held a press conference celebrating the selection of a plan, but obstacles such as an extensive environmental impact review remain despite signaled Federal alignment.

This coalition of government, real estate developers, and private landowners hopes to turn much of the land along the river in Jackson into lucrative waterfront property with retail spaces, public performance spaces, and boat ramps being envisioned at the expense of the existing ecosystem and possible detriments to people living along existing tributaries and to cities downriver. 

The Pearl River is an integral part of Jackson's water infrastructure, Louisiana and Mississippi's wetlands, and the economies of countless cities along its banks—but you wouldn't know it from talking to our city's residents. For many people who call the "City with Soul" home, they are either unaware of the vast wetland ecosystem here in Jackson, intimidated by accessing the oftentimes unmarked trails to the river, or view the river as something to be harnessed into something more profitable and less "hazardous." The inequitable lack of access to this river not only robs residents of the chance to know this vital waterway for our state, but also blurs what many developers have come to realize: the Pearl River is a major potential economic driver. Without further action, many activists are arguing that the residents of Jackson will be permanently shut out of the Pearl River's benefits, including the simple reprieve of nature in a city. 

Before Jayla joined Refill Jackson Green Corps, a five-month-long environmental workforce program where youth earn industry-recognized credentials operated by the Refill Jackson Initiative, she had never seen the Pearl River. Refill Jackson Initiative serves young adults ages 18-30 who are "disconnected," a term meaning a young person who is not attending any educational institution and who is not employed. Almost 20 percent of all youth in Jackson are disconnected, and the majority of young adults experiencing disconnection do so due to experiencing homelessness, domestic violence, mental health crises, incarceration, or other systemic violences. 

"In my training at Refill Jackson, I learned at that moment how important the river is. I didn't know how much it gives us," said Jayla. "The Pearl River does a lot. The animals, the energy sources, water—so much comes from it." Through work like marking storm drains, Jayla and other young people in Jackson gain skills to work in environmental and disaster response fields like water quality monitoring. 

Mister, a member of Green Corps and Jayla's classmate, said that like Jayla, he'd never been to the Pearl River prior to his training. The two cohort members offered up potential reasons: Parks in Jackson (located in Hinds County) are not well-kept like parks in other neighboring places, like the Ross Barnett Reservoir in wealthier, whiter Rankin and Madison County; in the metro Jackson area, the river looks polluted, and many of their peers are hesitant to swim in what is considered the conventionally "nicer" Ross Barnett Reservoir created by a Pearl River impoundment. "It's about your context," said Jayla. "How you were raised. What you had available to you. Who was there to take you places growing up."

The Pearl River, for so many people, is dependent on who has the time, knowledge, and privilege to go into unkempt, private places and who feels like they belong in the outdoors. Mister said that most of his peers don't know about the Pearl River being located in his city, and if they do, it's a very surface-level type of knowledge.   

Another Refill Jackson cohort member, Sam, had a similar experience growing up in Jackson. "Most people around me have never experienced nature. But, experiencing the Pearl River helped me realize there's a lot more in Jackson." He especially marveled over his new ability to go outside and have picnics, meditate, and spend time soaking in these spaces, which he didn't think was possible in our city before.

Caitlin Brooking, the executive director of Refill Jackson Initiative, has had a similar experience trying to find natural spaces as the youth she serves. Although she knew from disaster recovery work during Katrina that river systems existed in central Mississippi, she said the connection between the Pearl River watershed and their drinking water for her first few years living in Jackson. 

Through her work with Refill Jackson and her own experience with flooding in Jackson, she became aware of this water system—and the structural issues preventing others from learning about it. "It's interesting to me that there's kind of a separation between the areas of the river in our city that are specifically set aside and designed for recreation, and then there's a drinking water usage of this river and also the nuisance of these unmaintained creeks that come off of the Pearl River that cause flooding and chaos. It's hard not to make the connection between illegal dumping in Jackson and all of the abandoned and deteriorating properties present in our city," Brooking said. 

This is a connection of care that she tries to make apparent for the youth she serves, since almost all of them arrive at Refill Jackson unaware of the Pearl River's presence in Jackson.  Referencing the 2022 Jackson Water Crisis, in which long-term institutional disinvestment and underfunding culminated in a complete failure of the Jackson water system when Pearl River flooding caused the city's primary water treatment plant to fail, Brooking said that "there is still this lingering idea that you can't drink the water that comes out of your sink in Jackson that exacerbates the disconnection between the drinking water and the Pearl River, where you might go fishing."

Brooking feels that it's rewarding, if not a bit jarring, to show Green Corps participants the creek systems connected to the Pearl River that run by their neighborhoods and schools. "Every single young person I've ever brought to Lynch Creek for water testing can't believe it's in our city. It's quiet, there's running water, and nature. There's just not a lot of accessible spots for people in our city to experience it." Based on Brooking's experience training youth in water monitoring, there are very few spots people can even physically access due to lack of maintenance or existing infrastructure to do so. "It's sad," she said. "People may drive over it, but they'll never have individual experience with it.

Jackson is often referred to as "the Blackest city in America," with a population over 80 percent Black. And, over a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line. Due to disinvestment and a dwindling tax base, its infrastructure is crumbling, as seen in not only the 2022 Jackson Water Crisis but in massive, persistent potholes; abandoned city parks; and frequent sewer line leaks. 

Despite the Pearl River making this city possible, disinvestment, pollution, and lack of public access obscure the waterway from most residents' consciousness—and stymies the efforts of organizations like the Pearl River Keeper, Capitol City Kayaks, and Refill Jackson Initiative in introducing all people living along the Pearl River to its significance. 

The Pearl River is not just environmentally vital, but culturally as well. The Pearl River Keeper is a nonprofit affiliate of the nationwide nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance, and is dedicated to preserving the Pearl River Watershed and educating the public about the vital role it plays in Mississippi and Louisiana ecology, recreation, and commerce. In addition to providing a huge amount of fresh water to the Gulf of Mexico, the Pearl River has cultural significance, as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians have land at its headwaters, with much of their tribal history based on the river.

The Pearl River can be thought of as a working river as well. "There are over a hundred permit holders along the Pearl River, so organizations like International Paper and Georgia Pacific, which is the largest employer in Monticello, Mississippi, wouldn't be able to operate without the fresh water from the Pearl River, so it's really important to our economy in that way," said Abby Braman, the executive director of the Pearl River Keeper.  

Every time Braman takes groups out to a sandbar, young or old, she says it blows people's minds. "It's so cool to tell kids that a turtle they see is only found in Mississippi, right along the river where you live," she said. "So often, people only see [the river] from a road or bridge. Here in Jackson, we've gotten closed off from the river." 

The Pearl River Keeper and its volunteers work to address this issue of access and expose people to the river, but complicating factors remain. For example, LeFleur's Bluff State Park in Jackson has an access point, but people have to pay to enter. Belhaven Beach, an unofficial but frequently traveled access point located in a wealthier, predominantly white part of Jackson, is on city property, and so to go there is technically trespassing. During Pearl River Keeper programming, when Braman tells attendees about this access point of the Pearl River, many Black attendees tell her straight out it feels unsafe and uncomfortable for them to even attempt to access this common access point.  It's hard to make sense of how a giant river can be so close to our doors and yet structurally so far away. 

Since at least 2019, the part of the Pearl River that encircles Jackson has been under a contact advisory due to the city's water system dumping raw sewage into the river, and new advisories occur fairly regularly. That means no swimming, no wading, and no fishing—and if you do,  definitely don't eat the fish. The story of this river for so many residents is look, but don't touch.

Juan Fernández, who grew up in the Jackson metro area and is pursuing a Master of Regional Planning, reminisced about swimming in the Pearl River as a teenager and acknowledged that in addition to the access points to the Pearl River involving trespassing, "the whole thing is really polluted now—and probably was even when we were in there." 

Fernández, who is an advocate for the Pearl River and has extensively studied the water system, said that areas in more affluent regions of Jackson along the Pearl River, especially in the north, were singled out to potentially become parks starting in the 1970s, but those plans never came to fruition due to complications with private land, the levee system, and public resources—including a decreasing tax base caused by Jackson Public Schools integration efforts, and the resulting advent of white flight to surrounding whiter, wealthier suburbs. 

Ironically, this river has become off-limits to the majority of its residents when "Jackson was built here because the river could give them transportation" and access to the world from the center of the state, said Fernández. 

There's one significant way the Pearl River hasn't been ignored in the past decades. The One Lake Project (then called Two Lakes) was first proposed in 1996 by developer John McGowan to ostensibly transform the experience of the Pearl River for the people living by it, and to also mitigate flooding. This controversial (to put it lightly) plan and its later iterations throughout the years propose to dredge portions of the river around Hinds and Rankin counties and, through dams, create a lake—and lucrative shorefront property to develop. It would also destroy wetlands, the current river access points in Jackson, and impede the freshwater flow to towns downstream. Proponents of this plan and its iterations believe it will increase economic development for areas surrounding this new lake, but opponents of this plan like Fernández allege that it will only benefit current landowners—who happen to be involved in the studies of feasibility, sit on the current Rankin Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District, and have other connections that suggest a specific few private individuals stand to profit instead of the city at large. Fernández and others fear that if plans to further alter the Pearl River floodplain come to fruition, it will again be wealthy, white citizens who get to access and benefit from the river instead of the wider community.

However, the One Lake plan itself remained in a state of flux with the Army Corps of Engineers releasing in 2025 a Revised Draft Environmental Impact Statement outlining scenarios for flood control and land development. This document provided information about the two most recent proposed plans for flood control measures (Alternative D1 and Alternative E1) and was created in part due to significant community feedback submitted to the Corps. Now, this project awaits further study and mitigation after a January memo from Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Tell signaled he approved of plans D1 and E1. Telle undoubtedly has been privy to the various stakeholders lobbying for the effort through his ten years as a key staffer for former Mississippi republican senator Thad Cochran.

Notably, this iteration of flood control and land development has seen strong support from the previous and current mayoral administration and has coalesced under stakeholder group efforts in the city such as the Pearl River Revitalization Project and Great City Foundation. Their public advocacy argued that there's much to economically gain from river development—but many environmental groups and local activists insist this natural resource is worth far more than what private development could ever bring. All plans outlined in the latest environmental impact statement would have an adverse impact on the Pearl River's ecosystem, endangered species, and current public access points like Belhaven Beach. It would reduce current Belhaven walking trails created in the city by volunteers, and plans for development prioritize parcels of land that are actually located in Rankin County, not Hinds.

This local discourse on the benefits of developing the Pearl River in Jackson pits environmental advocates against local politicians and a wide coalition of business owners. When the Pearl River is harmed, all who live along the river's fragile ecosystem experience it. Consider the several extremely hazardous sites along the river in Hinds and Rankin County that are currently leaching pollutants into the river—and the City of Jackson's water. With the ever-accelerating dismantling of the EPA and increasing lack of accountability for federal institutions under this administration, it's very possible that despite the significant harm to the flora and fauna of the Pearl River (people included), plans to develop it will move forward.

Maybe you start a river story with ways the river is made visible and invisible to people and places alongside it. Walking into a hidden access point feels sometimes like entering a portal, or a sleight of hand that transforms a busy underpass street into something else, a walk turned from mundane to magical. 

"People can be dismissive of rivers," said Fernández. "But there's a level of reverence we feel when we encounter them. We feel something almost anthropomorphizing or deifying about it, that sense of awe it gives you." For Fernández and many other Jacksonians, the Pearl River has its own special, ineffable quality that helps give meaning to our city. It's a privilege to know this river. 

However, through programs like Refill Jackson, Pearl River Keepers, and others, people in our city are working to increase access for all Jacksonians. "A big goal of our program is to rehabilitate those river access spaces such as small parks or publicly accessible spaces along the river," Caitling Brooking of Refill Jackson Initiative explained. "For many decades, the Pearl River and its tributaries have not met EPA standards for contact, and so while I don't imagine our little program is going to change that in the immediate future, at least someone is monitoring it and providing data." For Brooking and many other Pearl River advocates, making the river visible by collecting data is the first step to rehabilitating the damage we all have caused to the river.

"It needs to be well-kept," said Refill Green Corps member Mister, when asked what he's learned most about the Pearl River watershed system. Without that help, the system will "decay" and prevent another generation from experiencing this miraculous river, which is rightfully theirs.

Floating in this river are the facts of my city, a home I love so much. The shared story of Jackson and the Pearl is caught up together in the river, visible through and around its waters, sometimes only surfacing the moment my attention turns past it or slips. Over the course of a day, the Pearl River weakly, firmly, loudly, softly insists it is part of our future and that it belongs to us living Jacksonians nominally now, but pledges more allegiance to people who will inherit in the future. You tell the story of a river by starting with the people who love it, the people who can endure the surface tension of owning and belonging to a certain body of water they call home.