Is Alabama home to America's Amazon? Journey into one of the planet's treasures, a cradle of biodiversity

Hidden away in Alabama, one of the nation's great wildernesses stands with its future hanging in the balance.

You won't find an army of activists chaining themselves to trees to protect it, or national environmental groups using scenic pictures of it to sign up new members. In fact, most people -- outside of the small group of Alabamians fighting to save it -- have never heard of the place.

And yet, here it is, the Mobile River basin, the richest river complex in North America and one of the richest in the world in terms of the sheer number of species and types of habitat.

It runs from the top of Alabama to the bottom, drains most of the state and is composed of hundreds of thousands of acres of forests. Its waterways are great and small, from giant rivers to tiny creeks that you can step across without getting your feet wet.

For the people who live closest to it, the rivers and forests of the Mobile River basin make for an amazing playground, where the hunting and fishing are world-class. But even those who know it best are likely unaware of just how unusual and special the system is.

That's a shame, for this is America's Amazon.

This river network and its surrounding forests represent the true cradle of American biodiversity. Because of the Mobile River basin, Alabama is home to more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles and crawfish than any other state. And the competition isn't even close.

Alabama has 84 crawfish species. Louisiana has just 32 and California -- three times the size of Alabama -- has nine.

There are 350 species of freshwater fish in Alabama, about one-third of all species known in the entire nation.

The turtle population is even more singular. The system's delta, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, has 18 turtle species. That's more than the Amazon. More than the Nile. More than the Yangtze. More than the Mekong. More than any other river system on Earth.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Unlike most of America's great river systems, the Mobile Basin -- along with its wetlands, floodplain forests and estuary -- has survived with its biological community mostly intact. That's due in large part to an odd combination of benign neglect and the mixed fortune of being in the heart of Alabama.

But this incredible system sits on the cusp of decline, facing death by a thousand cuts, just as the scientific community has begun to appreciate its riches. Habitat destruction, development and lax enforcement of environmental regulations conspire to take an increasing toll, making the area a global hotspot for extinctions, particularly of aquatic creatures.

Roughly half of all extinctions in the continental United States since the 1800s have occurred among creatures that lived in the Mobile River basin, according to records maintained by Endangered Species International and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

This bounty ought to be preserved as one of the nation's greatest treasures. But saving it will require a dramatic change in state regulations, public attitudes and priorities.

Perhaps the first step is to revel in the existence of this wilderness, richer by almost every measure than any other place in the nation. [Our view: Give thanks for Alabama by fighting to preserve our sweet home]

This notion of Alabama as biologically rich is a recent phenomenon.

It was first confirmed in the science-based nonprofit NatureServ's 2002 compendium on American natural diversity. There, Alabama ranked first in aquatic diversity and among the top five states for the overall number of species of plants and animals. The other states in the top five, California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, were all more than twice as large as Alabama by area and had less than half as many species per square mile.

Shielded from wide-scale scientific inquiry in the 20th century, in part simply because Alabama was a long way from the nation's most famous research universities in the Northeast and on the West Coast, few biologists explored the state. That is changing, thanks largely to a homegrown crop of devoted biologists. New species are being discovered regularly in both the state's flora and fauna.

In a recent interview, world-famous scientist E.O. Wilson -- who was born in Birmingham and raised in Mobile -- reflected on the awakening that's occurring. His personal scientific journey began in the Mobile Basin 70 years ago, when, as a boy, he caught snakes and bugs on the edges of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

Wilson spoke after an expedition into Mobile Basin forests and his capture of several ant species believed to be previously unknown.

"I used to say when I was in college that I was going to come back here and be an explorer of this area. There wasn't much interest then, not even among scientists. It's only gradually we've come to understand what a treasure this is," Wilson said. "So I was thinking about it then, and now -- how should I put it, in the autumn of my career -- I am here, participating in studies, in my case of all the different kinds of ants that are here. It's a new scientific effort to explore the system. And that effort will go on for many, many years, even generations.

"There is so much here, and so little explored," he said. "People think it is exciting to discover a new species. Well, it is happening all the time here. Dozens of new species."

A HIDDEN ALABAMA
In some measure, Alabama's natural heritage has been obscured by a century's worth of bad press that distilled the state down to what we've done to it, and in it.
Civil rights protests, steel mills and cotton fields -- that's the Alabama in the mind of the public. But there is another Alabama, a wild Alabama, that ranks among our country's rarest places.

In that hidden Alabama, there are more species of flesh-eating pitcher plants than can be found anywhere else on Earth. Fourteen new species of long legged flies were discovered in 2012. There are 54 species of orchid, from the tiny green fly orchid -- an arboreal species living in the tops of ancient live oaks -- to the white fringed orchid, whose delicate flowers glow like Chinese lanterns in the crepuscular hours before dawn.

Alabama's wild places have long benefited from a predominantly rural economy and sparse development as the state missed out on the great industrial and technological growth spurts seen elsewhere in the U.S. since the 1950s. Now, however, Alabama is poised on the edge of a period of prodigious expansion.

Thanks to hefty tax credits, business-friendly labor laws and lax environmental regulation, the state is becoming a manufacturing hub, with Mercedes, Hyundai and Honda all making cars at new plants. An Australian company is building warships for the Pentagon in Mobile, and, just a few miles away, Europe's Airbus will soon be assembling its newest jetliner.

The new ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel mill built on hundreds of acres in Calvert, in the heart of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, is the largest and most expensive manufacturing facility constructed in the nation in 25 years. Subdivisions and cities are spreading quickly into former woodlands and country byways.

With that growth comes the possibility of accelerated destruction for what scientists have only begun to realize is one of the most diverse ecologies outside of the Amazonian rain forests. The decline is already beginning to show.

Mobile Bay, the catch basin for this river system, drains parts of four states and has annual dead zones just like the Gulf of Mexico due to the excess nitrogen and other nutrients flowing from suburbs and farms.

"Oh, it's changed. And not for the better," said Jimbo Meador, who has spent his entire life on the shores of Mobile Bay, often making his living from its waters. "We've lost the grass beds. And the oyster beds. It's the pollution. We've got to do something and quick."

Meanwhile, the rivers of the Mobile Basin have been dammed, channelized and bear the scars of industrial pollution with swamps that rank among the most polluted in the nation for DDT, mercury and other contaminants. The once-clear rivers are now often a muddy brown, a testament to the amount of runoff pouring in.

"We literally stripped the Delta," said Robert Leslie Smith, 96, who grew up in a logging family on the fringe of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and wrote the book "Gone to the Swamp," about life in the early 1900s. "We tore monstrous ditches. We drained all the ponds that held all the water and all the creatures. ... I just hope I live to see it taken care of."

But Alabama's environmental protection efforts are simply not up to the task of safeguarding the state's treasures. In 2012 and 2013, Alabama ranked 49th in the nation in per-capita spending to protect the environment. More recently, its environmental regulatory agency was forced to address a petition filed in federal court that sought to compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take over the administration of the Clean Water Act in Alabama. The state, according to the petitioners, had failed to prosecute hundreds of alleged permit violations.

LEADING IN EXTINCTION
For all the majesty that the state deserves for being home to more species of fish, mussels, snails and crawfish, Alabama is also at the top of another list -- the list of aquatic extinctions.

Alabama has lost more aquatic species to extinction than any other state. Each year, a few more species go, too.

The extinction problem extends to terrestrial species, as shown in records kept by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Endangered Species International and NatureServ. The rate of extinction in Alabama is roughly double that seen anywhere else in the continental United States.

Ninety species in Alabama have been confirmed as extinct, and scientists believe an additional 90 species may have slipped into extinction. And the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service suggests that more than 100 other species are on the brink and deserve protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Alabama has more extinctions than the surrounding states of Mississippi, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee combined. For comparison, Mississippi has 11 confirmed extinctions and Louisiana but nine, according to the NatureServ analysis.

Of course, part of the reason there have been so many extinctions in Alabama is because there were so many rare species here to begin with. Set against this backdrop, the moment has arrived for Alabama to take up and celebrate its incredible natural heritage, or sit by as it is slowly and forever diminished. Else, the state that wears the crown for the most aquatic creatures in its midst will be left only with the crown for the most creatures vanished.

FRIDAY ON AL.COM
America's Amazon -- not always fresh, but never frozen When the ice came, the living world fled, taking shelter in the land that's right here under our feet.

This series, titled America's Amazon, ties      in to the film of the same name, which made its debut this year on Alabama Public Television. Some interviews used in this series were conducted during the filming of America's Amazon. The film was produced by Mary Riser, Lynn Rabren and Ben Raines, and is available on DVD at americasamazon.net. It was directed by Rabren and written and narrated by Raines, who also wrote this series for AL.com.