Once upon a time in Alabama, a man rooted so passionately for the Crimson Tide he devised a plan to make rival football fans at Auburn University furious. In the dead of night, he drove through Auburn loaded up with herbicide looking for his victims. I imagine a Nick Saban photograph on his dashboard, facing outward, so Coach Nick could be his guide.

Roll, damn Tide.

Harvey Updyke Jr., the man in question, poured his herbicide into the roots of two landmark oak trees at Toomer’s Corner in downtown Auburn, then called Paul Finebaum’s popular sports-talk radio show to brag about it.

Updyke got his wish. Auburn fans were furious. In fact, they lost their damned minds. If you dabbled in social media back in January and February of 2011, Facebook was a wall of Auburn orange and navy blue — and pictures of those two trees. I’ve never been to an Auburn football game, but I can imagine what made folks so upset. It was an attack on their memories and experiences with friends, family and loved ones, as kids, college students, parents and grandparents. Parts of their culture, family and sense of place were all wrapped up together under those trees at Toomer’s Corner.

So the Auburn fans lost their minds over the desecration of just two oak trees, and Updyke went to prison.

It just so happens that in May of 2011, as the buzz from the attack of the Auburn arbor assassin was subsiding, another environmental catastrophe was taking shape in the Deep South. More than 38,000 fish turned up dead in the Ogeechee River over an especially hot Memorial Day weekend. As the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the Ogeechee Riverkeeper raced to find the culprit, they discovered elevated levels of chemicals that under no circumstances should be in the river. It was discovered that King America Finishing, located in Sylvania, Georgia, had been illegally dumping formaldehyde, ammonia and hydrogen peroxide into the Ogeechee River for last five years.

Chew on that for a second. Five years of absolutely illegal, harmful and unregulated pollution.

The Ogeechee River is an incredibly beautiful, vulnerable, biologically diverse river, and for five years, King America Finishing had gotten away with dumping chemical pollution in the river so the company could make more profit.

I don’t recall Facebook catching fire when King America was caught poisoning the Ogeechee. If so, it was only a handful of my environmentalist friends. Otherwise, no one really cared. Well, maybe they cared, but not deeply. As for me? I had never been on the Ogeechee, but I was thinking my grandpa paddled it, maybe. Sure, the pictures are beautiful, and I was upset, but what could I do or say about a place I had never visited? Who really cared about the Ogeechee River? A hearty few river folks and passionate environmentalists, for sure, but enough voices to constitute a groundswell of support? No.

It took years to bring King America to “justice,” and the company almost got off the hook. The Ogeechee Riverkeeper, GreenLaw and Atlanta environmental Don Stack did amazing legal work in the face of incredible odds. King America was slapped with fines, but none of its executives spent a day in jail. Not one individual faced a penalty. King America was later sold, but the factory is still in business today, with a new permit, pumping slightly less pollution into the river.

If we loved the Ogeechee River the way folks in Auburn loved those two oaks in Toomer’s Corner, the roar of discontent would have shaken the foundations of King America Finishing. Its owners and operators, having willfully poisoned the Ogeechee for more than five years, might have found themselves in jail, just like Harvey Updyke.

If you think the 2011 Ogeechee River Fishkill is an isolated incident, think again. The South is brimming with critically endangered habitat. These places are underappreciated, and they are under constant threat. I’m lucky to work at an organization where I feel like we can make a difference: the Georgia Conservancy, which for almost half a century has advocated for the state’s environment and for land conservation.

It’s not easy watching the places you love being exploited. But if you are in the business of conservation, as I am, I see it happen all too often. Sometimes it feels like an an unending MadLibs game with that John Prine song, in which any number of natural wonders and corporations could be substituted for the Green River and Peabody’s coal train.

But at the Conservancy, we’re taking a page out of the Toomer’s Corner playbook to protect some of Georgia’s most precious places. Our goal is to take thousands of people into Georgia’s most beautiful and most threatened habitats. We want to make them love those places as deeply as Auburn fans love the trees at Toomer’s Corner.

You see, I believe that if you want folks to care for a place in this world, they’ve got to connect with it. Not just see it in pictures or glance at it from an overpass. Folks need to experience it. Get close to it. Get it under their fingernails. It should be the destination of their daydreams and impromptu road trips. The connection they feel to it should approach the sublime.

So over the next 12 months, we will lead 3,500 people on hiking, paddling, camping and service trips to far-flung and unheard-of natural places while celebrating conservation, culture, food, music, diversity and family. We are in the business of conservation, yes, but to succeed, we must also be in the business of love. Love for the rivers, the barrier islands, the marshes, plains, canyons and even urban parks and the cities that surround them.

We want folks breaking bread on Georgia’s riverbanks or singing songs around a campfire, from the mountains through the coastal plain and to our amazing saltwater-marsh ecosystem and barrier islands. Our goal is simple: Create a connection between some of Georgia’s most underutilized, stunning natural places and the people we need to help us protect them.

In 2015 we’re leading or have led trips to the Ogeechee, Altamaha, Ocmulgee, Oconee, Flint, Ochlockonee, Chattahoochee, Satilla, Suwannee and Conasauga rivers; to Ossabaw, Sapelo, Cumberland, Blackbeard and Little St. Simons islands; to Okefenokee Swamp, Cloudland Canyon, Frick’s Cave, Howard’s Waterfall Cave, Panola Mountain, Broxton Rocks, Radium Springs, the Len Foote Hike Inn, Augusta Canal, Ebenezer Creek, Sweetwater Creek and the mighty Cohutta Wilderness.

As a Georgia native, I find these experiences eye-opening and heartening. Many times, I've been a first-time visitor myself, just like many of our guests. I’ve paddled rivers I’d never heard of, explored canyons and caves I had no idea existed, snorkeled through clear mountain streams and visited remote and restricted barrier islands.

Inevitably folks ask me, “Where should I go? If I only take one trip, what would you recommend?”

I don’t even have to think about my answer. Heads and shoulders above every creek, stream, river, marsh, canyon, mountain and island in the state, there is one place so beautiful, so majestic, so special that anytime someone mentions it, my heart immediately begins to pine for the way its sunrises illuminate its live-oak forests.

It’s called Cumberland Island National Seashore.