Was it the Mulberry River, or the Buffalo? Four odd decades later, the details have gotten murky, but one day, while floating an Arkansas waterway, Debbie Doss and Cowper (pronounced “Cooper”) Chadbourn began to pick up trash. And while the couple didn’t plan it, that mostly forgotten moment delineates a clear before-and-after in their lives. Expressed in river terms, the day in question—when they realized a recreational float could also include clearing litter—gave rise to the headwaters of their conservation work.
Although the married Doss and Chadbourn tend toward modesty, even an accounting of basic facts from their time along Arkansas waterways feels like hyperbole. There are the 340,279 pounds of trash Chadbourn and his friends have fished, lugged, floated, and otherwise extracted from rivers and streams, just since 2016. There are the seventeen years that Doss spent as conservation chair of the Arkansas Canoe Club, fighting to improve state water regulations, promoting alternative sources of drinking water, and protecting streams from fracking—all of which helped keep at least four waterways undammed and free-flowing. And the record day that involved pulling a trio of stolen Porta-Johns from the tea-colored Bayou De View in eastern Arkansas. But despite their shared beginnings and mission of preserving resources and broadening access to Arkansas waterways, they’ve taken different channels to achieve the same purpose.
Doss skews toward supporting bigger-picture, systemic change and slower-moving destinations like Bayou De View, developing public paddling trails in less-frequented locales as head of the Arkansas Watertrails Partnership. Chadbourn favors the immediate gratification of corralling rubbish from more popular rivers, often MacGyvering out even the most unwieldy items (a thousand-pound steel dumpster, say) through whatever means are at hand (a giant net bag filled with empty two-liter soda bottles, for instance, to float the bow of an abandoned powerboat).
Where those approaches converge, however, is how they gauge success. Sitting on the sandy banks of the Saline River, some thirty minutes southwest of Little Rock, the couple explain that their every effort is driven by the hope that they’ll see others doing the same. “It’s not success to me if I pull five hundred tires out of the river every year—success is when I do that for ten years, and now I can only find fifty,” Chadbourn says. “And success is when my friends start posting pictures on trips where I wasn’t there, and they’ve got a tire in their boat, too.” Doss concurs: “It’s seeing other people out there.”
Homebase: Conway, Arkansas
Affiliations: Arkansas Watertrails Partnership, Arkansas Canoe Club
Side Quests: The couple’s considerable conservation efforts have been entirely volunteer—before retirement, Doss taught math and science and worked as a school psychologist, while Chadbourn spent decades as a power company engineer.
