Cadillac Desert (59 page)

It was just the beginning. Carter had entered office convinced that the 160-acre land limitation in the Reclamation Act was a sound principle. But in Congress there was talk of removing the acreage limitation altogether, and of allowing unlimited leasing (which was, in effect, the same thing as removing the limitation). The more “moderate” proposals called for a limit of 1,260 acres, an eightfold expansion. Most of Carter’s advisers were telling him that he had to hang tough on the acreage issue: if subsidized water suddenly became available to the biggest growers in the West, it would not only be an outrageous subsidy of the wealthy, but it would intensify pressure for even more projects. Assistant Interior Secretary Guy Martin, the administration’s canniest strategist on western water policy, says he recommended a revised acreage limit of perhaps six hundred acres—a compromise which, he felt, the administration could sell. By late 1979, however, Martin’s boss, Cecil Andrus, was suddenly agreeing with Jerry Brown, another lapsed champion of the 160-acre limit, on a new limit of 1,260 acres. (It wasn’t clear whether that meant 2,520 acres for a man and wife.) In California, with 1,260 acres and subsidized water costing between $3.50 and $9 per acre-foot, a halfway ambitious farmer could become a millionaire—which was not exactly the intention of the Reclamation Act.

And then, on top of everything else, there was Tellico Dam.

Tellico was a dam the Tennessee Valley Authority had conceived as early as the 1930s and hadn’t gotten around to proposing seriously until the 1960s—which was mute testimony to the kind of project it was. The dam itself would produce no power—it would merely raise and divert the Little Tennessee River about a mile from its confluence with the main Tennessee so some extra water could be run through the turbines of nearby Fort Loudon Dam. The result would be twenty-three megawatts of new power, about 2 percent of the capacity of one of the nuclear and coal plants the TVA was simultaneously building. There were no flood-control benefits; there were hardly recreational benefits (the region had more reservoirs than it knew how to fill with boats); there were no fish and wildlife benefits. On the other hand, the Little Tennessee was about the last fast-flowing coldwater stream in the state. It was dammed only once upriver, while most tributaries of the Tennessee were dammed several times. It had a large and healthy population of trout. It was a splendid canoeing stream. It flowed through a beautiful valley, one of those happy places that contain both farms and bears. The Cherokee Indian Nation had had its pick of all the rivers of central Appalachia, and it chose the valley of the Little Tennessee as its home. There were hundreds of archaeological sites, some probably yet to be discovered. With its pretty white clapboard houses and its well-tended little farms, the valley was a beautiful anomaly, a place more at home in the nineteenth century. Tellico Dam would put all of this under eighty feet of water.

After wrestling with its lack of a
raison d’être
for a while, the TVA decided that the only way it could justify the new dam was to change the whole character of the region in which it would be. The solution, it finally decided, was to create an entirely new town around the reservoir, a chrome-and-steel headquarters for a major branch of the Boeing Corporation which would go by the somewhat ironic name Timberlake. (Actually the TVA may have come up with the idea because the Bureau of Reclamation had thought of it first. In the 1960s, it was no secret that the Bureau, boxed out of much of its historical domain by the Corps of Engineers, was looking to expand its activities eastward, and Appalachia was the first place it planned to give things a try, building exactly the kind of sterile, reservoir-centered new towns of which Timberlake would be a first example.) It was like deciding to put a fifty-thousand-seat Superdome in the middle of Wyoming and then building a city of 150,000 people around it to justify its existence. And there was no real guarantee by Boeing that it would establish itself there; it had merely expressed interest in the idea. But that was enough to get the project moving. By 1969, Tellico Dam was well on the way to being built.

As it was going up, however, two entirely new hurdles were thrown in Tellico’s path. One was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires an environmental-impact statement and a discussion of alternatives before any major federal project can proceed. (The TVA claimed it was exempt from NEPA and had to be taken to court before it complied.) The other hurdle, which no one paid much attention to at first, was the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

In that same year, 1973, a professor of zoology from the University of Tennessee was snorkeling around in the Little Tennessee when a small fish, resembling a dace, darted out from under a rock in front of his face and gulped a snail. The zoologist, whose name was David Etnier, followed the fish until he could get a good look at it. He had never seen one like it before. After some taxonomic investigation, the fish was identified as a snail darter—a species that appeared to inhabit only a portion of the Little Tennessee, mainly the taking area of Tellico Dam. Its numbers estimated to be in the low thousands, its habitat apparently confined to one place, the darter seemed eligible for classification as an endangered species. Before the act, that would have meant merely that the fish was probably doomed. Now it meant, by law, that “protection of habitat ... critical to [its] continued existence” was federal government’s number-one priority.

The TVA tried to get around the act by attempting, without much success, to transplant the darter to other nearby streams. Meanwhile, instead of suspending construction, it redoubled its efforts to complete the dam in a hurry, a time-honored strategy employed by the public-works bureaucracies—but one which, this time, resulted in its being hauled into court by the Environmental Defense Fund. The federal district court essentially found for the EDF, but ruled that the Endangered Species Act was never intended by its framers to stop a project which was already 80 percent built. On appeal, however, the district court’s decision was overturned, and completion of Tellico was stopped cold.

The national media, which had covered the story with yawning lack of interest up to then, were suddenly tearing each other’s clothes trying to get onto the Tellico site. Half the newspapers in the country seemed to run the story on page one, under some variation of the same headline: “Hundred-Million-Dollar Dam Stopped by Three-Inch Fish.” In most cases, the coverage went little deeper than that. Some editorial writers couldn’t even see humor in the impasse; the Washington Star harrumphed that it was “the sort of thing that could give environmentalists a bad name.”

Had the editorialists and reporters taken a longer look, they might have seen that the big story was not the dam at all but the TVA itself, an agency that had evolved from a benevolent paternalism into the biggest power producer, biggest strip miner, and single biggest polluter in the United States. Unaccountable to the public, largely unaccountable to Congress, the TVA was an elephantine relic of the age of public works; it had undoubtedly done its region some good, but by the 1970s it had passed the uncharted point in an agency’s career—twenty years, thirty years, sometimes much less—when it confronts new challenges with barnacled precepts and, in a sense, turns on the constituency it was created to help. Had they looked around them, the reporters might have seen that Appalachia, the godchild of this benevolent agency for four decades, still looked socially depressed; physically, it looked horrifying. The single most important reason was the TVA’s purchase of immense quantities of strip-mined coal. It still clung to the discredited notion that the salvation of Appalachia lay in cheap power, and strip-mined coal was the cheapest fuel. But the strip-mining, besides eliminating thousands of jobs in deep-mined coal, was creating a scene of gruesome devastation. The denuded mountains seemed covered with a reddish-brown rash, and rivers that were once pristine were running with what looked like old blood. Meanwhile, the TVA’s older coal-fired power plants were creating pollution traps in the valleys where they were situated, and its newer ones, with smokestacks a thousand feet high, were wafting sulfur and nitrogen oxides up to New York State and Canada, where they fell as acid rain.

This same obsession with cheap electricity had, of course, resulted in the TVA’s having built thirty-odd major dams in the Tennessee Basin over the course of thirty-odd years. The dams, mostly built during the Depression and the war era with low-interest money and by workers earning a few dollars a day, were the cheapest source of power around, and TVA’s rates were as low as those in the Northwest. As in the Northwest, a complement of energy-intensive industries had moved in—aluminum, uranium enrichment, steel—and now the TVA was afraid they would move right back out if it raised its rates. It was a fear whose end result, rational or not, was the Tellico Dam.

In June of 1978, the Supreme Court upheld the injunction against the dam on the basis of the Endangered Species Act, as written. Legally, the Court had little choice, even though, by then, the dam was more than 90 percent built. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who wrote the decision, was clearly offended by the whole situation, and all but invited Congress to amend the act. Congress required no such prompting. The legislative hopper began to spin with amendments to weaken or gut the act. Through the leadership of Senator John Culver of Iowa, however—and of Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, whose only real interest was completing the dam—a less drastic amendment was passed, by which an endangered species review committee would be created to resolve any case where a major project such as Tellico ran up against the act. It was to be a Cabinet-level committee, composed of the Secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and the Army, in addition to the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a representative from the affected state. According to the language of the amendment, the committee, which some began to call the God Squad, could grant exemptions to the act where no “reasonable and prudent” alternative exists, where the project is of national significance, or where the benefits of building it “clearly outweigh” any other course of action.

The makeup of the interagency committee suggested a predisposition toward completing stalled projects, especially in the case of a dam. At best, Tellico’s opponents were hoping for a four-to-three split in favor of construction, which might seem like enough of a hung jury to let them try another tack. They were wondering what such a tack might be when the committee’s decision was announced. No one was prepared for the outcome: a unanimous decision that held for the snail darter and against the dam. In so doing, the committee skipped over metaphysics, transcendentalism, and evolutionary philosophy and ruled solely on the basis of economics. Tellico was a terrible investment—even worse, if the committee was to be believed, than the environmentalists had said. “Here is a project that is 95 percent complete,” said Charles Schultz, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, “and if one takes just the cost of finishing it against the benefits ... it doesn’t pay.” Cecil Andrus added, “Frankly, I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for delaying a project that was so ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place.” God, in his new bureaucratic incarnation, had spoken. Tellico was a loser—it didn’t deserve to be finished.

The dam’s two main Congressional defenders, Senator Howard Baker and James Duncan, a Republican Congressman whose district encompassed both the dam and the TVA’s headquarters, still tried to blame everything on the snail darter. “Should a worthless, unsightly, minute, unedible minnow outweigh a possible injustice to human beings?” groused Duncan on the floor of the House—ignoring the injustice to the thousand-odd people who would be evicted from their homes. Nonetheless, the finale had been written. Baker and Duncan had been beaten, fair and square—beaten, through some oddly poetic reprise, by Howard Baker’s own amendment. The only thing for them to do was to accept defeat gracefully.

June 18, 1979, was a dull day on the floor of the House, even duller than most. Little was going on, so hardly anyone was there. Bob Edgar was one of the many who were absent, and he still hates himself for it. He was one of the few Congressmen who might have been suspicious enough to stop what was about to take place. “Duncan walked in waving a piece of paper,” Edgar recalls. “He said, ‘Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! I have an amendment to offer to the public-works appropriations bill.’ Tom Bevill and John Myers of the Appropriations Committee both happened to be there. I wonder why. Bevill says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s good.’ Myers says, ‘I’ve seen the amendment. It’s a good one.’ And that was that. It was approved by voice vote! No one even knew what they were voting for!
They were voting to exempt Tellico Dam from all laws.
All laws! They punched a loophole big enough to shove a $100 million dam through it, and then they scattered threats all through Congress so we couldn’t muster the votes to shove it back out. I tried—lots of people tried—but we couldn’t get that rider out of the bill. The speeches I heard on the floor were the angriest I’ve heard in elective office. For once, a lot of my colleagues were properly outraged. Senator Baker and Representative Duncan couldn’t have cared less. They got their dam.”

A few days later, the House passed the appropriations bill with the Tellico rider still in it. The Senate followed suit, 48-44, despite two earlier votes against the dam. “That,” said Edgar with sardonic disgust, “is the democratic process at work.”

There was, of course, still the possibility of a presidential veto. If anything, it seemed inevitable. Here in the case of one dam, was everything that was rotten in Denmark: a bad project proposed by a dinosaurian bureaucracy; needless destruction of one of the last wild rivers in the East; usurpation of a quiet valley; and a cynical Congress sneaking around one of its own laws. Guy Martin and Cecil Andrus were both urging a veto in the strongest possible terms. Gus Speth, by then chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, was privately talking of resignation if Carter backed down. Few in Carter’s conservationist constituency even entertained the possibility that he wouldn’t veto the bill. Congress, however, had taken care of everything. Carter was in the midst of negotiating a treaty that would give the Panama Canal back to Panama, and he was meeting stubborn resistance in Congress. The votes were lined up closely enough to put the President in a position of wretched vulnerability. The threats were quite naked. If Carter vetoed the bill, there would be no treaty; his education bill might suffer the same fate. In both cases, his embarrassment would be extreme—worse, perhaps, than if he swallowed the Tellico exemption. The gulp was almost audible. On the night he signed the bill, the President telephoned Zygmunt Plater, the young law professor from the University of Tennessee who handled the case before the Supreme Court, and performed a
mea culpa.
Plater was taken aback. He was, in fact, speechless, and he wasn’t even sure why. Was it having the President on the other end of the phone, or was it the fact that a dam was not dictating foreign policy?