Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [210]
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