Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [211]
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.