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By Root 1755 0

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