The Source

by Martin Doyle

  Then, in August 1973, the snail darter species was documented. Upon its discovery, the small fish was almost immediately listed as an endangered species under the new, largely untested ESA. With the prospect of the snail darter’s only known habitat being inundated by the Tellico Dam reservoir, Article 7 of the ESA took effect. And it offered no exceptions: even though the dam was over 90 percent completed, construction would have to stop. In an ironic twist, the TVA found itself on the wrong side of regulations.

  From this point on, the story commonly told of the Tellico and the darter diverges tremendously from what the journalist Dan Rather later described as the “real story.” But first, the public story. Of all the strange things that happened between the dam and the darter, perhaps the strangest was the TVA’s response to environmental regulation: the TVA claimed that it was immune to other federal agencies’ regulations, whether they were set by the ESA in the case of the snail darter or by the Clean Air Act when it came to the TVA’s coal-fired power plants, which were also under regulatory scrutiny. The world had changed around the TVA, but the agency wasn’t ready to acknowledge it. The agency that had been set up to be a model of holistic river basin development was placing the demands of power not just above all other interests, but above the federal government itself. When the TVA had been challenged in the Supreme Court shortly after its conception, when Willkie and others were contesting its very existence, the TVA invariably won. But four decades later, when the TVA challenged these new environmental regulations, it inevitably lost. In June 1978 the Supreme Court said that the TVA, like other power companies and like other federal agencies, would be regulated by these new federal laws. And specifically regarding the snail darter, the Supreme Court said that, regardless of how inane the fish might seem and no matter how far along the dam construction was, the Tellico project must cease.

  This decision dominates much of the rhetoric and lore of the snail darter: the idea that a tiny fish was deemed more important than a dam. This part of the story is what makes the fish and the dam as much a part of liberal environmental lore as they are of libertarian anti-regulation lore. But it ignores the second part of the story, which is more about economics and farmers than fish.

  Four months after the Supreme Court decision, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker and Iowa Senator John Culver were still furious that states could lose dams and other infrastructure projects to fish. The two senators introduced an amendment to the ESA that would create the Endangered Species Committee, or the God Committee. The committee was designed to be composed of federal leaders who would potentially balance the competing interests of a species and a development project: the Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Army, Secretary of Interior, Administrator of the EPA, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a representative of the state in question. The God Committee was an intentionally designed loophole to get around protecting endangered species when doing so proved inconvenient.

  When it convened for the first time on that January morning in 1979, the God Committee actually had two projects and two species to consider. The first was the Grayrocks project: a dam and reservoir on the Laramie River in Wyoming that would provide cooling water for a coal-fired power plant but have an impact downstream on whooping cranes in Nebraska. The God Committee went through the case, found that Grayrocks was a valuable economic development project and in the national interest, and reviewed some of the measures proposed to offset potential damage to the species. With that balance of positive economic development and mitigation of the potential negative impact to endangered species, the God Committee voted unanimously to grant the Grayrocks project an exemption from the ESA.

  Then the conversation turned to the snail darter. Surprisingly, the value of the endangered fish was not prominent in the discussion or in the group’s decision. The presentation of the Tellico case for the God Committee focused almost exclusively on the economic costs and benefits of the dam project, which were not particularly promising. After describing the economics of the project, the presenter displayed a few pictures of the snail darter itself, apologizing for how difficult the fish was to see. As if to emphasize the seeming insignificance of the fish, he noted the paper clip included in the photo for a sense of scale.

  After the presentation, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors broke the awkward silence, saying, “Well, somebody has to start.” And then he summed up the equally awkward reality of the Tellico project: “The interesting phenomenon is that here is a project that is 95% complete, and if one takes just the cost of finishing it against the total benefits and does it properly, it doesn’t pay, which says something about the original design.”21

  The Tellico project was found to be a boondoggle, regardless of its impact on the snail darter and regardless of how much of the dam had already been constructed. The God Committee turned down the TVA’s request to complete the dam, and they did so unanimously, on economic grounds alone.

  Once again, the ESA had caught Congress by surprise. And Congress responded by being far more direct: getting an explicit exception to the ESA just for the Tellico Dam. Along with Congressman John Duncan, whose district included the Tellico site, Senator Baker introduced a rider to another bill as a way to sneak the Tellico Dam through. When speaking on the floor, Baker captured what was, to him, an unintentional effect of what Congress had created in the ESA: “We who voted for the Endangered Species Act with the honest intentions of protecting such glories of nature as the wolf, the eagle, and other treasures have found that extremists with wholly different motives are using this noble act for meanly obstructive ends.”22 This rider was attached to the massive water and energy bill that the beleaguered President Carter in 1979 had little choice but to sign at the decline of his presidency.

  In the popular version of the story, completion of the Tellico Dam represented economic rationality winning over environmental insensibility. But a more honest telling of the story is that the TVA had overrun its course as an instrument of economic development for the Tennessee Valley. In addition to destroying the snail darter’s habitat, the Tellico Dam, like all dams, put land underwater. The Tellico also inundated some of the few remaining small rural farms in that area. In its proposal for the Tellico Dam, the TVA had based its economic rationale on the assumption that the lands around the dam would be converted from poor rural farms to power-hungry industrial users. That is, the TVA gave the industry it had originally been designed to rein in priority over the people it was designed to help: the poor farmers of the Tennessee Valley. As the reservoir slowly filled with water, these farms were inundated, literally drowned out of existence. In the end, these farms were sacrificed for industrial developments that never materialized. Today, high-value lakefront suburban sprawl and retirement communities surround the reservoir.

  Regulation is about picking winners and losers; it is about setting the rules intentionally in favor of a particular group or a particular activity. From the era of textile-producing milldams up through the 1970s—over 150 years—the government indicated through its use of regulation that it considered economic development to be the primary goal. All other uses of rivers were largely sacrificed to power production.

  When private power companies became too dominant, the TVA used the rivers to limit their influence. Taking a river’s power potential away from the private sector and handing it over to the public sector was simply a different means to the same end of putting rivers to work generating power. The TVA’s drowning of farmland to build the Tellico was a logical extension of the momentum initiated in the early nineteenth century by the drowning of the upstream landowners’ property along the Merrimack and other rivers. The quest for power superseded all other concerns. Whether they involved a private company along the Merrimack or a federal agency along the Tennessee, regulations were made to ensure that power was always the big winner.

  But since the 1970s—really, from the Tellic
o project on—the priorities of society had shifted; and with these changing priorities, the intent of regulation had to change. Hydropower development projects have become rare in the United States. While good sites for new dams are harder to find, species conservation has constrained new development significantly. Indeed, environmental conservation is now seen as a legitimate goal of government regulation that takes precedence over development and even over power production. By reining in the industries, the new era of environmental regulations established a fresh perspective on who would benefit.

  PART FIVE

  CONSERVATION

  CHAPTER 11

  Channelization

  For years, from the perch of a favorite barstool in sleepy Hillsborough, North Carolina, my gaze would inevitably rest on a small field just past the county courthouse. Through the field ran a small creek, ankle deep and narrow enough to jump across. More than a ditch, but too harassed by the county’s lawn mowers to be a stream, for decades the little creek, “Unnamed Tributary 1,” had anonymously performed its hydraulic work of conveying the runoff of small-town America.

  From the same barstool, I now stare at a wall of adolescent willows and sycamores that is twenty feet tall. Through this thicket Unnamed Tributary 1 still flows, but it is now a meandering, gravelly, occasionally babbling brook. Almost nameworthy.

  Setting aside the possibility of divine intervention, I think there is something creepy about the new and improved Unnamed Tributary 1. It’s too perfect. It looks the way a river is supposed to look, only small. There are mini-waterfalls, mini-pools, and mini-riffles. There are mini–gravel bars, perfectly sized for a fly-fishing Ken and Barbie. This wiggling, babbling brook, placidly flowing through evenly spaced willows and unnatural cascades, is eerily symmetrical in its perfectly contoured sinuosity.

  Nature doesn’t deal in symmetry or neat geometry. Streams with symmetrical meanders point to human hands. In this case, it is Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The ideas that Adam Smith’s hand should have a green thumb, that environmentalists should “see green in green,” or that there should be a green Tea Party became almost a cliché in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Stream restoration emerged as a booming sector of America’s environmental economy, ironically dwarfing the headline-grabbing but largely anemic twenty-first-century carbon markets in yet another example of how rivers and their advocates have quietly shaped the American economy. Conversely, as the American economy has waxed and waned over the past centuries, how—and whether—we moved, filled, drained, and re-meandered rivers evolved alongside it. The story of how symmetrical streams became a traded commodity and how this particular stream in Hillsborough, North Carolina, took on its perfect sine-wave curves has its origins in the nineteenth-century backwaters of upstate New York.

  Among anglers, the Beaverkill River is legendary. Tucked away in the upper reaches of the Catskill Mountains, the Beaverkill was remote from the nineteenth-century urban centers of Philadelphia and New York City, though close enough for the dedicated few to fish. Through the mid-nineteenth century, as trout fishing grew in popularity, urban anglers made their pilgrimages to the Beaverkill. With popularity came impacts. By the 1870s overfishing had depleted the Beaverkill, and the idea of trekking hours out of a city for increasingly absent fish was less alluring. In the polluted mill villages of New England or in the industrial wastelands of Cleveland, there were numerous likely causes for lack of fish in a stream. But in the Beaverkill, a mecca of isolation, it was harder to blame the loss of fishing on upstream pollution or dams. It seemed that the stream itself was the problem.

  What makes trout so compelling for fishermen is how finicky they are. Trout like very particular conditions—water just deep enough for cover, just fast enough to sweep aquatic insects past them, and just shady enough to be cool. But trout also need variety: a bit of deep flow, a bit of shallow flow, and room to move around between the two. Unsurprisingly, trout evolved to thrive in the conditions that stream channels develop when left to their own devices.

  Streams and rivers are naturally wiggly, cascading, and tortuous. The best way to see this phenomenon in action is not in a river, but in an experimental river. Imagine a fifty-foot-long aquarium, tilted a bit so that water pumped into the upper end drains fifty feet away at the “downstream” end. Fill the bottom of the aquarium with a few inches of sand and small gravel, and you have what looks like a toy river: a flume. Fluvial geomorphologists—scientists who study the shape of rivers—love flumes.

  Doug Thompson is a fluvial geomorphologist at Connecticut College; he spends his summers studying real rivers and his winters playing with his flume. Along with all things geomorphic, Thompson is inordinately fascinated by where fish live—pools and riffles—and by the strange, quixotic physics of flowing water that cause pools to form in the way they do. His flume is immaculately clean, all geared up for a set of experiments in the coming academic year. After setting up the flume for a particular condition, he runs some water through it for a while, using extremely precise velocity meters to measure exactly what is going on in his tiny pools and riffles. Studying the miniature version gives him a better sense of what might cause pools or riffles to form in real rivers.

  Thompson went to Colorado State University for his PhD. It’s a hotbed of river science, largely because decades ago, federal agencies constructed an enormous flume facility for studying rivers—the Engineering Research Center. About the size of an airplane hangar, the lab at the research center is filled with a dozen mini-rivers for studying the intricacies of flow, sediment, erosion, and all other aspects and effects of moving water: in one corner there’s a miniature dam; in the middle, a miniature Sacramento River. Some of the classic flume experiments of the twentieth century were done here, including a particular early and simple one when river scientists were just starting to really play with flumes. The Colorado State scientists partially filled a wide flume with sand, into which they cut a perfectly straight channel. When they turned on the water, visible wiggles—meanders—began developing within minutes.1

  “Rivers meander; that’s what they do,” Thompson says, standing next to his flume in the basement lab. Anything that flows—rivers, blood, Gulf Stream, jet stream—will meander. You don’t even need a basement lab to see this for yourself. Just cut a shallow, straight ditch in your yard and turn the hose on for a while. In only a few minutes, meanders will start to appear and then grow into the familiar sinusoidal wave of a quintessential stream.

  Suppose we get down into a real, meandering river and start wading downstream. Over a hundred yards or so, we’ll notice that the level of the water we’re wading through rises and falls—perhaps ranging from ankle deep to waist deep. That’s because depth varies over the course of a river’s meanders, and in a very predictable way. At the apex of any meander is a pool where the water flow is slow-moving and deep, often over a bed of sand. Between two pools is a riffle, where the flow is shallow, swift, and gravelly. Bigger rivers, whether the Mississippi or the Columbia, will develop similar patterns at a larger scale with the pool–riffle sequence extending over miles instead of yards. Pool–riffle–pool–riffle: leave a stream or river alone and give it time, and it will inevitably find this course.2

  Fly-fishing—or the “gentle art,” as the nineteenth-century Beaverkill regulars called it—mixes a layman’s understanding of these hydraulic forces with patience and an appreciation of ichthyology: find the right flow, use the right fly, and the fish should be there. Of course, this advice assumes that humans leave streams alone, which they rarely do. Instead, people have made immense and relentless efforts to straighten streams and rivers across the United States since the early eighteenth century. Meandering streams and rivers can be sluggish and slow, and consequently they flood more often than the faster-flowing straight ones. Meandering rivers are also difficult for steamboats and flatboats to navigate. Furthermore, the driving force behind the nineteenth-century economic growth was harnessing natural resources. Natu
re was rarely left in any remotely natural condition.

  The naturally meandering Wind River in Wyoming.

  In this push to turn the landscape from wild to productive, rivers were tweaked and turned and, most of all, straightened. Large rivers were straightened to speed along steamboat traffic, and streams throughout the Northeast and Upper Midwest—where forestry was an essential part of the economy—were cleared of gravel bars, snags, and boulders to help logs float smoothly.

  Without the rhythmic pool–riffle sequence in streams and small rivers, trout-luring flow conditions would not exist, and trout would not reproduce or move to other streams. In response to the ensuing drop in the trout population, a group of late-nineteenth-century trout fishermen in the Catskills, led by the indomitable James Spencer Van Cleef, set out to fix their streams.

  Like most trout fishermen in the Catskills, Van Cleef was from somewhere else. An attorney from Poughkeepsie, New York, he first visited the Beaverkill River in 1857. There he quickly fell in with the locals, who became his fishing mentors. He became a recurring presence, tromping through the Beaverkill and remnant surrounding forests on weekends and during the summer, learning the secret holes where the elusive trout still wandered and growing frustrated at finding fewer and fewer good fishing holes. As his angling prowess grew, Van Cleef became a regular contributor to the magazine Forest and Stream. He initially wrote about various aspects of fly-fishing, but gradually shifted toward the problem of streams and rivers. Van Cleef had a clear view of what was causing the destruction of trout streams: “I have become satisfied that the destruction of the trees bordering on these streams and the changed condition of the banks produced thereby, has resulted in the destruction of the natural harbors or hiding places of the trout.” He added that this explanation for the loss of trout had the advantage of being reversible: “I believe it possible to restore most of our streams . . . especially when they are under the control of clubs or associations who can make the effort.”3