KNOXVILLE — Three decades after the snail darter became the environmental icon that nearly swallowed TVA, the case still echoes in case law, politics and popular culture, says the UT law professor who took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This was the world's most extreme environmental case,” said law professor Zygmunt Plater, who in 1974 pursued the case with plaintiff Hank Hill, the sole named plaintiff in Hill v. TVA.
On Friday in the University of Tennessee’s College of Law, the professor and Mr. Hill, now a Chattanooga attorney was among about a dozen main players presenting a 30-year retrospective of the legendary snail darter case.
Started in order to save the snail darter, a small fish that was thought to have lived only in the Little Tennessee River and was endangered by Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam, the case shaped environmental law in the country, symposium participants agreed unanimously.
But they also agreed that they “won all the battles, but lost the war,” as Mr. Hill phrased it.
TVA displaced scores of landowners to build the dam and its reservoir, they noted, and created a crop of “McMansions” along the Tellico Reservoir, the lake formed from the once free-flowing Little Tennessee River.
Pat Parenteau, a nationally recognized expert on environmental law, said the snail darter case set the precedent for all environmental law that came after it.
“You had everything — except political support, especially in the Tennessee delegation,” he said Friday at the symposium.
Perhaps worst of all, the group agreed, the public largely to this day doesn’t know the real story of the power struggle among citizens, politicians and a large federal agency.
Alfred Davis, a farmer who lost his 180-acre, three-generation family farm to TVA although only 30 acres of his land was intended to be flooded, got a loud laugh when he shared the political lesson he learned from the ordeal.
“We were done in by politicians,” he said. “Well, politicians have something in common with diapers. They both need changing regularly.”
LEGISLATIVE WRANGLINGS
In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the snail darter, which at that time was on the Endangered Species List. The next year, the Supreme Court sided with the fish again after a Cabinet-level panel created by then-Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., tried to get around the case by saying the public need trumped the court’s decision. The court decided TVA’s economics were flawed for a project that would not generate hydropower but would build “a model city” to be called Timberlakes.
Later in 1979, Sen. Baker and Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., pushed legislation to overrule the Endangered Species Act and other laws.
Mr. Plater said that, at the time, he was told he had President Jimmy Carter’s support and he hoped for a veto. But the president called him and told him he “had no choice” and could not veto the override, Mr. Plater said.
Neither Sen. Baker nor then-TVA counsel Herbert Sanger responded to requests for comments.
THE LITTLE-KNOWN STORY
During Jean Ritchey’s last days at her 110-acre farm on the Little Tennessee River, she watched the smoke from a neighbor's lost home curl into the sky. The next day, she said, was worse.
“I watched TVA and its bulldozers erase our home forever,” she said. “And we were miles away from that dam.”
Only three acres of the farm are underwater today.
Mrs. Ritchey and Mr. Davis, one of her neighbors, made many trips to lawmakers’ offices and to Washington to protest the planned dam. Mr. Davis said the behavior of TVA and the state and federal governments destroyed his view of civic fairness.
“I was audited three times,” he said of the period when he was fighting the government.
In retrospect, Mr. Hill told symposium listeners, the legal crew should have named the case Farmers vs. TVA. The press and the politicians would have been more apt to listen to the stories of the river-bottom people, he said, than to a three-inch fish that later was reintroduced in other areas and now has been reclassified as threatened rather than endangered.
Some panelists disagreed. Jerry Martin, an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee in the late 1970s, said he tried to talk to church groups about the fish and the farmers.
“TVA was God then in East Tennessee,” he said. “People would say, 'You just don't know what this area was like before TVA came,’” he said.
Mr. Parenteau said the farmers’ stories would not have been enough because it all boiled down to politics.
“You had the truth, you had the Supreme Court,” he said. “But you’ve got to win your own state. You didn’t have one member of your delegation.”
Despite the dam’s ultimate construction, the Endangered Species Act is still strong, Mr. Parenteau said, at least with the courts.
“What you have to worry about is Congress. When every congressional district has got a species on the list, and some species are getting in the way of something, all of a sudden the politics of the Endangered Species Act is shifted,” he said.
