INTRODUCTION

God Is Speaking, by Committee

JANUARY 23, 1979

A packed crowd sits hunched forward on folding chairs in a big, stark meeting room at the Department of Interior headquarters in Washington. The ceiling lights glare above eight obviously important men who sit ill at ease at a long table at the front of the room, as several staffers with flip charts and an overhead projector present maps, chronologies, analytical data, and multiple columns of big numbers. This morning is a moment unprecedented in human history. Really. For the first time, a conscious decision is being made whether an entire species of living creatures will be condemned to extinction, or allowed to survive. These eight men are the members of the so-called God Committee, created by Congress ten weeks earlier to resolve the problem of a notorious lawsuit from Tennessee. A small group of citizens had persuaded the Supreme Court to halt construction of the Tennessee Valley Authoritys Tellico Dam because it would exterminate the entire known population of a tiny endangered perch, the snail darter. The men sitting at the table are some of the highest-ranking officials in the nation, including members of the presidents Cabinetthe secretaries of agriculture, interior, army, and transportationthe administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the chair of the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers. Here they sit, told to dig into the
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Introduction

economics of the case and then declare which will prevail, the dam and its reservoir or the fish and its river.1 Doesnt this just about beat anything? Margaret Sexton whispers. Her soft Tennessee vowels add a quiet little melody to the gravelly torrent of technical talk thats been pouring for the past two hours from the bureaucrats up front. And to think this-all started with my Daddys hat! Margaret, one of the volunteers defending the endangered darter and its Little Tennessee River (the Little T), was raised in a small farmhouse surrounded by ninety-plus acres of rich soil in the bottomlands along the river. She had moved to Washington when her fianc, Joe, got a job there at the end of the Korean War. Down in Tennessee her parents, Asa and Nellie McCall, like several hundred other farm families in the Little T valley, continued to work the dark soil of the cool rivers undulating valleyraising corn, wheat, tobacco, soybeans, alfalfa hay, black-eyed peas. Looking out over the riverside fields, here and there a visitors eye would pick out large Native American burial mounds along the river. This had been the ancient heartland of the Cherokee, the site of nine major Cherokee villages, including Chota, their sacred place of refuge, and Tennassee Town, which gave its name to the river and the state. Then one day fifteen years ago white cars with federal license plates began to appear along the back roads, stopping at each of the farmhouses. TVAthe federal Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been one of the most lauded creations of the New Dealwas now politically the dominant regional power in a seven-state area of the southeastern United States. Were buying your land for a new reservoir project, the TVA appraisers said when they came to the McCalls farm. Aint for sale, said Asa. Makes no sense, said Nell. Rivers too shallow to get you enough power to pay for a dam. Yes, maam, but this Tellico project is for a recreational reservoir, plus were going to have the Boeing Corporation come in and build a model city on this land. Thats why we have to take all of your farm, not just the three acres well be flooding. The restll be sold for development. As TVA described it officially, the Tellico project is expected to result in significant beneficial shifts in land use . . . to industrial, commercial, residential, and recreational development use.2

Introduction

You just git off our land this minute and dont come back, Asa told the TVA agents. Nell added something choicer. Thus began the earliest chapter of a long, bitter battle between the giant federal utility and a motley collection of farmers, trout fishermen, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, history buffs, and conservationists local people convinced from the start that TVAs small dam was an irrational mistake. As they dug into the details of TVAs project, the farmers and their supporters unearthed more and more serious problems with the agencys plans. The project clearly made no economic sense. Alternative development designstourism, recreational resources, and an industrial parkcould foster far more economic benefits than a dam, while keeping landowners on their farms and the river flowing. If people looked at this project, a frustrated Nell McCall said, theyd see its nuthin but a crooked land grab. The farmers and their allies, however, found it virtually impossible to get anyone in power to listen. They tried, fighting against the land condemnations, carpooling to Washington to testify against the project, writing letters to local newspapers. For a short time they were able to halt the project because TVA initially refused to do a required environmental impact statement. But the federal agency, supported in Washington by the pork barrelthe intricate politics of dubious federally funded projectsultimately overrode every citizen effort to block the dam. Demoralized by a string of battles lost, the local dam fighters saw their ranks grow thinner and thinner year by year. Then a small fish swam into the controversy, discovered under the swift currents of the lower Little T River. The fish was clearly endangered, and federal law said any federal agency action jeopardizing an endangered species violated the Endangered Species Act. After some hesitant discussions about the wisdom and consequences of using this kind of legal argument (in which, as we will see, Asa McCalls hat played a pivotal role), the farmers and their allies decided to launch one final attempt to block the dam and its real estate development project. On the way to the Supreme Court, the citizens case for the snail darter and its river struggled through tortuous layers of agency bureaucracy and congressional politics and trekked through three federal courts, culminating in a dramatic Supreme Court victory. But the darters legal achievements were always obscured by an avalanche of

Introduction

criticism and ridicule in the media and in popular opinion. The case was inaccurately depicted as an irrational obstruction of a valuable project, a quixotic conflict between a trivial fish of no known value and a huge hydroelectric dam. The press, and even more significantly the business community and the pork-barrel lobby, reveled in the darter story, depicting the little fish as an example of environmental extremism and government regulation gone haywire. The Tellico projects economic flaws and its very dubious condemnation of farmland for resale went unnoticed in the public debate. Reacting to the Supreme Court decision and the ensuing media hullabaloo, Congress amended the Endangered Species Act, inserting provisions creating the God Committee, empowered to review affected projects and bring common sense to the law by overriding endangered species protections wherever a formal economic analysis showed that human necessities outweighed the value of preserving a species. As the day of the God Committees economic analysis approached, the odds of an extinction verdict were unpredictable. Political insiders assumed the committees economic review would make short work of the darter. By the time the committee got the case, TVA had already spent 95 percent of the project budget. Its heavy machinery had devastated the valley and brought the reservoir levees close to completion. With all those sunk costs, the dam should surely prevail. The darters defenders, however, still hoped for an economic verdict that would finally show the world the realities of the federal mistake theyd been fighting for so long. The river valley could be far more valuable without the dam, while the snail darter, wiped out in all its previous habitats by sixty-eight dams, could be a canary in a coal mineby its very existence in this last stretch of big flowing river, a sensitive natural indicator of an avoidable impending threat to human welfare. On this January morning the staff analysts in the front of the hall finish presenting their economic charts and statistical analyses to the God Committee members. The economic merits of the darters case have been carefully laid out in public as never before. But at this late date, so far into the game, the dam is indeed almost completed. We sit there holding our collective breath. For an awkward moment following the presentations, the eight judges shift in their chairs in hesitant silence, glancing at one another.

Introduction

Well, somebody has to start, says Charles Schultze, chairman of the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers. He pauses, then continues, The interesting phenomenon is that here is a project that is 95 percent complete, and if one takes just the cost of finishing it against the benefits, and does it properly, it still doesnt pay!which says something about the original design! [Laughter].3 The room is full of Washington insiders, all of whom know that most public works projects are built upon economic exaggerations. Theres humor here in having the fictions laid out so starkly that they might now be evident to the public beyond the Beltway. In another four minutes, based on the staff s extensive economic analysis, the committee votes unanimously against the Tellico project and in favor of the snail darter and its river. I hate to see the snail darter get the credit, Chairman Cecil Andrus (the Carter administrations secretary of the interior) says, for stopping a project that was so ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place. Margaret is ecstatic. Back in Tennessee the farmers and their volunteer crusaders joyfully greet the news. Will this be the end of twentyfive years of battle? Will TVA and its allies finally yield and turn to alternative river development designs, with the farmers still living and working on their rich bottomlands? Will the public now see the realities of the snail darter casethat the dams promoters are the extremists, and the fish and its defenders stand for common sense? The verdict of the God Committee reaches Capitol Hill and the Washington media bureaus shortly before noon, but most of the evening papers and news shows do not mention the event, much less the dramatic reversal of the story as it had previously been reported. By the end of the day, however, ominous rumblings have begun deep within the marble corridors of Congress.