The snail darter controversy related to the discovery in 1973 of an endangered species during the construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River; the dam project had been authorized and begun before passage of protective environmental legislation. On August 12, 1973, University of Tennessee biologist and professor David Etnier discovered the snail darter in the Little Tennessee River while doing research related to a lawsuit under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The lawsuit said that the Tellico Reservoir, to be created by Tellico Dam, would alter the habitat of the river to the point of killing off the endangered snail darter.
The NEPA lawsuits slowed the construction of the Tellico Dam but did not stop it. After the Supreme Court upheld protection under NEPA, Congress passed legislation specifically exempting the snail darter from protection; the dam project and inundation of the reservoir were completed in 1979.[1]
This committee has not viewed the Endangered Species Act as preventing the completion and use of these projects which were well under way at the time the affected species were listed as endangered. If the act has such an effect, which is contrary to the Committee's understanding of the intent of Congress in enacting the Endangered Species Act, funds should be appropriated to allow these projects to be completed and their benefits realized in the public interest, the Endangered Species Act not withstanding.
The language of the Act made no exceptions for projects like Tellico that were well under way when Congress passed the act.
It is clear from the Act's legislative history that Congress intended to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction. The pointed omission of the type of qualified language previously included in endangered species legislation reveals a conscious congressional design to give endangered species priority over the "primary missions" of federal agencies. Congress, moreover, foresaw that on occasion this would require agencies to alter ongoing projects in order to fulfill the Act's goals.
Though statements in Appropriations Committee Reports expressed the view of the Committees either that the Act did not apply to Tellico or that the dam should be completed regardless of the Act's provisions, nothing in the TVA appropriations measures passed by Congress said that the Tellico project was to be completed regardless of the Act's requirements. When voting on appropriations measures, legislators are entitled to assume that the funds will be devoted to purposes that are lawful and not for any purpose forbidden. A contrary policy would violate the rules of both Houses of Congress, which provide that appropriations measures may not change existing substantive law. An appropriations committee's expression does not operate to repeal or modify substantive legislation.
Completion of the Tellico Dam project would violate the Act, so the Court of Appeals did not err by ordering the project to be enjoined. Congress has spoken in the plainest words, making it clear that endangered species are to be accorded the highest priorities. Since that legislative power has been exercised, it is up to the executive branch to administer the law and for the Judiciary to enforce it when, as here, enforcement has been sought.
Burger's opinion emphasized that, as written, the Endangered Species Act explicitly forbade the completion of such projects as Tellico if the Secretary of Interior had determined that such a project would likely result in the elimination of a species. Although more than $100 million had been spent on the project by 1978, and the dam was substantially finished, the court could not allow the TVA to finish the project. According to Burger, this would force the court "to ignore the ordinary meaning of plain language."[2]
Supporters of the dam project, who believed that it would serve a much larger public good than protection of the snail darter, reacted in an effort to rework the Endangered Species Act. In his book The Fishes of Tennessee' David Etnier later wrote: "the snail darter had become almost a household word, and in current usage 'snail darter types' is approximately synonymous with 'ultra-liberal environmental activists.'"[3]
Two Tennessee legislators get involved
Congressman John Duncan, Sr., whose district included Tellico, and Senator Howard Baker. Duncan had been a long-time congressional supporter of the project. On the other hand, Baker had not taken a position before.
Howard Baker was a leading sponsor of an amendment to the Endangered Species Act that was passed into law in November 1978. The idea was to create a mechanism whereby a specific project could be excluded from the Endangered Species Act. If a controversy arose, the amendment called for the creation of a special committee consisting of various Cabinet level members and at least one member from the affected state where the project in question was located. It came to be known as the "God Committee" because if they exercised their power to exempt a project from the act, they were in effect acting like God and allowing destruction of an entire species.
There was a fear by project supporters in Congress that many projects in the country would be affected by litigation as biologists might set out to discover obscure species, including insects or even micro-biotic life forms. The proponents of the "God Committee" amendment believed it could be a means to protect the Endangered Species Act. According to the Burger opinion, U.S. endangered species laws at that time "represented the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species ever enacted by any nation".
But, instead of granting Tellico an exemption from the Endangered Species Act, the committee voted unanimously in favor of the snail darter, largely finding that the dam project had poor economic issues.[1] On January 23, 1979, the Committee unanimously denied an exemption for Tellico, specifically on economic grounds, rather than ecological grounds. "I hate to see the snail darter get the credit for stopping a project that was ill-conceived and uneconomic in the first place," said Chairman Andrus.[4] The reservoir project deserved to be killed on its own merits. As Charles Schultze, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and a member of the Committee, said, "Here is a project that is 95% complete, and if one takes the cost of finishing it against the total project benefits, and does it properly, it doesn't pay, which says something about the original design."[4]
The opposition made much of the problematic benefit-cost issue throughout the 1970s. Despite his credentials as one of the nation's top economists, however, Schultze was no more prepared to accurately predict future benefits than anyone else at the time. Wheeler and McDonald state the problem was TVA's general unfamiliarity with the econometric models used to come up with benefit-cost ratios.[5][pageneeded] Such models require some underlying assumptions.
Wheeler and McDonald identified five general assumptions which TVA used and declared them all to be false. They were:
(1) The Tellico area would remain economically static without the project. (2) All economic projects that occurred in the area after completion of the project should be attributed to the project. (3) If an economic benefit could take place at Tellico, then it would. (4) The Tellico Project would not detract from any economic benefits already being enjoyed in the area. (5) Once set, costs would not rise faster than the normal annual inflation rate of the early 1960s.
Congress had updated and strengthened the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Tellico Dam opponents had successfully sued under the provisions of that law to stop the dam. The Supreme Court had stated that as written, it was clear that Congress intended to protect all species, including the snail darter. In 1978 Congress amended the law, with the case of the snail darter specifically in mind.
Baker drafted an amendment to the Endangered Species Act that excluded the Tellico project. He attempted to satisfy arguments of the federal courts. Duncan gained passage of the amendment by the House on June 18, 1979, on a voice vote. The vote became infamous among dam opponents. Baker introduced the amendment in the Senate on July 17 and was defeated on a vote of 45–53. Undeterred, Baker reintroduced the amendment in September. Baker spoke in favor of his amendment on the Senate floor:
Mr. President, I hope this is the last time around. I hope we can resolve this issue once and for all, and I hope reason will finally prevail. . . .
Mr. President, the awful beast is back. The Tennessee snail darter, the bane of my existence, the nemesis of my golden years, the bold perverter of the Endangered Species Act is back.
He is still insisting that the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, a dam that is now 99% complete, be destroyed.
In the midst of a national energy crisis, the snail darter demands that we scuttle a project that would produce 200 million kilowatt hours of hydroelectric power and save an estimated 15 million gallons of oil.
Although other residences have been found in which he can thrive serenely, the snail darter stubbornly insists on keeping this particular stretch of the Little Tennessee River as his principal domicile. ...
Let me stress again, Mr. President, that this is fine with me. I have nothing personal against the snail darter. He seems to be quite a nice little fish, as fish go.
Now seriously Mr. President, the snail darter has become an unfortunate example of environmental extremism, and this kind of extremism, if rewarded and allowed to persist, will spell the doom to the environmental protection movement in this country more surely and more quickly than anything else. ...
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. ...[6]
Completion of dam
On September 10, 1979, Baker's amendment passed on a vote of 48 to 44. Twenty-eight Republicans and 20 Democrats supported it. Ten Republicans and 34 Democrats opposed it. On September 25, 1979, President Jimmy Carter signed the bill that exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act.
On November 29, 1979, with retired TVA Chairman Red Wagner watching, the TVA closed the gates on the Tellico Dam to begin inundation of the Tellico Reservoir. Before this action, numerous snail darters were transplanted into the Hiwassee River in Tennessee. The snail darter was reclassified from endangered to threatened on July 5, 1984. It was delisted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service effective November 4, 2022 after achievement of recovery criteria and the finding of additional populations within the Tennessee River drainage.[7]
↑ Etnier, David A. and Wayne C. Starnes. The Fishes of Tennessee. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993.
1 2 Zygmunt J. B. Plater, "Reflected in a River: Agency Accountability and the TVA Tellico Dam Case", Tennessee Law Review, Summer 1992, Volume 49, Number 4, 754.
↑ William Bruce Wheeler and Michael J. McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam 1936-1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1986)
↑ U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. "Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Removing the Snail Darter From the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife". Federal Register. 87 (192): 60298–60313.87 FR60298
General and cited references
U.S. Senate Report Number 95-301, (1977): 99.
Jim Range, telephone interview with Jim Breitinger, February 27, 2001. Master's thesis, University of Utah, 2001.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a federally owned electric utility corporation in the United States. TVA's service area covers all of Tennessee, portions of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and small areas of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. While owned by the federal government, TVA receives no taxpayer funding and operates similarly to a private for-profit company. It is headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and is the sixth-largest power supplier and largest public utility in the country.
The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is the primary law in the United States for protecting and conserving imperiled species. Designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a "consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation", the ESA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 28, 1973. The Supreme Court of the United States described it as "the most comprehensive legislation for the preservation of endangered species enacted by any nation". The purposes of the ESA are two-fold: to prevent extinction and to recover species to the point where the law's protections are not needed. It therefore "protect[s] species and the ecosystems upon which they depend" through different mechanisms. For example, section 4 requires the agencies overseeing the Act to designate imperiled species as threatened or endangered. Section 9 prohibits unlawful 'take,' of such species, which means to "harass, harm, hunt..." Section 7 directs federal agencies to use their authorities to help conserve listed species. The Act also serves as the enacting legislation to carry out the provisions outlined in The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).
The Little Tennessee River is a 135-mile (217 km) tributary of the Tennessee River that flows through the Blue Ridge Mountains from Georgia, into North Carolina, and then into Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. It drains portions of three national forests— Chattahoochee, Nantahala, and Cherokee— and provides the southwestern boundary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The snail darter is a small species of freshwater ray-finned fish, a darter from the subfamily Etheostomatinae, part of the family Percidae, which also contains the perches, ruffes and pikeperches. It is found in East Tennessee freshwater in the United States and in small portions of northern Alabama and Georgia. First recorded in 1973, the snail darter was listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973 by 1975. The species was at the center of a major environmental law controversy that involved a lawsuit seeking to halt the completion of Tellico Dam, which posed a risk of extinction for the snail darter by blocking its migratory route. The case was eventually appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled on it in its 1978 decision Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill.
Kenneth Douglas McKellar was an American politician from Tennessee who served as a United States Representative from 1911 until 1917 and as a United States Senator from 1917 until 1953. A Democrat, he served longer in both houses of Congress than anyone else in Tennessee history.
Norris Dam is a hydroelectric and flood control structure located on the Clinch River in Anderson County and Campbell County, Tennessee, United States. The dam was the first major project for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been created in 1933 to bring economic development to the region and control the rampant flooding that had long plagued the Tennessee Valley. The dam was named in honor of Nebraska Senator George Norris (1861–1944), a longtime supporter of government-owned utilities in general, and supporter of TVA in particular. The infrastructure project was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.
John James Duncan Sr. was an American attorney and Republican politician who represented Tennessee's 2nd Congressional District in the U. S. House of Representatives from 1965 until his death in 1988. He also served as Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee, from 1959 to 1964, and as assistant attorney general of Knox County, from 1948 until 1956. He is the father of Congressman John J. "Jimmy" Duncan, Jr., who succeeded him in Congress, and current Tennessee State Senator Becky Duncan Massey.
Tellico Dam is a concrete gravity and earthen embankment dam on the Little Tennessee River that was built by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in Loudon County, Tennessee. Planning for a dam structure on the Little Tennessee was reported as early as 1936 but was deferred for development until 1942. Completed in 1979, the dam created the Tellico Reservoir and is the last dam to be built by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Tellico Village is an unincorporated planned community, and census-designated place on the western shore of Tellico Reservoir in Loudon County, Tennessee, United States, about 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Knoxville. Its population was 5,791 as of the 2010 census and and 7,311 at the 2020 census. Tellico Village is the second largest area by population in Loudon County behind Lenoir City.
Fort Loudoun Dam is a hydroelectric dam on the Tennessee River in Loudon County, Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. The dam is operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built the dam in the early 1940s as part of a unified plan to provide electricity and flood control in the Tennessee Valley and create a continuous 652-mile (1,049 km) navigable river channel from Knoxville, Tennessee to Paducah, Kentucky. It is the uppermost of nine TVA dams on the Tennessee River.
Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hiram Hill et al., or TVA v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978), was a United States Supreme Court case and the Court's first interpretation of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. After the discovery of the snail darter fish in the Little Tennessee River in August 1973, a lawsuit was filed alleging that the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)'s Tellico Dam construction was in violation of the Endangered Species Act. Plaintiffs argued dam construction would destroy critical habitat and endanger the population of snail darters. It was decided by a 6-3 vote, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hill, et al. and granted an injunction stating that there would be conflict between Tellico Dam operation and the explicit provisions of Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act.
The amber darter is a small, endangered species of freshwater ray-finned fish, a darter from the subfamily Etheostomatinae, part of the family Percidae, which also contains the perches, ruffes and pikeperches. It is native to the Conasauga River and Etowah River in Georgia and Tennessee in the United States. It typically inhabits riffle areas over gravel and sand bottoms, hiding in aquatic vegetation when present. It feeds on small invertebrates and probably breeds between late fall and early spring. It is an uncommon fish with a small range and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has classified its conservation status as being "endangered".
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) was first passed in 1973 and forms the basis of biodiversity and endangered species protection in the United States. The original purpose of the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was to prevent species endangerment and extinction due to the human impact on natural ecosystems. The three most powerful sections of the ESA are Sections 4, 7 and 9. Section 4 allows the Secretaries of Interior and Commerce to list species as threatened or endangered based on best available data. Section 7 requires federal agencies to consult with Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) before taking any action that may threaten a listed species. Section 9 forbids the taking of an endangered species. The first amendment to the ESA was passed by the 95th United States Congress in 1978 to "introduce some flexibility into the Endangered Species Act".
Bussell Island, formerly Lenoir Island, is an island located at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River, at its confluence with the Tennessee River in Loudon County, near the U.S. city of Lenoir City, Tennessee. The island was inhabited by various Native American cultures for thousands of years before the arrival of early European explorers. The Tellico Dam and a recreational area occupy part of the island. Part of the island was added in 1978 to the National Register of Historic Places for its archaeological potential.
Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, 515 U.S. 687 (1995), is a US Supreme Court case, decided by a 6–3 vote, in which the plaintiffs challenged the Interior Department's interpretation of the word "harm" in the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The Citico darter is a threatened species of freshwater ray-finned fish, a darter from the subfamily Etheostomatinae, part of the family Percidae, which also contains the perches, ruffes and pikeperches. It is native to Tennessee. This species was formerly subsumed within Etheostoma percnurum. The E. percnurum group now consists of four distinct species: E. percnurum, E. marmorpinnum, E. lemniscatum, and E. sitikuense.
Ray Howard Jenkins was an American lawyer, active primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the surrounding region, throughout much of the 20th century. He is best known for his role as special counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations during the 1954 Army-McCarthy Hearings, earning broad praise for his aggressive questioning of the hearings' two complainants, Senator Joseph McCarthy and Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens. Jenkins appeared on the cover of Time at the height of the hearings on May 17, 1954.
This is a list of notable events relating to the environment in 1973. They relate to environmental law, conservation, environmentalism and environmental issues.
Sequoyah v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 480 F.Supp. 608 (1979), was a Tennessee court case that ruled on the applicability of the Free Exercise clause to the relationship and significance of land sacred to the Cherokee people, specifically the Little Tennessee River and its surrounding valley. The suit, brought by three Cherokee individuals and two Cherokee organizations/bands to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, sought an injunction to restrain the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) from flooding the sacred Cherokee land along the Little Tennessee River for the purpose of creating the Tellico Dam. The plaintiffs argued that the flooding of the Little Tennessee River valley, given their specific spiritual and historical relationship to the land, would infringe on their right to practice their religion.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
