6
Tellico Dam, Dickey Dam, and Endangered Species Law in the United States during the 1970s
Michael Camp
In the late 1970s, the United States Army Corps of Engineers spent two summers and thousands of dollars scouring the banks of the St. John River in Maine, searching for undiscovered populations of an unexceptional wildflower named the Furbish lousewort. It did so because in peril was a massive hydroelectric project that would have brought energy to the New England region, which had long suffered frigid winters and needed robust sources of power. The corps needed to find new populations of the lousewort in order to allow the dam’s construction to go forward, and it spent significant amounts of time and money to do so. The national news magazine Time was outraged, castigating the corps for its quixotic quest and lampooning the idea that a mundane wildflower should impede a multi-million-dollar construction project.1 How had the state of Maine—and the United States more generally—gotten to this strange moment?
This regional situation had its roots in developments a few years earlier. The 1973 oil embargo, instituted by oil-producing nations as punishment for covert US support for Israel in its war against a coalition of Arab states, was a major event in the political history of the late twentieth century. The embargo caused oil prices to skyrocket and created lines and fist fights at gasoline stations as Americans waited hours to fill their gas tanks. The US presidents of the 1970s—Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter—pursued energy policies that would increase domestic production to replace foreign oil, including coal, nuclear power, and alternative technologies.2
As it was for all domestic energy sources, the mid-1970s was therefore a moment that held the potential for dynamic change in the hydroelectric economy of the United States. Keynoting the 1976 annual convention of the Colorado River Water Users Association (a group of representatives and officials from Western states and Native American tribes), US Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Gilbert Stamm declared emphatically that hydro power was significantly underdeveloped in the United States, with untold numbers of rivers primed and ready for useful hydroelectric construction. He optimistically predicted that remedying this problem of underuse could help solve the nation’s energy woes, dependence on foreign oil foremost among them. Citing the key role of hydro power in the historical development of the American West, Stamm warned that “we would be grossly irresponsible if we ignored its undeveloped potential in planning for future generations.” And noting that only a third of the nation’s identified hydroelectric capacity had been exploited, Stamm extolled water’s potential to make an “important and unique” contribution to energy security.3 Though Commissioner Stamm specifically touted the untapped hydro capacity of the Colorado River Basin in the West, he also expressed broader optimism about flowing water’s potential to solve the nation’s energy problems. If the numberless rivers criss-crossing the country could be harnessed for human use, the nation’s dependence on oil from across the world—especially the Middle East, but also places like Venezuela, which was in the process of nationalizing its oil industry, as Joseph Pratt describes elsewhere in this volume—would dissipate.
Not all observers shared Stamm’s zeal for hydroelectricity. The mid-1970s witnessed tense debates surrounding several large hydroelectric projects, whose potential effects on the landscape and wildlife in a proposed construction area generated controversy. Environmentalists often mobilized to block the construction of these huge structures, which brought them into conflict with public agencies funding and supporting the projects. Environmentalist opponents of the dams were often unable to prevent the construction of hydroelectric projects by appealing to general environmental sensibilities. Instead, they resorted to using a relatively new piece of regulatory legislation, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), to preserve undeveloped wilderness areas.
Passed in 1973 as a key piece of a broader wave of environmental legislation in the United States during this era, the ESA was meant to protect imperilled animal and plant species. Supporters of the law argued that allowing species to go extinct was short-sighted. One pragmatic reason given was that these species might provide some yet unknown benefit to humans in the future, and another was that they had an inherent right to exist and humans did not hold the moral authority to wipe them out.4 Once passed, the ESA prevented federal agencies from taking any action that would kill endangered animal or plant species or destroy their habitats. Though the law passed with virtually universal acclaim from the public, several facets quickly became controversial once it was put into practice. Chief among them was the fact that the law protected endangered species indiscriminately with no regard for their relative usefulness to humans. This provision at first seemed uncontroversial. How can one compare the inherent monetary value of one endangered species relative to another? Yet the ESA’s enforcement soon irritated many Americans who came to believe that it was too broad. Not long after the law’s passage, several of these endangered species—which often had negligible differences setting them apart from similar species whose populations were abundant—delayed or halted massive, multi-million-dollar energy projects.
Endangered species’ ability to dominate and marginalize all the other facets and issues embedded within an otherwise complex debate soon made many observers question the scope and power of the law. Even publications that may have had mixed feelings about a given economic project came to opine that such debates should pivot around weightier concerns than one seemingly un-notable species. This chapter examines two controversies that unfolded from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, both related to hydroelectric projects, and that imparted this pessimistic notion to diverse constituencies and interest groups.
The two cases, Tellico Dam in East Tennessee and Dickey Dam in northern Maine, each unfolded over more than a decade, with stops and starts in funding allocations based on sporadic environmental litigation. But while the Tellico Dam was finished and its gates closed to impound the Little Tennessee River, the Dickey Dam was never built—in fact, wilderness land was never even cleared to prepare the area, and families living on the dam’s proposed site who had faced forced relocation remained on their land. There were also differences in the dynamics of public-private alliances in the two cases. While Tellico witnessed co-operation between the quasi-public Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Boeing Corporation to develop land around the Little Tennessee, in the case of Dickey Dam, the Army Corps of Engineers clashed with private power companies who detested public competition in electricity generation.
Yet even with these significant differences in play, each project was at one point imperilled by the ESA. A small fish called the snail darter delayed the Tellico project and for a time put its eventual completion at risk. The dispute over the dam made its way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of the tiny fish. Likewise, a few clumps of the Furbish lousewort jeopardized the future of the Dickey Dam in Maine. The two endangered species’ ability to dominate public debate and supersede all other concerns about the future of the two projects made many observers, including individual citizens and national periodicals, come to believe that the act protecting them was too powerful. These cases turned many Americans against the idea of environmental regulation, as numerous observers came to believe that regulations, while admirable in the abstract, did not in practice adequately take into account the imperatives of human need.
The Tellico story has already received significant attention from historians and political scientists. Such analysis generally focuses on narrow aspects of the story, such as the history of legal litigation on the dam or the internal discussions among TVA officials as the story played out. This chapter instead places Tellico into the larger unfolding story about the declining political power of environmentalism after the 1973 oil embargo, a story that also includes the never built and much less well-known Dickey Dam. When environmental guidelines did not seriously endanger Americans’ standard of living, they were relatively uncontroversial. But when environmental values and energy production came into conflict, some Americans came to believe that recent regulations were unfairly predisposed, against the dictates of common sense, to favour the former at the expense of the latter. The Tellico and Dickey controversies led to the deterioration of the ESA’s legal power. With it, the reputation of environmentalism in the United States suffered a serious blow, as energy production was firmly established as the more pressing public policy problem in the post–oil embargo United States.
The Tennessee Valley and Riverfront Development
The Tellico Dam project, as an initiative of the quasi-public TVA, had deep historical roots. By the mid-1960s, the time of the project’s inception, the agency had developed a central and nearly mythical position in the history of the US Southeast. During the New Deal years, many of President Franklin Roosevelt’s top advisers had developed a theory to explain the seemingly insurmountable poverty of the American South, which, in terms of wealth, persistently lagged behind the industrial centres of the Northeast and Midwest. They concluded that urban industrial hubs in other parts of the nation had kept the “resource-rich hinterlands” of the South in a perpetual state of underdevelopment by appropriating the region’s raw resources with little concern for its residents. The southern states had exhausted their soils and forest resources to produce material—mainly cotton—for refining and processing in urban industrial centres. To equalize incomes between farm and factory, therefore, meant that agricultural regions must “retain the right to their own resources” and use them effectively. New Dealers also decided that the federal government would have to be the agent of change, as the South, focused intently on preserving strict nineteenth-century racial hierarchies through maintenance of a farm-based economy, lacked the political will to achieve its own forward-thinking economic uplift.5
As historian Sarah T. Phillips has argued, no single New Deal initiative better embodied this thinking than the TVA, a government corporation created during FDR’s first hundred days. Created to “restore and develop the resources of an entire watershed area,” according to Phillips, the TVA built multi-purpose dams, supplied hydroelectric power to farms and small towns, and began to repair the South’s damaged forests and soil.6 Though some New Deal programs were either ineffective or were ruled unconstitutional, the TVA emerged as one of the most prominent symbols of the successes of New Deal liberalism. In 1933, when the TVA was established, per capita income in the Tennessee Valley was a mere 45 per cent of the national average. By 1972, the ratio stood at a greatly increased 75 per cent, a figure of which the TVA was exceedingly proud. The agency attributed much of the difference to its own activities in the region, and it used the irrefutable economic progress of the past decades to push for an expanded mission in the near future.7
The agency had a practical reason for wanting to expand the scope of its mission in the Tennessee Valley. It had relied on consistent funding from Congress to pay for the construction of power-generation facilities for the first quarter-century of its existence, as the subsidized electric rates offered to impoverished valley residents did not in turn provide sufficient revenue to the authority for its daily operations. During the Eisenhower administration, however, Congress began to withhold dollars, channelling money instead to the task of waging the burgeoning Cold War with the Soviet Union. Aubrey Wagner, TVA board chairman from 1962 to 1978, recognized that the TVA’s current formula—relying on power generation, navigation, and flood control—was insufficient to financially sustain the agency; it needed to expand its role in the region so as to multiply its sources of revenue. Wagner decided that including more direct local economic-development initiatives within the TVA’s mission could attract additional congressional appropriations, as members of Congress from the Tennessee Valley would be eager to steer federal funds that would generate local jobs. The TVA had long used dams to generate electricity for residents of the valley. The chairman decided that building entirely new communities around the reservoirs created by these dams provided the path forward.8
In 1962, the first year of Wagner’s chairmanship, the TVA began a fierce push for increased riverfront development. It explained to the US Congress why federal support for these projects would be beneficial. First and foremost, it would help develop industry in the region. The Tennessee Valley had numerous navigable waterways that, in theory, could be used for easy transport of industrial products to other areas of the nation for consumption. The only problem was that the region, focused on maintaining the romantic ideal of the independent rural farmer, had largely failed to develop industrial sites along these promising rivers. The TVA, the agency’s leaders claimed, could and should rectify this shortsightedness. There was also a more pressing practical reason for this course of action. Due to robust population growth, Tennessee’s labour force was outpacing job opportunities in the state’s stagnant farming economy. A failure to diversify the region’s economy would soon lead to structural economic disaster.9 In the TVA’s estimation, riverfront development would continue to create low-cost hydroelectric power for the valley, but it would also provide a way to encourage capital investment and industrial development in the resource-rich region.10 However, as the TVA found, the new environmental legislation of the late 1960s and early 1970s created a formidable obstacle to its riverfront development plans.
The Tellico Project
The TVA’s inaugural effort to pursue this new mission centred on constructing a dam on the Little Tennessee River, about twenty-five miles southwest of the TVA headquarters in Knoxville, and then building a new industrial community around the hydroelectric structure. The site seemed to be ideal, as it was a rural and impoverished area desperately in need of an economic jolt. Following Wagner’s lead, in April 1963 the TVA board voted to endorse the project and seek congressional funding, which came quickly. Congressional favour led to executive support as well. President Lyndon Johnson’s January 1965 budget proposal included nearly $6 million for the project.11
In its initial stages, the project proceeded without any apparent problems, as a modernization program for an impoverished rural area seemed to have little obvious downside. Tennessee congressman Joe Evins got a favourable vote for the prospective Tellico Dam from the Appropriations Committee and then the full House in 1966. Initial construction of the project began soon afterward in March 1967. The initiative’s main component was the dam on the Little Tennessee River, about a quarter mile above its confluence with the Tennessee. It seemed a perfect location on a river whose utility had already been proven. In its promotional materials, the TVA referred to the Little Tennessee and its tributaries as “a hard-working river system.” Indeed, it had already been successfully impounded sixteen times for hydroelectric generation and flood control.12
The project also included the creation of a thousand-foot-long canal to divert the waters of the Little Tennessee into the Fort Loudon Reservoir, enabling these waters to pass through the existing hydroelectric units in the Fort Loudon powerhouse. The reservoir created by the dam would prospectively extend over thirty miles upstream, its impressive length allowing its waters to occupy over fifteen thousand acres. In the TVA’s boosterish words, this would “create an ideal living, working, and recreation environment . . . [in an area] characterized by low incomes and under-utilization of human and natural resources.” Recognizing that “the influx of thousands of people requiring homes and services in an essentially rural area” could result in rapid and uncontrolled sprawl, the TVA planned to create a focused, suburban-style community of single-family homes on the left bank of the reservoir’s lower reaches.13
In promoting the project, the TVA emphasized a multiplicity of recreational, disaster-preparedness, and energy-production benefits. First and foremost, it would bring money and jobs to an area that sorely needed both. Pointing out that the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park received over seven million visits from tourists every year, the TVA claimed that the lake would be a “valuable” supplementary recreational asset that would attract dollars from wealthier areas of the Southeast and the nation. The TVA also projected that the diversion of the reservoir waters through the turbines at Fort Loudon Dam would provide 200 million kilowatt hours of inexpensive electricity for valley residents annually. Emphasizing the environmental benefits of hydroelectric power, the TVA claimed that producing this same amount of electricity in a coal-fired steam plant would require about ninety thousand tons of coal each year, the pollution from which would be mitigated by the turbines’ operation.14
Within its more traditional mission, the agency also pointed out that the Tellico Dam and Reservoir would provide over a hundred thousand acre-feet of storage for flood control, providing much-needed flood protection for Chattanooga (a city about a hundred miles southwest of Knoxville, on the border with Georgia) as well as myriad communities along the Tennessee River between Chattanooga and the project.15 To assuage possible concerns about risk to drinking water, the TVA claimed that the project, despite its massive scale, was not expected to adversely affect water quality “to any significant extent.” It also downplayed the possible losses of rare and endangered species, claiming that any rare fish or mollusks in the area that might be affected by the construction also existed securely in other locations.16
With all of these ostensible benefits, the project received virtually unanimous support from local governments and business interests. The Chamber of Commerce of nearby Lenoir City resolved in 1969 that the dam was “vital to the economy and welfare” of the city’s residents and urged that the level of appropriations for the project be increased by such amounts to insure “timely completion.” In 1970, the Monroe County Quarterly Court deplored the fact that the project was only 30 per cent complete, and criticized a delay caused by recent budget cutbacks. In 1972, the town of Madisonville exhorted the “economic development and employment opportunities” of the dam, as did Lenoir City’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen. The same year, the president of the Knoxville Chamber of Commerce wrote to Governor Winfield Dunn explaining his support, claiming that the dam’s creation of a lake with adjacent properties would address the concerns of both environmentalists and urban planners by “providing a place for [growing populations] to live, while at the same time enhancing their environment.”17 To the Chamber of Commerce president it seemed that the concept of environmental quality was synonymous with human recreation, providing a glimpse into how boosters unconvincingly tried to square their support for economic growth with the political power of environmentalism in the early 1970s.
Vague definitions of “environmentalism” aside, not all citizens were persuaded. Local ecologist Edward Clebsch crystallized the environmentalist viewpoint, writing indignantly to the recently created President’s Council on Environmental Quality to criticize the TVA’s process of land acquisition. He lamented the idea that the financial benefits of the project would be derived from the development of pollution-generating industrial sites. According to Clebsch, the dam’s economic proceeds would flow overwhelmingly to the privileged few who owned the industrial sites, with the negative externalities distributed among the general populace. Pointing out that the TVA expected to receive several million dollars in land sales to industry, Clebsch also found it “revolting” that it would use eminent domain to acquire land “and then sell it at an unbelievably high profit to itself.”18
To the agency’s surprise, many local residents were even more vocal against the project, with some allying themselves with environmentalists to oppose the dam. Chairman Wagner encountered this opposition in person, travelling to the nearby town of Greenback in 1964 to sell the idea to locals. He assumed they would embrace an initiative to improve their area’s aggregate income and economic standing. Instead, the trip was a disaster. The rural residents loved the idyllic farm life to which they were accustomed and were loath to give up agricultural land for industrial development and suburban-style home building; this was a deeply rooted cultural ideology that Wagner had not considered. Farmers and fishermen from the area were not content to voice their protest against visiting TVA officials, but instead supplemented their localized grumblings by travelling to the nation’s capital in 1966 to speak out against the project in congressional hearings, enraging the TVA head.19
Even though it included the state governor, this alliance of environmentalists and farmers seemed to matter little. The US Congress generally sided with Wagner and the TVA. Not unimportantly, eminent domain powers backed by Congress gave the TVA the ability to seize farmland against locals’ wishes. Private companies also joined the controversy on the side of the TVA and Congress, creating a seemingly unstoppable alliance in favour of the project. As the debate unfolded, the TVA had attracted the support of the Boeing Corporation as a partner to help build the prospective new town of Timberlake on the Tellico Reservoir, a project that was never completed. Also in 1972, the agency received approval of its environmental impact statement, prepared in response to National Environmental Protection Act requirements that federal projects be evaluated for their environmental consequences. Rumours of budget overruns and exploding costs, while providing fodder to those already against the dam, did little to move the opinions of those who favoured it. By 1973, it appeared that the dam would go forward as planned, despite the vehement and diverse opposition.20 But dam opponents had one more powerful weapon to use against the project: the Endangered Species Act.
Discovering the Snail Darter
In August 1973, zoology professor David Etnier, a Tellico Dam opponent, recognized that the ESA might be the last chance for wishing to stop the project. Though the ESA had been passed with known species threatened by human development in mind, Etnier realized that as yet undiscovered species would fall under the act’s provisions too. He therefore went looking for new species in the Little Tennessee River that might require federal protection. Etnier’s expedition was indeed fruitful, as he discovered a tiny, previously unidentified fish barely bigger than a paper clip. The find, which became known as the snail darter, gave new life to opponents of the dam. Not unimportantly, the snail darter, while a unique species, was one of over a hundred known species of darter fish, each of which had negligible differences from the others. After extended testimony from both the TVA and the environmental opposition, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to side with the environmentalists. The service listed the snail darter as an endangered species and designated a part of the Little Tennessee River its “critical habitat.” This designation meant that the area could not be altered in a way that might imperil the snail darter’s survival. Even though the dam was 90 per cent complete by this point, the fish and its habitat in the Little Tennessee were now protected by the ESA, and TVA could not go forward with the project.21 Litigation by the agency over the subsequent years advanced within the US court system, and a spring 1978 Supreme Court decision—which saw the Carter administration, especially Attorney General Griffin Bell, siding with TVA against dam opponents—ended with the court ruling that the dam could not be completed.22
The Tellico Dam saga indeed played a role in reorienting some of the environmentalist legislation passed a few short years before. In March 1977, the month after Weisman’s letter was published, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Congress was considering curbing the power of the ESA, specifically the Fish and Wildlife Service’s power to safeguard habitats deemed essential to the survival or recovery of an endangered or threatened species. The mere addition of an organism to the endangered species list did not automatically exempt the land it lived on from developmental potential. But since the service had broad authority to designate land a “critical habitat,” each new listing held the corresponding possibility to impede or prevent a developmental project. According to the Monitor, the service’s authority faced a “water[ing] down” at the hands of Congress in multiple ways. For example, the changes under consideration would give the interior secretary unilateral power to exempt a federal project that would otherwise be excluded from a designated critical habitat. Furthermore, the kinds of species that might be eligible for critical habitat protection also faced curtailing, with cold-blooded vertebrates and invertebrates possibly losing habitat protections altogether.23
Opposition to the ESA continued to grow in Congress. In April 1978, within the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee’s Resource Protection Subcommittee, John C. Culver, Democrat of Iowa, offered an amendment that would create a review board drawn from seven federal agencies empowered to grant exemptions from the act for some government construction projects. Under certain circumstances, the proposed board could permit construction of a project that would destroy an animal or plant species if the project’s benefits to humans “clearly outweigh[ed]” the value of the species.24
The amendment offered no scale or metric by which to determine how benefits to humans would compare to the existence or non-existence of a given species, and it seems impossible that any such measure could be reasonably devised, giving the review board wide latitude to make decisions. The board could not override the ESA with a simple majority vote. Instead, it would take five out of seven members to permit a project to proceed in the face of an endangered species objection. The review board would be composed of the secretaries of the interior, agriculture, and the army, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, administrators with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an individual nominated by the governor of the state in which a project was affected by the ESA. Six of these seven members were presidential appointees. Given such criteria, the practical effect of the panel would be influenced by the ideological orientation of the president making these personnel decisions.
This proposed amendment, while seemingly byzantine in its bureaucratic orientation, represented a major change in the nature of the law. One of the things that made the ESA different from other federal regulations was its locally enforceable curbs on development. Other areas of federal regulation—antitrust, financial, and others—relied on vigorous efforts from law enforcement officials like the president and attorney general to function properly. Presidents who disfavoured regulations often did not need to persuade Congress to roll them back in order to weaken their power; they simply needed to institute lax enforcement of the laws. But the provisions of the ESA allowed local groups to petition local courts to stop an action that might harm endangered species. In the case of Tellico, local groups took their opposition all the way to the Supreme Court, where they took on Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, and won. This amendment, by potentially taking power back from local opposition groups and giving it to high-ranking federal officials, represented a major reduction in the enforcement powers of the ESA.
In summer 1978, the US Senate voted overwhelmingly to amend the ESA, creating the proposed interagency review board. Three months later, the House voted for its own version of the ESA amendments, and soon agreed to adopt the Senate version. The Washington Post did not mince words that fall, with a September 29 headline declaring simply that the “Endangered Species Act Is Dying.” Recognizing the rising unpopularity of the ESA within Congress and the heavy pressure for change, environmentally inclined representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, had reportedly been working non-stop to maintain a “holding action” of offering compromises in Congress and averting moves to gut the act or kill it outright.25 And in November, in the face of this immense congressional support for the amendments, President Carter reluctantly signed the amendments and made them law.26
The irony of the ESA amendments, though, is that although they had largely been spurred to passage by the Tellico Dam saga, they did not resolve the controversy dragging on in East Tennessee. The new exemption committee voted not to exempt the Tellico Dam from the act, claiming that the project’s economic and social benefits did not “clearly outweigh” the negative impacts. Also ironically, the snail darter was scarcely a factor in the committee’s decision. Instead, looking at the hard numbers, the committee decided that the dam would not generate enough economic benefit in the region to justify its multi-million-dollar cost. In other words, it simply was not worth the money.27 Though the snail darter was barely a consideration, the committee’s refusal to grant an exemption meant that the ESA legally prohibited the dam’s completion. Dam proponents had one last idea to try to circumvent the snail darter and finish the project, and it required some congressional manoeuvring.28
In 1979, on a day when most legislators were absent, Tennessee representative John Duncan attached a rider to the Energy and Water Resources Appropriation exempting Tellico from the ESA, and the appropriation passed with few caring about the exemption. The Senate deleted the amendment in its version, but Duncan—along with Senator Howard Baker, who called in as many favours as possible—ensured its return in conference. After the amendment passed both houses, President Carter, who was under pressure to support energy projects while the Iranian Revolution was causing oil prices to spike, signed it. The TVA finally finished the dam, the environmentalist opposition defeated by an anticlimactic legislative proceeding. In November 1979, the long saga of Tellico came to a quiet and strange conclusion.29
The Origins of Dickey Dam
Of all the hydroelectric projects of the 1960s and ’70s, the Tellico Dam controversy has received by far the most attention from historians and legal commentators, and for good reason: it was a key event that helped turn public and congressional opinion against the ESA. Yet there was another major but less well-known case, one that involved the prominent senator Edmund Muskie and that also witnessed an extended battle between environmentalists and pro-development advocates. The story of the Dickey Dam, while unfolding with quite different dynamics and within different parameters than the Tellico saga, further helped discredit endangered species legislation in the public arena. Putting the story of Tellico alongside that of Dickey shows that, whether a potential hydroelectric project was actually completed or not, the intrusion of the ESA into the debate helped discredit environmental regulation.
Like Tellico, Dickey began in the mid-1960s as an effort to bring power and jobs to a rural area. In 1965, the US Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to begin construction of the dam—a project the corps supported—on the St. John River in northern Maine, near the Canadian border. New Englanders hoped the project would bring jobs and cheap electricity, much as the TVA had done in the Southeast. In practice the formal authorization had little consequence. Congress refused to appropriate any money for the project, despite the consistent support of the powerful Maine senator Edmund Muskie. Appealing to historical precedent, proponents implored Congress for money to begin preparing the site. Government-produced electricity, they said, would have provided a “yardstick” to shame New England utilities for their perceived exorbitance, again much as the TVA had done in the Southeast. Private power interests, though, fearing government competition, succeeded in holding off construction for the better part of a decade, preserving their dominance in the power market.30
The 1973 oil embargo changed the parameters of the public-private controversy. With electricity bills for consumers skyrocketing around the country, especially in the frigid winters of New England, utility executives decided it would be “unseemly” to appear opposed to new energy supplies from any source, and they relented in their opposition. By the middle of 1974, a start to the construction of the project seemed a distinct possibility for the first time in years.31
Even with private utilities relaxing their opposition, the contrast between the condition of the proposed site and the magnitude of the prospective project in 1974 was nothing short of astounding. The town of Dickey, after which the dam would be named, consisted merely of a few homes and a Shell gas station. The local post office had long since closed. Slated to stretch nearly ten thousand feet between two mountains and to soar more than three hundred feet above the St. John riverbed, the dam would flood this small group of buildings. Dubbed an “Aswan Dam for Maine” by the Wall Street Journal after the massive structure located on the Nile River in Egypt, the dam would be the eleventh largest in the world. Though located in an area that could have hardly been called even sparsely populated, a completed dam would send electricity throughout New England.32
Environmentalists expressed vehement opposition. The Friends of St. John, a Boston-based group, argued that the dam and the hundreds of miles of transmission lines would ruin an astonishing 110,800 acres of “the last remaining wilderness area in the northeast.” The group’s chairman, Paul Swatek, feared that 57 miles of “the best white water canoeing in the northeast” would be lost forever. The effect on wildlife was a concern as well. Swatek pointed to the approximately two thousand deer that spent their winters in the area, as some 13,000 acres that they inhabited during the cold season would be inundated by the dam.33
The Friends of St. John critiqued the project on a fiscal basis too. Opponents claimed that the dam’s benefits paled in comparison to the costs: Dickey would only be used for peaking power (it would run only in periods of high demand, in other words), since the river contained very little water; one newspaper described it as “a ribbon of rocks through the wilderness.” The river’s limited flow capacity meant that the dam would operate a mere three hours a day, as the reservoir behind the dam would otherwise get too low in the summer to generate any power at all. The dam’s sporadic usefulness, opponents said, was hardly worth the wholesale environmental devastation it would cause. Even more tragic, they said, was the forced relocation of long-time residents from their homes that would have to be carried out.34
The Pro-dam Response
A faction calling itself People of the St. John provided several rebuttals to these critiques. The generic-sounding name of the pro-dam group was not accidental. All the members of the group lived in northern Maine, an area that would receive an economic infusion from the project. The group demanded that the elitist, environmentalist “out-of-staters” making up the Friends of St. John remove themselves from the debate and allow locals to make decisions about their own land. While environmentalists saw the wilderness areas of northern Maine as a recreational asset to be shared by all New Englanders, dam proponents were concerned about those who lived nearby. In response to wildlife and landscape concerns, the Army Corps of Engineers asserted that the dam complex would be built carefully to cause minimal impact to native ecosystems. Colonel John H. Mason, the corps’ chief engineer for New England, said that public hearings would likely be held to allow environmentalist grievances to be aired. He also promised that his organization would submit an environmental impact statement to the president’s Council on Environmental Quality.35
Dam supporters conceded that some people would be forced to leave their residences if the structure was built. But few people lived in the immediate area and the entire region would benefit from the dam’s power generation, the People of St. John said, arguing that the needs of the many outweighed those of the rural few. On the issue of peaking power, proponents admitted that the dam was not capable of remaining in operation around the clock. But they also said that tallying the number of hours per day the dam would be in operation was misleading and missed the bigger picture: the dam’s aggregated use, even for only a few hours each day, would reduce New England’s power bill by about $40 million over the course of a year, proponents pointed out, which was the important figure.36 As Paul Chastko notes in his contribution to this volume, the enormous US demand for energy was sometimes enough to keep even foreign energy producers afloat through tough economic times, and the Friends of St. John were unsurprisingly incensed that a needed domestic energy project might be stymied by what they saw as relatively minor concerns.
For some other local supporters, backing for the project emanated from a more pressing worry—namely, the floods that were causing increasing damage to the area’s farmland. Robert Jalbert, a lawyer in the nearby town of Fort Kent and a registered Maine wilderness guide, was a representative figure. Having long opposed the dam, in mid-1974 Jalbert shifted his view. His conversion was not attributable to the jobs that would come into the area, but instead the effects of recent changes in the lumber industry. The past handful of years had witnessed the introduction of the “skidder,” a large vehicle used for dragging and pushing trees. The technology increased the lumber industry’s yield to the point that it was able to completely strip hillsides of trees. When snow came in the winter, not only was there no shade to slow melting, but hillsides could no longer absorb excess water. The quicker, bigger runoff was generating disastrous floods that damaged nearby farms. Jalbert critiqued the lumber industry’s irresponsibility—“They believe they have to harvest [the forest] like a garden,” he said—but conceded that, within the current system, nothing could be done. “It’s a capitalistic system and they own that land,” he acknowledged. Though the corps had a plan to flood a series of dikes to protect Fort Kent, Jalbert was not convinced that this would be sufficient. Only damming the St. John’s waters would provide lasting protection.37
Unexpected Setbacks
In 1977, the contents of the long-awaited, two-years-in-the-making Army Corps of Engineers impact study must have come as a shock to this varied group of dam supporters, and as a gift to environmental opponents. It stated plainly that “there would be a reduction in the long-term productivity” of the area’s economic future if the dam was built. Though the nearly two-hundred-page report noted that there would be short-term gains in electric power production and recreational opportunities on the resulting lake, they would be far outweighed by the long-term downsides. As the New York Times reported, the statement “painted a grim picture of flooded timberlands, destroyed canoe and fishing rivers and wiped-out deer herds.” In the time since construction had become a serious possibility, environmentalist heavyweights like the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace had joined the Friends of St. John to oppose the project.38 While dam supporters seemed to have the upper hand in the debate in 1974, the dynamics of political influence had clearly shifted in the intervening years as the more lasting environmental consequences became apparent.
Environmentalists had also found another, more powerful weapon, the same one wielded by opponents of Tennessee’s Tellico Dam—the ESA. In 1976, as part of the preparations for the site, the US Army Corps of Engineers hired Maine botanist Charles Richards to identify potential “rare and unusual” plants in the project area. The discovery near the dam site of a few clumps of a greenish-yellow wildflower named the Furbish lousewort (after botanist Kate Furbish), not known to exist anywhere else, threatened to bring the project to a halt and compelled the corps to act. The ESA required that federal agencies not take any action that would jeopardize the continued existence of a listed species or its habitat, which dam construction clearly would. The menace to the project’s future was enough to compel the corps to spend $17,000 and two summers scouting a three-hundred-mile stretch of the St. John to try to locate other communities of the flower.39
While conceding the broader environmental concerns and doubts about the limited production possibility of the dam, Time called the idea that the lousewort alone would hold up the project “downright silly.” The magazine seemed quite satisfied to report that the engineers, after their long search, had “proudly announced” the discovery of “no less than five clumps” of lousewort “safely beyond” the proposed dam site. “What is more,” Time declared triumphantly, the corps had also concluded that “the exotic flower can be cultivated elsewhere.”40 As was clear from the magazine’s tone, the ESA was one regulatory measure whose reach seemed far too broad. The idea that a few clumps of flowers would by themselves impede a nearly $700 million project seemed to the periodical to be simply ridiculous. For Time, as well as for other national periodicals, the delicate balance between protecting vulnerable species and cultivating development projects to benefit human populations had moved entirely too far in one direction.
And with the project still in the planning stages, it remained susceptible to new strains of criticism. Many government projects see their projected budgets increase steadily as time goes on. The bigger a project is and the longer it takes to complete, the more difficult the final cost is to estimate, which often leads cost assessments to rise over the course of a project’s planning. The Dickey Dam, a multi-year project with costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars, was no exception. In the summer of 1979, for example, the House’s Public Works Committee voted to kill the project, the first time that the committee had ever voted to end a major water project after substantial sums—$10 million so far—had already been spent. Defying the default urge to support pork-barrel projects, both of Maine’s House members, Republicans Olympia Snowe and David Emery, supported de-authorization. So, too, did one of the state’s senators, Republican William Cohen. With Senator Muskie’s continued support, however, de-authorization faced a challenge on the Senate floor, and the measure indeed failed.41
Yet, other events unexpectedly impinged upon this hydroelectric political situation. In 1980, President Carter authorized the secret Operation Eagle Claw, a daring desert rescue involving several helicopters, to liberate the hostages being held in Tehran. Deeming it far too risky, Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance—who had often clashed with the hawkish National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski—resigned as soon as Carter approved the mission. Vance’s concerns turned out to be prophetic. The mission failed spectacularly when one of the copters became engulfed in a dust cloud and crashed into a transport aircraft, killing eight American servicemen. In response, the Iranian government scattered the American hostages across the nation, making another such rescue attempt impossible. Carter tapped Senator Muskie as Vance’s replacement, removing the Mainer from the Senate.42 Maine’s governor, Joseph Brennan, appointed George Mitchell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Maine, to serve out Muskie’s term. With Muskie’s exit from the Senate, the Dickey Dam’s future was in serious doubt.43
In the spring of 1981, after the election of Ronald Reagan, the Maine delegation submitted legislation to Congress to de-authorize the dam, the projected cost of which had risen another 20 per cent in less than two years and now stood at $900 million. Senator Mitchell was in principle a supporter of the project, “contin[uing] to believe that the entire project merits support” and believing “it will in the future receive the support it deserves.” But with Reagan coming to office on the message of deep cutbacks in federal spending, and with local opinion near the St. John turning against the dam, Mitchell agreed to support de-authorization legislation for the time being.44
Local opinion had not turned against hydroelectricity in general, but it had shifted in favour of a smaller, more focused project, a path also favoured by environmentalists as a compromise measure. The Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), formed in 1959 to oppose large hydroelectric projects, expressed support for the proposed Lincoln School Dam a few miles downriver from the prospective Dickey. Though the Lincoln School Dam would produce only a small fraction of the potential output of the larger dam, it would also affect less than 5,000 acres of wilderness land—compared, of course, with over 110,000 for the Dickey—which made it seem like a worthwhile compromise. More important to locals was the use of the power. Nearly 80 per cent of the Dickey’s output would have been transmitted from Maine to other states in New England, but the Lincoln School’s power would remain in the area for local use. Though some St. John locals continued to believe in the Dickey’s superior potential for economic development, the NRCM and other environmental groups succeeded in turning others against the project by compromising in favour of a more diminutive alternative.45
Other Mainers had also been converted to the anti-dam position for fiscal reasons, becoming ever more suspicious as cost estimates grew; politicians, meanwhile, used the issue to garner votes, with no physical construction to show for the money being spent. Contractor Clark McBreaity had once supported the dam but had gradually come to oppose the project. “Every time a candidate ran for office,” McBreaity remarked, “he run [sic] up and down New England whooping and hollering” about the dam’s potential, using the perpetually un-begun project for their own political gain. As time went on, the hype surrounding the Dickey’s economic possibilities faded in the St. John area, replaced instead by suspicion and skepticism. As the Christian Science Monitor noted, this independent-minded rural area had always been suspicious of government intervention, and the enchantment of the Dickey’s potential had finally run out.46
Still another logistical problem had to do with the relocation of the families living on the land potentially affected by the Dickey Dam. The small town of Dickey itself was a Scotch-Irish enclave, but the surrounding countryside was populated largely by French Canadians. The government could have provided money to assist in relocating the Dickey families, but regulations prohibited it from paying to move the 161 Dickey families more than fifty miles, which was not far enough to get them out of French-speaking territory. The Dickey families’ reticence to move to an area in which they would be surrounded by speakers of a foreign language also imperilled the dam’s future.47
The End of the Dam
The final nail in the coffin for the project came when the Interior Department expressed opposition to it. James Watt, Reagan’s appointee to head the department, had drawn early and intense fire from environmentalists when he moved to roll back environmental regulations and to expand leasing of federal lands to coal mining companies.48 But in the midst of the Dickey debate, Watt was on an extended tour of the Western states and was not in day-to-day control of the department. Therefore, when Acting Secretary Donald Hodel expressed opposition to the dam on environmental grounds, it was he who was speaking for the department. In taking a stand against the project, Hodel cited destruction of black duck breeding grounds and the loss of summer foraging areas for moose, as well as the migratory deer areas emphasized by the anti-dam Friends of St. John years earlier. As it turned out, Watt himself was also against the dam, bringing him into rare agreement with environmental activists, although Watt’s opposition probably owed more to Reagan’s fiscally motivated desires to cut back on federal water projects. Declining energy demand in the early 1980s, which made many energy projects seem much less necessary, did not help Dickey’s prospects either. Though the corps made one last appeal to public opinion, officials conceded that the united front presented by Maine’s congressional delegation and the Interior Department made the dam’s construction “unlikely” to ever happen.49 Despite the TVA’s nearly mythical role in the Southeast, the United States was never on the whole a “hydro democracy” on par with Canada, as Daniel Macfarlane describes the United States’ northern neighbour elsewhere in this volume. National pride was not enough to keep expensive hydro projects afloat as their costs continued to balloon.
Indeed, ground was never broken for construction on Dickey Dam, and neither was the smaller Lincoln School alternative built. After years of debate and congressional wrangling, the issue was effectively dead. There were therefore many differences between the Tellico Dam debate in East Tennessee and that of the Dickey in northern Maine. First was the final result. While the gates of Tellico Dam were closed in 1979 after some sneaky legislative manoeuvring by Tennessee representative John Duncan, turning a portion of the Little Tennessee River into a reservoir, Dickey Dam simply faded into obscurity in 1981 when the corps gave up on the project. The Tellico Dam involved intense controversy over the cozy relationship between the quasi-public TVA and private industry in forcing small family farmers from their land, bringing an extra level of scrutiny not present in the Dickey Dam debate, which had instead witnessed a confrontation between public and private interests. Local opposition in East Tennessee against Tellico was also much fiercer than in northern Maine against Dickey, as the area around the proposed site in Maine was largely unpopulated and would not have involved forcing farm families off of their land, as was the case in Tennessee.
There was, however, one important similarity to be found in the two dam sagas, one that overwhelmed all the diverse differences. The Dickey Dam battle, with a divergent set of circumstances and a different outcome from the controversy over the Tellico Dam, nonetheless witnessed a comparable debate surrounding the ESA. There were many compelling arguments in favour of Dickey, including the economic opportunities to be brought to the St. John area, as well as the electricity that would flow throughout New England. There were also compelling reasons to oppose the dam, such as the negative effects on human recreational opportunities in wilderness areas and the disruptions to both migratory and permanent habitats of extensive varieties of birds and mammals. But national periodicals seemed to agree on one thing: the Furbish lousewort should not be part of the deliberation.
The idea that a few clumps of wildflower should control the fate of Dickey Dam seemed to many observers just as ridiculous as the tiny snail darter’s influence on the Tellico in East Tennessee. For these analysts, the reach of the ESA had again proved itself far too broad, protecting small populations of seemingly useless and unneeded species at the expense of projects that otherwise turned on sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars and land areas of thousands of acres. The ESA’s ability to assume such a disproportionate power in these debates was, for many commentators, more than unfortunate—it was unjust and unfair. The public may have assumed that Congress was protecting well-known endangered animals like grizzly bears and bighorn sheep when it passed the act in 1973, but with thousands of species listed, it was doing much more than that. In some cases, including those of the Dickey and Tellico Dams, many constituents and interest groups came to think that the act needed to be brought under control.
Endangered Species Law
Though it enjoyed overwhelming popular support at the moment of its passage, the ESA was more controversial in professional circles. Several distinct criticisms, both on scientific and economic grounds, emerged. First, there was the matter of defining exactly what a “species” was, especially in terms of where one began and another ended—itself a tricky epistemological exercise.50 Second, the broad-reaching and inflexible nature of the law could interfere with other common-sense actions meant to protect the environment. For example, in 1979 a federal judge in Los Angeles barred the EPA from acting to reduce municipal sewage discharges from the city into the Pacific Ocean. Since the EPA’s treatment would remove nutrients from the water that supported a fish population around the discharge point, and since the fish provided a vital source of food for both the endangered brown pelican and the endangered grey whale, the judge ruled that the EPA’s plan would indirectly jeopardize the two predators. Though an attorney for the National Wildlife Federation called the ruling “absurd on its face,” a characterization broadly expressed by other environmental groups, the EPA was nonetheless legally barred from trying to clean up the ocean.51 As this case demonstrated, the strict terms of the act, which privileged the survival of individual species—sometimes with several degrees of separation from a proposed action—at the expense of the overall health of broader ecosystems, could generate nonsensical outcomes. But by far the most common criticism of the act was that it unfairly impeded seemingly reasonable attempts at economic development, halting projects that could create wealth and improve standards of living merely for the sake of the survival of small animals that many thought useless and barely worth protecting.
Speaking in 1979 about proposed deregulation of the trucking industry, President Carter characterized regulation as a bureaucratic nightmare impeding both common sense and economic efficiency:
Too many trucks are rattling back and forth empty on the road today, burning up precious diesel fuel because the ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] rules prohibit two-way hauling. Some trucking firms can deliver all the ingredients necessary to make soup to a factory, but are forbidden from hauling soup away from the factory. Other rules defy human imagination. Some truckers can haul milk; they can’t haul butter. They can haul cream; they can’t haul cheese. Others can transport paint in 2-gallon cans; they can’t haul paint in 5-gallon cans. Some truckers are allowed to haul bananas; they can’t haul pineapple. They can haul pineapple and bananas if they are mixed.52
There were, of course, significant differences between trucking (and airline and railroad) regulation, on one the hand, and environmental regulation, on the other. The first was designed to protect economic systems from abuse by balancing competing business interests and regulating entry barriers, while the latter was meant to protect people themselves from the actions of business entities.53 But put in the terms of the trichotomy that Heidrich outlines in this volume, the rhetoric surrounding energy in the United States has overwhelmingly cast it as a market good subject to the same political trends as any other commodity. This was especially true in the transitional economic moment of the mid- to late 1970s. In an era in which regulations of all sorts came under attack as antithetical to efficiency and common sense, environmental regulations affecting energy production were not excepted from the onslaught. Indeed, Carter’s characterization of trucking regulation as an anti-common-sense, bureaucratic folly would have been familiar to anyone who had been following the stories of the Tellico and Dickey Dams, in which forgettable animals and plants protected by the ESA threatened the construction of massive development projects. The rhetorical strategies invoked to inveigh against both economic and environmental regulation had become barely distinguishable. Though in popular perception it was Ronald Reagan who inaugurated an era of anti-regulatory, anti-government feeling in the United States, the process of loosening state control over American economic life was well underway during the Carter administration. The weakening of the ESA fit coherently into Carter’s broader program of deregulation, an agenda that reached across the trucking, airline, and railroad industries and into the arena of environmental regulation as well. And the desire for cheap and abundant energy after the oil embargo earlier in the decade lay near the heart of these deregulatory impulses.
Notes
Portions of this chapter were previously published in chapter 4 of my book Unnatural Resources: Energy and Environmental Politics in Appalachia after the 1973 Oil Embargo (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). I am grateful to the University of Pittsburgh Press for permission to reprint this material.
1 “In Search of the Elusive Lousewort,” Time, 19 September 1977.
2 For the political history of the oil crisis, see Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2016).
3 “Reclamation Chief Backs Hydro Power,” Los Angeles Times, 14 December 1976.
4 On the history of endangered species law from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, see Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer, Noah’s Choice: The Future of Endangered Species (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 149–63.
5 Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 78–80.
6 Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 78–80.
7 Tennessee Valley Authority, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project (Chattanooga, TN: TVA Office of Health and Environmental Science, 1972), I-1-43. The TVA’s apparent success in catalyzing economic development in the Tennessee Valley led other nations to pursue similar planning strategies. For example, the agency’s influence on Mexican planners is a major topic of Tore Olsson’s recent Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
8 Kenneth M. Murchison, The Snail Darter Case: TVA versus the Endangered Species Act (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 12–13.
9 “A Program for the Preservation and Development of Industrial Areas Along Tennessee’s Waterways” (Nashville: State-Local Waterfront Industrial Site Committee, 1962), 1, found in box 4, TVA Reports, 1933–1973, Special Collections, University of Tennessee.
10 For more on Wagner’s reasoning, see William Bruce Wheeler and Michael McDonald, TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936–1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-industrial America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 31–5.
11 Murchison, The Snail Darter Case, 7–22.
12 TVA, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-1-1, I-1-5; Erwin C. Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 1933–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 175; “Upper Little Tennessee River Region: Summary of Resources” (Knoxville: Tennessee Valley Authority, 1968), 5, found in box 3, TVA Reports, 1933–1973.
13 TVA, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-1-2, I-1-3.
14 TVA, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-1-2, I-1-3.
15 TVA, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-1-2, I-1-3.
16 TVA, Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-1-28, I-1-42.
17 Resolution by the Chamber of Commerce—Lenoir City, Tennessee, 1 May 1969, box 10, folder 11, Howard H. Baker Jr. Papers (hereafter HBJ), MPA 101, Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, University of Tennessee; Monroe County Quarterly Court, 20 April 1970, box 10, folder 11, HBJ; Resolution in Support of the Tellico Dam and Reservoir, Town of Madisonville, 14 April 1972, box 10, folder 11, HBJ; Resolution by the Board of Mayor and Aldermen, City of Lenoir City, Tennessee, 10 April 1972, box 10, folder 11, HBJ; James C. Talley II to Governor Winfield Dunn, 25 January 1972, box 10, folder 11, HBJ.
18 Environmental Statement: Tellico Project, I-4-7, I-4-9, I-4-10.
19 Zygmunt J. B. Plater, The Snail Darter and the Dam: How Pork-Barrel Politics Endangered a Little Fish and Killed a River (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 20–2.
20 Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, 176.
21 Murchison, The Snail Darter Case, 80–107. Though contemporary accounts claimed that Etnier happened to discover the snail darter in the river by accident, later interviews with participants in the case have revealed that Etnier was purposefully looking for species that would fall under the ESA’s provisions.
22 Murchison, The Snail Darter Case, 108–40; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, 175–6.
23 “Endangered Species Rules to Be Curbed?” Christian Science Monitor, 10 March 1977.
24 “Hearings Open on Amending the Endangered Species Act,” New York Times, 14 April 1978.
25 “Endangered Species Act Is Dying,” Washington Post, 29 September 1978.
26 Shannon Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species: The Statutory Ark (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 63–4.
27 Petersen, Acting for Endangered Species, 65.
28 Patrick Allitt, A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism (New York: Penguin, 2014), 124–7.
29 Allitt, A Climate of Crisis, 124–7; Hargrove, Prisoners of Myth, 177; Mann and Plummer, Noah’s Choice, 170–3. Almost a year after the dam was completed, David Etnier, who had originally discovered the snail darter, located another population in a different portion of the Tennessee River, sixty miles downstream from Tellico.
30 “An Aswan Dam for Maine?,” Wall Street Journal, 25 July 1974.
31 “An Aswan Dam for Maine?”
32 “An Aswan Dam for Maine?”; “Dam Project Forges Strange Alliances,” Washington Post, 30 June 1974.
33 “Dam Project Forges Strange Alliances.”
34 “Dam Project Forges Strange Alliances.”
35 “Dam Project Forges Strange Alliances.”
36 “Dam Project Forges Strange Alliances.”
37 “Maine Dam Project Sparks New Debate,” New York Times, 26 August 1974.
38 “Study Says Power Dam in Maine Would Damage the Environment,” New York Times, 2 September 1977. On national environmentalist involvement, see, for example, “Testimony of the National Wildlife Federation at a Public Hearing Conducted by the US Army Corps of Engineers,” 14 November 1977, box 7, folder 10, Senate Office and Committee Staff Files (hereafter MS), Edmund Muskie Papers, Bates College.
39 “In Search of the Elusive Lousewort”; NED Policy Statement on Furbish’s Lousewort at Dickey-Lincoln School, 15 November 1976, box 7, folder 11, MS.
40 “In Search of the Elusive Lousewort.”
41 “House Panel Votes to Scrap Maine’s Dickey Dam Project,” Washington Post, 27 July 1979.
42 Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 118–19.
43 “US Likely to Pull Plug on Maine’s Dickey Dam,” Christian Science Monitor, 29 September 1981.
44 “US Likely to Pull Plug on Maine’s Dickey Dam.”
45 “US Likely to Pull Plug on Maine’s Dickey Dam.” The Lincoln School Dam was projected to produce 202.6 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year, compared to 1.45 billion from the Dickey. The NRCM had, in 1977, opposed both dams, but compromised in favour of the smaller Lincoln after the second energy crisis of the late 1970s. On the NRCM’s previous opposition to both projects, see Testimony of Chris Herder (NRCM director) at Augusta Public Hearing, 26 October 1977, box 7, folder 10, MS.
46 “US Likely to Pull Plug on Maine’s Dickey Dam.”
47 “US Likely to Pull Plug on Maine’s Dickey Dam.”
48 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 494–5.
49 “Interior Dept. Acts to Halt Controversial Maine Dam,” Washington Post, 30 September 1981; “Watt Opposes Dam Project in Maine,” Los Angeles Times, 1 October 1981.
50 Mann and Plummer, Noah’s Choice, 28–9.
51 “Environmentalists, Like Developers, Find Endangered Species Act Can Delay Plans,” Wall Street Journal, 21 March 1979.
52 Trucking Industry Regulation Remarks Announcing Proposed Legislation, 21 June 1979, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter: 1979 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), book 1, 1114.
53 See Benjamin C. Waterhouse, Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 32.