A Keystone Dam and Georgia’s New Ocean - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 80

water and energy future to questions about democratic recreational access. Outdoor recre-
ation discussions also forced some southerners to negotiate the color line and confront so-
cioeconomic realities. If Sun Belt boosters celebrated their ability to segregate public re-
creation space, then they also defined where and what kind of recreation activities would
be available for white and black men and women, rich and poor, during their free time.
Unfortunately, this process also determined and limited how Americans engaged with and
learned about nature. In a Sun Belt comprised of used, abused, and abandoned landscapes,
the Corps and other institutions faced major challenges in creating democratic and access-
ible leisure landscapes while also building hydraulic waterscapes.
In the last half-century, longtime valley residents, including those forced to move and
make way for the Clarks Hill reservoir, had to share a transformed landscape perhaps best
described by William Faulkner in his collection of short stories Big Woods . In Faulkner's
Mississippi, an old hunter could lament that the new fishermen in powerboats had no
memory of the old forests and fields below the surface of a “government-built” reservoir.
Furthermore, the unappreciative sport fishermen lacked an ethic and simply left sunken
bass plugs and beer bottles on the “Big Bottom” itself where the hunter had once tracked
deer and bear on foot. 85 The old agricultural economy and landscape had been consumed
by human fears of future floods and droughts; it was consumed by corporate dreams of en-
ergy independence; it was consumed by insatiable boosters and clever congressional lead-
ers who repackaged the New Deal big dam consensus as a solution to southern water prob-
lems.
Flush with public funds and hungry for institutional validation after World War II, the
Sun Belt Corps' river planning program manufactured new environmental and social con-
ditions in the Savannah River valley and beyond. However, before the Clarks Hill reservoir
had even completely filled up, drought once again struck the American South in the 1950s
and cast doubt on the role new reservoirs could play in maintaining adequate water and en-
ergy supplies for a region that suddenly did not have enough water again.