Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
examples illustrate how countryside conservationists, outing clubs, academics, and scient-
ists contributed to an environmental culture and legacy reaching back to the New South.
An engaged Sun Belt citizenry continued this long legacy of environmental awareness and
actively negotiated post-1945 commercial development and water problems in the shadows
of dams inspired by New South capitalism and New Deal liberalism.
Sun Belt countryside conservation and environmentalism involved a wide range of parti-
cipants concerned about the Savannah River valley's beauty, communities, and commercial
future. The people who participated in the Trotters Shoals battles between 1960 and 1970
lived in small towns, growing suburbs, and emerging urban centers, and they linked togeth-
er the Sun Belt's energy regimes, economic development, and environmental conditions.
“Unlikely environmentalists” in Congress crafted federal water pollution control legisla-
tion in the 1950s while laying the foundation for the landmark Clean Water Act (1972).
And sportsmen and recreationalists certainly leaned on Sun Belt state agencies to fight pol-
lution in the 1940s and 1950s. 9 However, the less-well-known participants—county law-
yers, corporate executives, university employees, and journalists in the Savannah River val-
ley—also weighed in on the value of dams, water pollution, and the Sun Belt's future while
congressional committees and staff built their own cases. The countryside conservationists
and environmentalists repeatedly used water quality to justify a range of positions. They
had an appetite for economic development, but not at the expense of southern waterways
and certainly not at the expense of water quality in the massive federal reservoirs that were
supposed to drive the Sun Belt's growing recreational and service-based economy.
The Sun Belt's environmental movement was diverse and was not solely focused on how
best to manage the Savannah River valley's water resources or how to protect wilderness.
As historian Samuel Hays observed, “Internal Democratic party variations were especially
noteworthy in the South, where rapid social change was creating new urban views within a
more traditional rural climate.” 10 While he placed this friction in the 1970s and afterward,
the long sweep of Trotters Shoals's history illustrates how the region's conservationists,
liberal environmentalists, and their conservative critics reflected internal debates within the
Democratic Party over issues such as what constituted appropriate federal spending, the
public good, and adequate regulation of private enterprise. Boosters, elected state and na-
tional representatives, agency bureaucrats, corporate executives, and citizens all spoke for
the river because the water continued to represent potential energy for industrial produc-
tion and offered new leisure environments. The Corps' Clarks Hill reservoir and Hartwell
dam also created a new river environment in between at Trotters Shoals. At this geograph-
ic location, along this last undammed stretch of the Savannah River's Piedmont section,
countryside conservationists and environmentalists challenged the Sun Belt economic jug-
gernaut and powerful interests born of the New South and New Deal eras. The regional
fight had implications for the rest of the country, the Democratic Party, and southern rivers.
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