Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 123

try—including the Chattooga as one of the American South's only representatives—for in-
clusion in this new federal land protection category. 2 Forest Service staff discovered tre-
mendous support for a protected Appalachian river among local county governments, state
agencies, and a segment of the Georgia and South Carolina public. Furthermore, environ-
mentalists who participated in the Chattooga National Wild and Scenic River campaign
joined a national movement dedicated to solving water problems in the 1960s. Given this
wide spectrum of enthusiasm, the Chattooga easily moved from a study river in 1968 to an
official wild and scenic river in six quick years. The undammed river represented a scarce
commodity for these interest groups, and thus they considered the Chattooga an extremely
valuable chunk of southern wilderness worthy of federal protection.
This victory was surprising. The Chattooga River was not saved exclusively by crusad-
ing preservationists or wilderness advocates, such as those who successfully fought the
Bureau of Reclamation's Echo Park dam project (Green River, Colo.) in the 1950s. 3 In-
stead, nearly every party involved in the Chattooga's case—multiple federal and state agen-
cies, new environmental groups, and many county residents—agreed that Congress should
confer wild and scenic river status on the river. The process was made much easier when
the traditional enemies—private utilities and federal agencies intent on building hydroelec-
tric dams—intentionally avoided a fight during a national energy transition. A victory for
one set of players rang hollow for others, as demonstrated by the burning forest. Everyone
may have agreed the Chattooga River was a scarce and valuable resource, but not everyone
agreed with how the Chattooga Wild and Scenic River should be used. And most people
acknowledged that the valley, after centuries of land use and habitation, was no wilderness.
Based on arson events and Patrick Thomas's observations, one might assume that top-down
conservation rangers remapped the Chattooga River's watershed and resources without loc-
al input or consent.
Resistance—including clandestine acts of arson and vandalism or formal community and
labor organization—has been linked to transitions in land and resource use, ownership, and
management throughout the United States. 4 Thus, in the Chattooga's case, arson might look
like a local anti-statist protest in response to the taking of private land or the disruption
of local subsistence economies. However, the story behind the northeast Georgia fires was
much more complicated than a monolithic-state power narrative. The fires set within and
around this southern Appalachian river's narrow corridor were the consequence of turn-
ing a site of local leisure along the Chattooga River into a national destination popularized
by the 1972 screen adaptation of James Dickey's novel Deliverance and protected by the
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in 1974. The fires, like historic acts of resistance, did not oc-
cur during the negotiation and designation process to preserve a special environment, nor
were they the result of declarations of eminent domain. While the Chattooga had always
represented a leisure commons for many people, the reluctance of old river users to ad-