Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
here to new federal management policies—plus the crush of Sun Belt visitors stimulated
by Hollywood's visual representation of the Chattooga's wild landscape and rapids in
De-
liverance
—sparked a violent response during a management stage that was not nearly as
smooth as the designation phase.
The Chattooga River's story illustrates how landscape transformations, social relations,
and energy choices were bound together with the Southeast's hydraulic waterscape. First,
national citizen action and engagement in water politics had ramifications for how people
thought about and interacted with wild rivers like the Chattooga. For example, river advoc-
ates argued that free-flowing rivers had ecological and economic values that benefited local
environments and service economies. Second, the nation's electrical utilities continued to
shift away from hydroelectricity to coal while also experimenting with emerging civilian
nuclear technologies. The new fossil fuel and mineral energy sources still depended on wa-
ter, but not always directly on dams, to generate base loads. Whereas the Georgia Power
Company had built a hydraulic system that expropriated energy from the adjacent Tallulah
and Tugaloo Rivers in the 1920s, the company delivered the Chattooga River to the envir-
onmental and paddling community for safekeeping in the 1960s. Not all of the Sun Belt's
water problems could be solved so easily, but the Chattooga River's history illustrates how
water and power continued to cycle in the Southeast with important consequences for Sun
Belt rivers and communities.
