Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ists to varying degrees—clearly identified the river as a local leisure and labor landscape
and worried that the river's official designation might result in reduced recreational access
or a loss of forestry-related jobs in the face of increasingly centralized federal authority.
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River enthusiasts from Atlanta to Greenville, however, envisioned the river primarily as
a leisure waterscape for nearby Sun Belt residents. Members of the Georgia Conservancy,
paddlers from the Georgia Canoe Association, Georgia Power employees, and the Sierra
Club's Joseph LeConte Chapter formed a coalition. Private interests that cast themselves
as publicly minded—such as the Georgia Conservancy—spoke for more privileged local
and Bell, both path-breaking southern paddlers, also owned and operated summer camps
that utilized the Chattooga's headwaters. The network was indeed deep: One of Orr's At-
ates were not the only river enthusiasts. Greenville attorney Ted Snyder, who grew up in
Walhalla, twenty miles east of the Chattooga, had spent time on the river as a young adult
and understood that the Chattooga represented the last of its kind in the mountain South.
He spoke for the river on behalf of the local Sierra Club chapter and before congressional
committees in Washington, D.C., as a Walhalla transplant living in Greenville.
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The Chattooga also had attentive friends in Washington who learned about the river's
value and popularity. In mid-1973, Congressmen Roy A. Taylor (D-N.C.), William Jen-
nings Bryan Dorn (D-S.C.), James R. Mann (D-S.C.), and Phil Landrum (D-Ga.) co-
sponsored a bill to add the Chattooga River to the official list of wild and scenic rivers.
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This was in response to the favorable Forest Service staff report titled
A Proposal: The
hearing process, and Dr. Claude Terry—an Emory University microbiologist, avid white-
water boater, and Georgia Conservancy spokesman—testified before a subcommittee
charged with hearing public input on the Chattooga's wild and scenic status in late 1973.
Terry followed standard discourse on the need for balanced water management and de-
clared, “Using a river for power production, building industries or homes along its bank
or in its flood plains … are all consumptive uses which damage or destroy the stream it-
ment on southern rivers while shifting his focus during the hearing: “If the watershed of the
Chattooga is not protected, then many of the values for which the wild and scenic river is
cherished will vanish even though the stream bed and banks are preserved.” He expanded
the discussion of river protection in language not unlike John and Frank Craighead's back
in the 1950s, and Tedford distinguished between river protection and watershed protection
a growing ecological systems theory expressed by scientists like Terry but more clearly ar-