Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 135

ticulated by University of Georgia ecologist Eugene Odum, who viewed whole watersheds
and activity on the land above the riverbank as more valuable and influential than protec-
tion of individual streams or rivers. Terry and Tedford presented persuasive arguments to
shift the Chattooga from a study river to a wild and scenic river. They also got some help
from Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, who had paddled the Chattooga not just once but
multiple times. And Carter, an evolving countryside conservationist who would put a stop
to Flint River dams, proved to be instrumental in lobbying congressional committees on
the Georgia Conservancy's behalf. 54
South Carolina's and Georgia's congressional delegations also spoke for their constitu-
encies in less scientific terms to support free-flowing rivers. James R. Mann (1920-2010),
a five-term (1968-78) congressman from Greenville most well known for his drafting of
President Richard Nixon's articles of impeachment, recalled recreating on the riverbanks
“since [his] earliest years as a school boy.” Senator Herman E. Talmadge (1913-2002) de-
scribed the Chattooga as a “primitive, free flowing river” that offered excellent recreation-
al values. Talmadge's junior counterpart, first-term senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), painted a
slightly different picture and worried that visiting crowds threatened the Chattooga's re-
creational integrity. In Nunn's opinion such overuse and impact justified federal manage-
ment and “development of the proper facilities.” 55 Each of these spokesmen communicated
important reasons for maintaining a Wild and Scenic Chattooga River as one solution for
the Sun Belt's water challenges. Their interests in balancing the old policy of constructing
dams, preserving wild watersheds, and maintaining watershed integrity joined two other
major foundational aspects of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act—recreation and ecologic-
al restoration—as intended by the act's authors, the Craighead brothers. The act did not
specifically use ecological terminology but stated that “each component of the national
wild and scenic rivers system shall be administered in such manner as to protect and en-
hance ” the characteristics that contributed to a river's inclusion in the national system. 56
To enhance implies some degree of improvement or a landscape in need of hands-on man-
agement after centuries of human activity. The Chattooga indeed had been worked over
by the lumber industry at the beginning of the twentieth century and was not the primit-
ive wilderness many supporters claimed. But in the case of the Chattooga River, Senator
Nunn and natural resource agency staffers were less interested in watershed protection and
more interested in hands-on management to deal with the hordes of inexperienced pad-
dlers who soon descended upon the river. Recreation—at the expense of ecological restora-
tion—became a central part of the Chattooga's story, but not necessarily in the “educational
and spiritual” sense expressed by the Wild and Scenic River Act's authors. 57 The river's
popularity was a problem in and of itself.
The topic and film versions of James Dickey's Deliverance help explain the role recre-
ation played in pushing the Chattooga from study river to wild and scenic river in 1974