Taken and Delivered - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 141

Chattooga River borders—incurred a yearly average of five fires with 18 acres burned. But
in the five-year period between 1974 and 1979, twenty-three fires burned an average of 687
acres in the same district. 86 After 1974, South Carolina and Georgia residents—initially re-
spectful of the local recreational commons—assumed similar tactics to protest forest policy
in Sumter and Chattahoochee National Forests, with residents displaying signs proclaim-
ing: “You put it in wilderness and we'll put it in ASHES.” 87
Arson in the Chattooga River's corridor represented latent protest against turning a local
recreational commons into a federal recreational commons. It is important to remember
that in the Chattooga's case, the Forest Service did not “take” private land from unwilling
sellers by declaring eminent domain; the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act made this tactic ex-
tremely difficult to implement but never impossible to threaten. Prior to the road closures,
Georgia Power and the Forest Service already held title to 84 percent of the proposed wild
and scenic river corridor, including some roads, and theoretically controlled access to ex-
isting informal campsites, swimming spots, and fishing holes. 88 But after 1974, the conflict
between insiders and outsiders, and between privileged locals and nonlocals, materialized
over the issue of what constituted appropriate recreation in Georgia's and South Carolina's
expanding and popular national forests.
The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968) was a useful instrument for Sun Belt citizens
who pushed back and against a half-century of the modern hydraulic waterscape's as-
sembly. The network of public and private ambassadors from the Georgia Power Company,
the Georgia Natural Areas Council, the Georgia Conservancy, and the Forest Service parti-
cipated in local and national hearings, communicated with elected officials, and mobilized
a grassroots constituency to achieve a specific end. These parties—the “someone” Patrick
Thomas identified as responsible for “taking away access” to the Chattooga—justified the
river's federal protection on post- Deliverance safety concerns, but more importantly be-
cause the Chattooga was, in fact, the last major undammed river surrounded by a sea of
reservoirs in the mountain Sun Belt. 89
The process also did not accommodate all local recreational realities and elicited a re-
sponse that left the woods burning when the river corridor became a linear recreation space
that catered to national and nonlocal consumers. Initially a fragmented local landscape
composed of fishing holes and camping spots, the Chattooga became a unified wild and
scenic river with clear start and end points for paddlers and boaters that visually muted the
older intermediate recreation spaces. The Forest Service closed roads to secret spots and
campsites and transformed fishing trails along the river's edge into hiking trails on parallel
ridgelines. This imperfect process maintained a wild and free-flowing river, but some local
users lost a perceived freedom to access the river. While the Chattooga River's story high-
lights how a private and public coalition transformed a local commons into a federal com-
mons, the story also illustrates that the conflict did not revolve around whether the river