Water and Power - Southern Water, Southern Power - page 151

ise many municipal wells in Hilton Head, S.C. While the two states have been studying the
movement of salt water for decades, in the spring of 2013, the director of South Carolina's
state environmental agency threatened to sue Georgia unless the states can reach an agree-
ment to protect and share groundwater more equitably. 20
Politicians, agency staff, private sector consultants, and water professionals have pro-
posed a number of solutions to resolve these conflicts. Many of the solutions, however, may
only produce more problems. For example, any proposed interbasin transfer will continue
to threaten interstate and intrastate regional relations. One of the most talked-about inter-
basin transfers involves moving Tennessee River water to serve metro Atlanta customers.
Aside from the costs associated with construction (estimated in 2009 at more than $2 bil-
lion) and operations including the energy to move millions of gallons of water ($98 milli-
on annual operating costs), this proposal is complicated by a nineteenth-century surveyor's
mismarking of the Tennessee-Georgia border that may only be resolved by the U.S. Su-
preme Court. 21 Another option, a 2012 state agency initiative to operate a complex aquifer
storage and recovery project in the Flint River basin's agricultural region, exacerbated in-
trastate urban-rural relations. The agency initiative proposed a water exchange as a long-
term benefit for metro Atlanta 200 miles away. This was followed in 2013 by a legislat-
ive sidecar that initially threatened property rights with a proposal that would have altered
the state's centuries-old riparian water rights tradition. 22 Transferring water from the Sa-
vannah, Tennessee, or Coosa River basins into the Chattahoochee to serve metro Atlanta
and privatizing surface water in south Georgia may solve some of the state's short-term
difficulties and benefit a few landowners and corporate interests. But taken together, these
choices will manufacture more fundamental problems inside and outside the state.
In 2011 the chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce stated that Georgia
“grew along ridgelines and railways, not riverbasins.” 23 If you look closely at a relief map
of Georgia—one that depicts elevation via contour lines—you can read the state's historic
development in the landscape. Many roads, railways, and towns in the Coastal Plain and
Piedmont are indeed perched on a high point, bluff, or ridgeline above broad yet shallow
valleys. Among the many reasons for this human geography: Freshwater springs can gush
from high points; ridges do not flood; ridges lifted Georgians above miasmatic or malari-
al wetlands; and based on personal experience, ridge walking conserves energy otherwise
lost traversing valleys. Georgia's ridgeline civilization, however, could never have existed
without river basins, and Georgians should not forget the fall-line and downstream urban
areas that preceded ridgeline cities like Atlanta.
Southern Water, Southern Power illustrates why human manipulation and use of river
basins was critical for the region's modernization between the New South and Sun Belt
eras. Fertile river basins pleased corn, tobacco, and cotton farmers, or their grazing live-
stock, as well as fishermen. People also dredged, diked, and blasted rivers to control