Sprewell Bluff decision marked Carter’s debut as an environmentalist

Jimmy Carter has lived long enough to mark the 50th anniversary of an act that literally changed the American landscape. It began with a canoe ride down the Flint River.

When he ran for governor in 1970, Carter supported the U.S. Corps of Engineers’ proposal to dam the Flint at Sprewell Bluff, as he had when he was a legislator. Federal water projects were considered a major political plum back then, so supporting the project was a no-brainer. But at the request of environmentalists who opposed the project, Carter canoed down the unspoiled waterway to see for himself what was at risk.

“The wildlife that exists in that river corridor,” Carter wrote later, “Otter, fox, muskrat, beaver, bobcat… You cannot describe it.”

Carter went back to the Corps’ proposal and took a more critical look at its claims of minimal environmental damage and major economic benefits from the dam and reservoir it would create. He conducted some 50 interviews in the process. Even back then, it would have been unheard of for a governor to do his own research on a technical problem of this complexity. But Carter was not only a nuclear engineer but a very confident one, having served in Adm. Hyman Rickover’s elite nuclear submarine program.

When he determined after a lengthy investigation that the arguments for the dam were “a passel of lies,” Carter fired off a letter to the Corps turning down the project. This was a controversial move, and a Georgia House resolution was passed urging the Corps to build the dam. Monday was the 50th anniversary of the Senate vote, which defeated that resolution by a narrow margin and endorsed Carter’s rejection of the project, effectively ending it. Carter’s veto helped him gain the support of environmental groups in his 1976 presidential campaign, but its larger implications became clear only later.

Just one month into his presidency, Carter cut 19 federal water projects that had already been authorized by Congress and were under construction from the federal budget. He insisted that one decision was separate from the other, but Carter’s anger when he felt he’d been misled in Georgia surely had something to do with the speed with which he acted.

A lot of mainstream Democrats, already suspicious of the newcomer president, were aghast that Carter would take an ax to politically important projects that already had Congressional approval. It created a rift early in the administration, which never really healed. Republicans meanwhile began painting Carter as an environmental extremist, a theme they would widen later during the energy crisis caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973.

Most of the water projects Carter targeted were eventually built, with the renewed efforts of their congressional sponsors. But enthusiasm for new dam projects waned. Carter’s rejection of the projects, along with his designation of huge new protected wildlife areas in Alaska, set a new standard for federal environmental efforts. He has been compared with Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the nation’s greatest environmental presidents.

Despite challenges, Flint has remained in the natural state which so enchanted Carter when he saw it and is enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year.

Environmental progress is often a matter of one step forward, two steps back, or vice versa if we’re lucky. Just this week, legislators alarmed by the rate increases Georgia Power has gotten past the Public Service Commission and introduced a bill that would create a consumer’s utility counsel to more directly represent the interests of utility customers when decisions like these rate hikes are made.

That’s such a good idea; we’ve already had it. The state had consumer utility counsel, but former Gov. Sonny Perdue abolished the office in 2008 when the state was having budget problems. And no, those budget problems didn’t endanger a lot of state offices.

What Carter attempted, starting with his voyage down the Flint, were giant steps. He stumbled at times, for instance, when his actions regarding federal lands helped to spark the Western Sagebrush Rebellion. But with the efficiency of an engineer, he broke through that frustrating cycle of give and take by which so much environmental policy has been made.