The Darter & The Dam: Environmental Law's Original Morality Play

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 215-219

215

The Darter & The Dam:

Environmental Law’s

Original Morality Play

By Oliver Houck

The Snail Dar ter and the Dam: How Por k-Barrel Politics

Endangered a Lit tle Fish and Killed a R iver, by Zygmunt J.B. Plater.

Yale University Press. 392 pages.

From the March/ April 2014 issue of The Environmental Forum .

Forty years ago, two young professors at

the University of Tennessee launched a

case that would try the A merican soul.

e venue could not have been worse, pitting

the god-agency of southern Appalachia against

a creature whose very existence had only

recently been discovered, a three-inch sh with

an ugly face and a plain-Jane name, the snail

darter. In a plot with more twists and turns

than an Italian opera, the case would lose, then

win, win ag ain, then lose, then win, then lose,

and by journey’s end one of the most ill-con-

ceived water projects in t he country would be

built, families who had farmed their river valley

for centuries were evicted, the law teacher of the

pair was denied his tenure, and the Endangered

Species Act was barely spared from crippling amendments, to say nothing of

going extinct itself. It was the act’s rst big test, for which no one associated

with it was ready.

e law professor was Zygmunt Plater whom, by way of disclosure, I knew

and c ame to respect over this time. His passion could seem a bit over the

top but nothing short of it could have carried him through the ordeal to

follow. He tried these cases on a shoestring, indeed on no string at all, from

trial court to the High Court, throw in congressional committees, Hill sta-