The Soiling of the South: Ducktown Smoke

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 157-161

157

The Soiling of the South:

Ducktown Smoke

By Oliver Houck

Ducktown Smoke : The Fight Over One of the Sou th’s Greatest

Environmental Di sasters, by Duncan M aysilles. University of North

Carolina Press. 344 pages.

From the November/ December 2011 issue of The Environment al Forum.

Environmental law professors teach judi-

cial opinions and, from time to time, a

favorite question is the “top so many”

in the eld. Professor Lazarus and I concocted

a list for a book of histories (written by others)

with the usual suspects—e.g., Calvert Clis,

Lucas, Chevron, and the sentimental favorite

TVA v. Hill—but we are largely prisoners

of the present. en along comes a closely

contested opinion like Massachusetts v. EPA,

resurrecting a case like Tennessee Copper, and

we feel the same unease that we would were a

ghost to descend from the attic.

As Ducktown Smoke: e Fight Over One

of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters

relates in scrupulous detail, Georgia v. Ten-

nessee (and the Ducktown, Pittsburgh and Tennessee copper companies) was

the most important environmental opinion of its time, only the second of the

Supreme Court to touch on the subject, and as hard fought, divisive, intrac-

table, political, u npredictable, and seeming ly endless battle as any of today.

It was before the Court nearly 15 years. It was accompanied by hundreds of

private suits in state courts seeking relief from a smothering and seemingly

invincible blight. It remains with us, looking on perhaps with favor at the

elaborate schemes with which we now approach pollution control, but also,

just maybe, with the latent authority to step in again when things go amok.