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Water, Water, Everywhere, Nor Any Drop To Drink

Today the New York Times ran an article entitled “Georgia Claims a Sliver of the Tennessee River.” The quarrel is not just about boundaries. It is about water, that single commodity (right up there with oxygen) that we cannot live without. Recently Governor Riley of Alabama won a victory in what has been billed as The Water War, a conflict between Alabama and Georgia over the right of Georgia (as entered into in a secret agreement in 2003) to allocate nearly 25% of Lake Lanier, a federal reservoir on the Chattahoochee River, for Atlanta's water supply. This would result in major reductions in water reaching Alabama downstream. The secret agreement was recently ruled as illegal under Federal Law.

Following the decision Riley said "The ruling will have far reaching consequences. It establishes that the decades-old practice of Atlanta taking more and more water from the federal reservoirs in the Coosa and Chattahoochee Rivers without any legal authority to do so will not stand.”

But apparently, it’s not over till it’s over. Georgia has retaliated by asking for a resolution to establish a boundary commission to determine the dividing line between Georgia and Tennessee—shades of William Byrd’s The History of the Dividing Line (at that time between Virginia and North Carolina circa 1728). Regarding the recent dispute, it appears that in 1818 a surveying mistake was made that deprived Georgia of a “sliver” of the Tennessee River. Now that the severe drought has wrought devastation in the south, a sliver may be a very big piece indeed.

For millennia wars have been waged over land (and the water contained therein). Clean drinking water has become as precious as gold and every bit as contentious. Meanwhile, we continue to pollute what precious resources we have left. I live on Elk River but I no longer swim in or ski on the Elk (a tributary of the Tennessee). I discovered that after a dip in the river even the tiniest cut would become infected. My friend JPW at Alabama Ass Whuppin’ writes “I’m still waiting on an extra arm or leg to sprout from my body after spending all those years in the Tennessee River.” (Picture of the Tennessee River is courtesy of JPW.) 

Patterson Hood of the Drive By Truckers expresses his gratitude to Black Warrior Riverkeeper in his YouTube video. Hood says that it is time for us all---liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, to take a stand to protect the Southern way of life which has always been involved being outdoors and on the rivers and in the woods. He says they have “strip-malled and strip-mined our land.” They have “cut down the trees and polluted all the rivers.” On the Drive By Truckers' 1999 album Pizza Deliverance, Mike Cooley writes about “Uncle Frank” who had nothing but just a little piece of land. This land was flooded by TVA in the 1930s. Here is the opening stanza of “Uncle Frank”: “They powered up the city with hydro-electric juice./ Now we got more electricity than we can ever use./They flooded out the hollow and all the folks down there moved out,/but they got paid so there ain’t nothin’ else to think about.” Uncle Frank, who couldn’t read or write, left no suicide note but “Just a rope around his neck and the kitchen table turned on it’s side.”

The Tenneessee Valley Authority has been the custodian of the rivers and adjoining lands for the past seventy-five years, but this custodianship has not been without controversy. William Bradford Huie, a writer who thrived on controversy, explored the dichotomy between the rights of the individual vs. the needs of the larger society as a whole in his 1942 novel Mud on the Stars (which became the movie Wild River by Elia Kazan). Time has moved on, but the problem remains: how can we protect the environment (animal habitat, clean water, renewable resources) and at the same time move forward into the 21st Century.

I have been a member of the Shoals Environmental Alliance and the Alabama Rivers Alliance for several years. These groups along with Black Warrior Riverkeeper struggle to be a watchdog for the environment, but it is an uphill struggle. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, and the pie is almost gone. 

---Penne J. Laubenthal

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