Jere Brittain on French Broad interview 2

Partial Transcript: Mills River’s my place. I can feel it in my bones like an acquired genetic trait. When I was boy growing up at the confluence of north and south Mills River my mother would occasionally play on an old pump organ a little song called the Mills River Waltz. She said it was written by a relative, Perry Orr. By the time I was 11 or 12 I began to understand why Perry heard music in the river. Where the river meets rocky outcrops it makes music. Sometimes simple and clear as violin notes, sometimes loud and complex as a full orchestra. Then it flows on quietly and slowly as a waltz.

Partial Transcript: Well, one of my first memories involved the flood of 1941. My father took me around the side of the mountain where we could look down at the confluence, and the water reached all the way from the edge of one mountain to the edge of the other. It looked like a lake down there. My memories involve crossing a kind of a slippery footbridge, there was no driveway into our house. Fording the river with a horse and wagon to go and come to mills, to haul corn for processing corn meal, and cow feed. Later on, as I became an early teenager, I got quite involved in hunting and fishing, and trapping for fur-bearing animals.

Partial Transcript: Around 1966 or 67, the TVA came to the upper French Broad with a proposal to dam 14 of the tributaries and channelize 60 or 70 miles of the French Broad River. The communities affected, to name a few, would have been Mills River, Hoopers Creek, Cane Creek, Mud Creek, Little River, and North, West, and East forks of the French Broad up in Transylvania County. As well as the Forks of Ivy over in North Buncombe, and the Swannanoa, which would have affected Warren Wilson College, among other things.

Partial Transcript: The consequences would have been loss of farmland, loss of homes, loss of community centers and churches. I think the total number of families that would have actually been displaced by the project was around 650. In Mills River for example there were 60 or 65 families above the proposed dam site. So in every case many of these families had been in the community for 5 or 6 generations. So the cultural impact would have been multiplied by the loss of the heritage aspect of these communities.

Partial Transcript: I think that’s certainly broadly correct. These valleys were all rather complex geologically. There would be a few hundred acres of bottom land, a few more hundred acres of pasture land, and then some of the lower levels of forested slopes. But they would have had some impacts. Of course the proponents argued that the protection of farmland from flooding downstream from the dams would have been a positive thing. Therefore there were farmers on both sides of the issues depending on whether they lived above or below the dams.

Partial Transcript: To examine the impacts of the TVA proposal on farming and on agriculture one would find it beneficial to look at these valley’s from today’s perspective. These 18,000 or so acres that would have been impacted by the dams are now a very high value agricultural land producing things like tomatoes, still a few dairy farms, turf grass, all of them involve recreational assets for the communities, so the impacts I believe are best understood by looking at it from today’s vantage point.

Partial Transcript: In the TVA’s own documents one of the benefits claimed was low flow augmentation. In those days the French Broad River sometimes ran white and gray from the pollution coming from industry as well as municipalities in the headwaters. Wilma Dykeman wrote eloquently about this several years prior to the TVA proposal. This did give rise to a kind of a cynical saying among environmentalists at the time that the process implied that the solution to pollution was dilution. And we used that phrase in advocating against the proposal and in favor of the industries and municipalities getting their act cleaned up.

Partial Transcript: That was certainly implied, and in fact this process is still being done today in water treatment process such as for the town of Hendersonville. During flood events when sediment runs fairly high in the Mills River, the treatment plant operators use a higher percentage of water from the national forest from a 100 year old cast iron pipe system that flows by gravity down to the plant. So the dilution of pollution is still going on.

Partial Transcript: Our best weapon, the Upper French Broad Defense Association, acquired fairly early on copies of TVA's planning documents, including their rather lightweight environmental impact statement. The economic analysis claimed a benefit-to-cost ratio of 1.4 to 1, and some economist friends of ours sort of jumped on that as a kind of poor benefit-to-cost ratio. To get that ratio even, we felt and we did show the benefits claimed were exaggerated and the impacts acknowledged were minimized. So it was clear to all of us at the time that the cost of the project wasn’t justified, and the benefits were not adequate for the use of eminent domain to acquire property.

Partial Transcript: The Upper French Broad Defense Association was organized based on a coalition of small opposition groups in these various watersheds that were going to be affected. A lot of these small opposition groups were based on community centers that were in most of these communities at the time, as well as some churches. We made a coalition of these groups, which became the Upper French Broad Defense Association, and gave us a platform to begin to assert the opposition’s views with a speaker bureau and becoming more savvy about media and press releases and so forth. And we began to find early on that we could access the media system and the political system and I think that was one of the great lessons from the experience was that if people are willing to step up and challenge the system when they feel that some sort of big public works program is unjustified that it’s possible to do it with peaceful and legitimate means. So that’s what the UFBDA was all about.

Partial Transcript: I think that our rolls, our dues paying membership, eventually reached about 1500 members and there were actually a lot of participants who were not necessarily dues paying members. And a very significant aspect of the membership list was that it cut across demographic lines and political lines in the Upper French Broad. People who were politically conservative and those who were politically liberal and environmentally inclined, it was a very interesting coalition because the membership and the participation crossed a lot of lines, including very significantly the retirement community, in particular in Transylvania County where some very active retirees who had had great experience in industry or education joined the opposition even though they didn't have any invested interest whatsoever, they just thought we were on the right side and deserved some help.

Partial Transcript: I don’t remember any such slogan. There may have been something like that in a brochure. We printed some bumper stickers that were widely displayed on car bumpers and truck bumpers called, Save WNC from TVA. It was already too late to save WNC from TVA entirely because they had done some projects in the far western counties. But that was the nearest thing that I remember to a slogan. I can give you a slogan in my song a little later.

Partial Transcript: I think the results of the UFBDA’s work can best be summarized by examining the big public hearing that was held in Asheville in 1971. This was the first time TVA had consented to a public hearing, and they were under some pressure by that time as a result of the Environmental Policy act of 1969. So they did agree to hold a hearing in Asheville, which we felt made it awkward for a lot of the people in the headwaters to get to the hearing. But we were able to get a very large plurality of people to that hearing, and had people testifying about the impacts of the proposed project who had never given a public speech before or after. So it was a great outpouring of community participation, and we had folks bring in food- the hearing went on for 3 days, and we were willing to serve food to the opposition as well as to our own friends just to show that we were not mean-spirited. It was clear after that hearing that the pendulum had swung in the direction of the opposition and it led up to the elections of 1972 which, among several other things, resulted in the election of Jim Holshouser as Governor of NC who had been outspoken in opposition to the TVA proposal, as well as an entire new county commission and town hall in Transylvania county, all of of whom had expressed opposition. It was at that point that the TVA announced that it was going to withdraw for lack of local public support.

Partial Transcript: In the lead up to the public hearing, the TVA we felt behaved at its most arrogant by setting up the agenda for the hearing so that proponents would be the only speakers for the first half day or so of the hearing, when the media would be present the most. So when we realized what was happening, that they were, in my words at the time and I still think, that they were trying to rig the hearing, a member of our organization who had connections with textile and the printing industry came up with a brilliant idea to create some yellow neck scarves that people could wear. Bright yellow with UFBDA stamped on the back, so that there would be no doubt in terms of visual appearance of the audience who was in the majority. So these images were run by Channel 13, among other places at the time. So even though we weren’t invited to speak until most of the proponents had had their say, it was clear who was the prevailing number in the audience.

Partial Transcript: I think my brother’s testimony at the hearing in Asheville summarized what I believe is the legacy of our successful opposition pretty well. He was a social scientist at Georgia Tech and he talked about the principle of reasonable doubt. He said that if, in the case of the use of eminent domain for a public works project, if reasonable doubt exists then the decision ought to be to not proceed with the project and leave it to future generations. And I think the legacy of the UFBDA is that these rivers and streams have been left for the present generation and future generations to decide what’s in the best interest of these communities for the preservation or use, as the case may be, of these rivers. So that seems to me to be our legacy. And I personally trust the younger generation more than I did my own generation to make wise decisions about this.

Partial Transcript: I think it’s important to remember what happened back in the late 60s and early 70s. If the TVA proposal at the time hadn’t been challenged, these rivers and the headwaters wouldn’t be here any more. I guess it’s almost too obvious to state that it’s easy to take for granted natural resources until they’re gone. And so my advice to the younger generation would be don’t take it for granted. It’s a legacy and it’s up to each generation to nurture the legacy.