Environmental Politics in the American South: The Fight over the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, public concern about quality of life issues in the United States, expressed most aggressively through the environmental movement, did not spread equally to all regions of the country. Samuel P. Hays has remarked that New England and the Pacific Coast were among the leading sectors of change, whereas the South moved much more slowly.' However, by the end of the 1970s no region had shown a greater increase in environmental voting strength in Congress than the South Atlantic and Gulf states.2 If most states in the American South lacked large, influential, and well-funded regional environmental organizations in 1970, there was no corresponding shortage of environmental problems, such as the challenges associated with local agricultural, mining, industrial, or engineering practices. The Tennessee-Tombigbee (Tenn-Tom) Waterway, which eventually cut through Mississippi and Alabama, included most representative environmental issues in its construction.3