Jimmy Carter was an avid fly fisherman. On his way back from a trip to Japan July 10, 1980, he stopped in Alaska for a
few hours of fly fishing. (Courtesy of Jimmy Carter Library)
In his time in the White House, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter advanced environmental priorities, from protecting millions of acres of land in Alaska to creating the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Georgia.
But he took one of his first big environmental actions as governor of Georgia when he surprised – and angered – many people by deciding to block construction of a proposed dam.
That decision set a tone for Carter’s later conservation efforts, and for the direction of environmental advocacy in Georgia.
A ‘mountain scene’ in middle Georgia
Sprewell Bluff is about 75 miles south of Atlanta, but it looks like it could be in the north Georgia mountains. It’s where the Flint River runs through a deep gorge.
“It’s a remarkable place,” said Neill Herring, a long-time environmental lobbyist in Georgia. “I mean, it’s like a mountain scene down in middle Georgia.”
Now, Sprewell Bluff is a popular park where people fish, camp, paddle and hike. But in the early 1970s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was planning to put a dam there.
At the time, dams around the country were going up to control floods, generate hydropower, secure water supply and create lakes for recreation.
“Dams were flying up all over the South,” Herring said. “People wanted them; people loved them. It was like, you know, they thought they were going to have tourism and marinas and everybody’s going to have boats.”
Dam-building was popular on both sides of the political spectrum. But there was strong grassroots opposition to the one planned for Sprewell Bluff.
“We didn’t want to see that area wiped out,” said Mark Woodall, who now, like Herring, is an environmental lobbyist in Georgia but, at the time, was a kid growing up near the site of the proposed dam.
Woodall knew the area; he’d go on floating trips on the Flint with his Methodist Church group, and there was a Boy Scout camp there.
So, as a teenager, he asked then-Governor Jimmy Carter to stop the Sprewell Bluff dam.
“I was not an accomplished lobbyist at the time. I just told him it was too beautiful to ruin,” Woodall said. “Governor Carter was not a very effusive person. So he said, ‘Well, I’ll think about it,’ or something like that.”
Protecting a ‘treasure’
Carter did think about it, and canoed down the Flint to see it first-hand. With his background in nuclear engineering, he took a systematic look at the Army Corps’ claims about why the dam was worth building.
He didn’t buy them, and told the Corps not to build the dam.
“That made Republicans and Democrats mad,” said Flint Riverkeeper Gordon Rogers. “That made everybody mad. Everybody.”
Rogers, who as a teenager also dipped his toe into environmental advocacy with the Sprewell Bluff dam when his youth pastor in Columbus recruited him to write a letter to Carter opposing it, said Carter’s decision to stop the dam left a huge legacy.
According to the Riverkeeper, the Flint is one of only about 40 rivers in the country that flows for more than 200 miles without a dam blocking it somewhere. It’s within a couple hours’ drive for millions of people in metro Atlanta, and it’s become an international fishing destination.
“A local treasure, state treasure, national treasure,” Rogers said.
Jimmy Carter also canoed the Chattooga River in north Georgia as governor — and was one of the people in the first open canoe to run Bull Sluice rapid. (Courtesy of Doug Woodward/Georgia Rivers)
‘Not merely honorable, but popular’
Carter went on to stop other dam projects as president. He protected millions of acres of land, established dozens of national park units and tripled the size of the country’s Wild and Scenic River System.
President Carter signed the Endangered American
Wilderness Act on February 24, 1978, designating about 1.3 million acres of land as
wilderness. (Courtesy of Jimmy Carter
Library)
“Sprewell Bluff in a lot of ways, he opened a doorway that he never looked back,” Herring said. “Carter actually breathed life into federal environmentalism in a very meaningful way. But he started in Georgia.”
And, Herring said, his legacy in Georgia is still apparent, too. Not just at Sprewell Bluff, but in attitudes about environmental protection. What success environmental advocates have had in Georgia – Herring said that Carter did a lot to make it possible.
“He made it popular. Not merely honorable, but popular.”
