Talk:Snail darter controversy

Commnet
Who is Hill in this contraversy? how diod he get involved

The above comment constitutes a dispute to the neutrality of the article???

Hank Hill was a law student at the University of Tennessee who got involved in the case. He learned that the endangered snail darter was in the Little Tennessee River and wondered if that was enough to write his final essay on for his environmental law class. Turned out, it was.

Justification for the Story tag

 * 1) The structure, with headings like "Enter Endangered Species Act" and "Two Tennssee Legislators Get Involved", has an unencyclopedic element.
 * 2) Informal, sensationalistic prose abounds:
 * 3) "Despite his credentials as one of the nation’s top economists, however, Charles Schultze was no more prepared to accurately predict future benefits than anyone else at the time."
 * 4) "Wheeler and McDonald’s analysis is very insightful, and it does identify potential flaws with TVA’s method. At the same time all econometric models must make some assumptions, and nobody can predict the future. Of course this is why people like Red Wagner never liked such numbers to begin with. Congress and the president required them however, and it certainly made sense to at least try to quantify the benefits of any project of this scale. People could make estimates of benefits, but benefits would always be difficult, or impossible, to quantify. Once they were quantified they became legitimate targets for the opposition."
 * 5) "He now found himself in the very unfortunate position of having to write a law that would flood the Little Tennessee River valley and drown a river that he, as much as any of the dam opponents, loved."
 * 6) "Senator Baker’s statement was humorous. It was melodramatic. It was, no doubt, heartfelt."
 * 7) "It meant the death of a river—a river that even those who supported the dam agreed was beautiful and unique."
 * 8) Lengthy, improperly formatted quotes make it difficult to tell what's a quote and what's the article - which is especially problematic as regards things like the Jim Range quote, which are more narrative than informative.
 * 9) The aforementioned informal, personally invested writing dances on, and at times seems to fall on the wrong side of, the line between NPOV and POV. As an example: "From a common sense point of view, despite the tactics that may have been employed by the TVA, it was simply impossible for many people to accept that a three-inch fish that nobody had ever heard of, and few people cared about, would stop a project that had displaced hundreds of families and cost the American public over $100 million—especially since the dam was basically finished."

In short, this is not an encyclopedia article, this is a story, and it has been since before it got split out of the snail darter article. The Literate Engineer 22:26, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Not notable
This article is not notable per regs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.88.103.100 (talk) 05:03, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Claims of exemption from all laws

 * Tellico was never exempted from all of the laws as many[who?] would later claim they were.

This claim was made by Congressman Bob Edgar, quoted by Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert:


 * "It was approved by voice vote. No one even knew what they were voting for!  They were voting to exempt Tellico Dam from all laws.  All laws!  They punched a loophole big enough to shove a $100 million dam through it, and then they scattered threats all through congress so we couldn't muster the votes to shove it back out.  I tried -- lots of people tried -- but we couldn't get that rider out of the bill."

Proposed merge to Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill
I've proposed merging this article into Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill. That article is recently created and I think does a better job of describing the case at the centre of the controversy, including the lead-up to it and later developments. It's less biased and better-referenced, but this article goes into more detail about the later rider to authorize the dam construction, so I think it has something to offer if suitably abbreviated. Dcoetzee 20:00, 18 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Apparently not a wildly popular idea, since two and a half years have passed, but here is why it should never happen: A good Supreme Court cas article, such as the TVA v. Hill one, has a level of detail such as names of justices on each side, who wrote the opinion, etc. that simply don't belong in a general article on the subject. To repeat what I said on the other page, it would be equally wrong to merge Baker v. Carr with redistricting. 2600:1004:B14F:C56D:E44C:1AF5:E7CF:2C77 (talk) 00:43, 20 November 2015 (UTC)