Displaying items by tag: snail darter

APIEL serves as both a legal forum and space for collective visioning

KNOXVILLE — Now in its 16th year, the Appalachian Public Interest and Environmental Law Conference continues to be critical for environmental and public interest advocates across the Southeast. It is hosted annually at the University of Tennessee College of Law, and brings together lawyers, students, grassroots organizers, scientists, and policy experts to address some of the most urgent challenges facing Appalachia and beyond. 

This year’s APIEL conference, set for Oct. 25-26, is free and open to the public and features a wide range of panels and workshops centered on environmental justice struggles that expose the interlocking systems of racial, ecological, and economic harm. One focus is the ongoing resistance to a proposed AI data center in Memphis, which threatens historically Black neighborhoods with toxic waste and unsustainable water usage. 

Other highlights include a panel on the lasting effects of the Trump administration on the National Park Service and public land policy, a discussion of emerging “climate-washing” litigation targeting corporations making false sustainability claims, and a groundbreaking session titled “Abolition is Ecological.” This panel will explore how justice systems contribute to environmental violence, and how community defense strategies in places like Appalachia are reimagining what true public safety and ecological care could look like. 

The snail darter, which caused an epic battle around TVA plans to dam the Tellico River in the 1970s, was recently removed from the Endangered Species List. Jeremy Monroe/Tennessee Aquarium

The little fish that caused a maelstrom over a TVA dam project gets the last laugh

TELLICO — In a win for endangered species protected by federal law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week the fabled snail darter’s recovery and removal from the Federal List of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife. 

Native to the Tennessee River watershed in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, the fish has long been an Endangered Species Act icon thanks to conservation efforts to save its habitat starting in the 1970s, when the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed construction of a dam on the Little Tennessee River. The snail darter (Percina tanasi) was central in the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, which solidified the scope of the then recently passed ESA.