Ducktown smoke
Subtitle: the fight over one of the South's greatest environmental disasters
By: Duncan Maysilles
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9780807834596
Subjects: Liability for environmental damages; Copper mines and mining; Trials, litigation; Environmental disasters
Description: It is hard to make a desert in a place that receives sixty inches of rain each year. But after decades of copper mining, all that remained of the old hardwood forests in the Ducktown Mining District of the Southern Appalachian Mountains was a fifty-square mile barren expanse of heavily gullied red hills, a landscape created by sulfur dioxide smoke from copper smelting and destructive logging practices. In this book the author examines this environmental disaster, one of the worst the South has experienced, and its impact on environmental law and Appalachian conservation. Beginning in 1896, the widening destruction wrought in Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina by Ducktown copper mining spawned hundreds of private lawsuits, culminating in Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., the U.S. Supreme Court's first air pollution case. In its 1907 decision, the Court recognized for the first time the sovereign right of individual states to protect their natural resources from transborder pollution, a foundational opinion in the formation of American environmental law. The author reveals how the Supreme Court case brought together the disparate forces of agrarian populism, industrial logging, and the forest conservation movement to set a legal precedent that remains relevant in environmental law today.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the view from the mountain; title: The setting, the Cherokees, and the first era of Ducktown mining, 1843-1878; title: The revival of Ducktown mining and the first smoke suits, 1890-1903; title: The farmers and the copper companies wage battle in the Tennessee courts; title: Georgia enters the fray; title: The Ducktown desert and Georgia's first smoke suit; title: Will Shippen, forestry, and Georgia's second smoke suit, 1905-1907; title: Attorney general Hart, the National Farmers Union, and the search for a remedy, 1907-1910; title: The smoke injunction and the great war, 1914-1918; title: Power dams, whitewater rafting, and the reclamation of the Ducktown desert, 1916-2010; title: Epilogue : the view from the mountain.