Hannah Conway

If you google “civil engineering” and click on the Wikipedia entry this image is at the top of the page. It is a photograph from the Tennessee Valley Authority of two engineers working on a scale model of the proposed Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River. The Tellico Dam was one of the TVA’s most controversial projects—its construction threatened the only known natural habitat of the Eastern Tennessee snail darter, leading to the Supreme Court’s first interpretation of the 1963 Endangered Species Act in the 1967 case Hill v. TVA, displaced over 300 farming families through the condemnation of more than 38,000 acres of farmland by eminent domain, and flooded important historic sites of the Overhill Cherokee including numerous sacred burial grounds and the towns of Tanasi and Chota—former capitals for the old Cherokee Nation prior to settler encroachment on our Eastern Tennessee lands. Some of these sites were occupied by our ancestors for more than 1,000 years, and archaeological artifacts from excavations prior to submersion dated back to the Archaic Period (8000-1000 BC). The project was contested by a diverse coalition of environmental activists, local farmers, the Eastern Band Cherokee, and scholars from the University of Tennessee. In September of 1979 President Jimmy Carter signed a bill exempting the Tellico project from the ESA, and on November 29 the dam’s floodgates were closed. To date, it is the last dam constructed by the TVA. 

Questions 

1. How does this archival image sanitize the history of the Tellico Dam Project?

2. What can this image tell us about the limits of scientific modelling—a form of “objective” knowledge production—for understanding the wide-ranging impacts of large technological infrastructures?