Sacrificing Snail Darters to Save The Climate

For those of you who know what the Snail Darter is and its place in U.S, History, my title for this piece may come off as blasphemy by yours truly. But stick with me and read on to see how I am trying to use a new angle to chat about where I think things stand in terms of emissions reduction and climate mitigation.

The Snail Darter is (not was) a small, endangered fish whose habitat in the 1970’s in a particular part of Tennessee and that area where it lived was slated for a massive project of TVA called the Tellico Dam. The story is a complicated one that involved the timing of when the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was enacted were versus the timing of the onset of dam construction. It ultimately involved a Supreme Court Ruling Congress intervening to exempt the Snail Darter from the Endangered Species Act. The Dam was delayed but ultimately it got built.

Thankfully, an effort to transplant Snail Darters elsewhere was successful to the point that the fish has now been delisted under the Endangered Species Act, so it wasn’t actually “sacrificed” to the Dam. But it became a cause celebre because it was seen that if the project went through it was the end of that animal. And by end, I mean extinction.

But the focus for me is the trade-off. The snail darter was sacrificed for what was seen as the common and higher good, with the risk accepted as to what the consequences might be. I don’t know if that was a right or wrong decision back then, but it happened, and it helps focus on what we now must confront.

The snail darter has had plenty of company over the years, with none getting more visibility than the Spotted Owl, a reclusive bird whose only habitat was the forests of the Pacific Northwest, which were also the habitat for loggers. But today the roster is expanding, especially when it comes to habitats that overlap with wind projects.

In Texas wind country, it is a plant called the Bushy Willow-Wort. It is the right whale in the wind-rich areas of the Atlantic. It is the American Burying Beetle in the path of a Nebraska transmission line to carry wind power to where the demand is.

In my opinion, the climate situation is such that we must carefully modify our thinking. We can’t save everything. We must swallow hard and realize that.

One of my biggest Environmental Heroes is Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) one of the most famous scientists and thinkers of his day. He was so well-known and respected that when he died there were memorial parades across America. Or to get across his influence in another way – he was Charles Darwin’s mentor and influenced most of the latter’s work.

The title of one of the best books I have ever read, and one which a few years ago was a NYT Best Books of the Year, is “The Invention of Nature - Alexander von Humboldt’s New World”. That title reflects the fact that it was Humboldt that first understood that the natural world was not some haphazard combination of random placement of different species in different locations. He came up with the concept of ecosystem – the idea that everything was connected, and that nothing existed in isolation.

The ecosystem concept has proven to be a key underlying component of environmental policy for decades, and that has led to the hold-the-line thinking that we can’t afford to lose anything or else we take away a cog in a finely tuned ecosystem because if we do, the hole in the ecosystem could disrupt the whole thing.

Long before I read about Humboldt, I believed strongly in ecosystems as the infrastructure and operating system of the natural world. I wish things were such that we could afford to meet certain climate objectives without harm to any species. But things are not that way. It is 2024, emissions are not coming down, temperatures in the atmosphere and oceans are reaching record highs. We are in a situation where we will increasingly have to make some very hard decisions with respect to what we can save while still mitigating climate change. That not only goes for organisms but fields and other plots of land that are good spots for solar, wind, and other clean energy projects.

We know that we need as much renewable energy as possible to reduce emissions. But what is now hitting everyone (and landing on some of the most prominent front pages) is that we need more electricity period. Not only is electrification happening as part of climate efforts, but electrification is the basis of our society and economy regardless of climate change, i.e. we run and live on electricity. Put the two together and one finds that we need more generation not just to replace gas and coal, but to handle new electricity demand being created overall. And we need to do that via zero-emissions efforts so we don't further dig our climate hole.

The way things are going, we simply won’t be able to have or save everything anymore. If we were reducing emissions fast enough to stay under the temperature targets, I would think differently. But we are not reducing fast enough or in large enough amounts, and so we can’t save it all. We need clean energy projects, and we need them fast, and we will have to risk von Humboldt rolling over in his grave based on what we may have to do to nature. Or based on what we already have done to it, maybe he already is.

P.S. When I finished reading “The Invention of Nature – Alexander Humboldt’s New World” I put the book down saying to myself ‘how did I not know about this guy?”. I can’t recommend it highly enough.