The Supreme Court was justified in overturning the decision of the trial court regarding the construction of the Tellico dam. The wording of the Endangered Species Act was clear in its plain meaning, and there was no exception as to the construction of the dam. If the congress by drafting the Act had intended to exclude the construction of such projects in protecting endangered species, nothing would have stopped them from making that provision in the Act. The exception was not necessary either. The protection of endangered species overrides any other project that may be initiated at the ecological habitat of such a species.
However, it can as well be argued that because the power to make and amend laws is vested in congress and that, it was the same congress that had made the initial political decision. The congress was also justified in coming up with an amendment in the Endangered Species Act to make an exception to the construction of the Tellico Dam. The court would have no choice, therefore, to refuse the amended provision. This, however, was an amendment that was politically motivated, and it had no ecological interest. The fear was losing millions of dollars in a project that was almost complete and not in protecting endangered species.
Creating room for a cost-benefit analysis in a situation of this nature may create problems in the future. This was a case of two competing interests: protecting an endangered species on one hand and considering the loss of millions of dollars in a project that was almost complete on the other hand. Whichever direction that the decision goes, one side, will lose. This paper, therefore, proposes that there should always be a hard-and-fast rule in situations of this nature. The goals of the Endangered Species Act were to take care of the endangered species. Therefore, by creating room for bargain, the congress created a loophole that is too hard to mend. Although the argument was that there was great fear that many projects in the country would severely be affected by numerous litigation that may consequentially arise as a result of biologists discovering “obscure species”, making exceptions to the provision would endanger the lives if already endangered species indefinitely.
This paper proposes that there should be no time that environmentally motivated concerns would give way to politically or economically motivated concerns. The politically motivated concerns may have an alternative way out, but the environmentally motivated ones may not.
Works Cited
Anishfield, Simon. Water Resources. New York: Island Press, 2010.
Wheeler, William. TVA and the Tellico Dam, 1936-1979: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-industrial America. New York: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2007.
