dians of our troubled waters is made possible by blue ridge national heritage area, community foundation of henderson county, james mcclure educational foundation, pigeon river fund, paul and simone shoemaker, stuart cohn, and chuck mcgrady.

(freeman owle) "so then god, ogi-doda, had created "the heavens and the earth. "the earth was muddy, and so he wanted it to dry up, "and he kept waiting and waiting for the land to be dry, "but it was still remaining muddy. "so he started sending the birds down to check out the earth. "and they flew down, and they flew back and forth "until all the birds it created were tired and worn out. "there was oy one birdeft in the olduzzard, egwa-shuli. "so the buzzd said, 'what aryou trying to do?' "he said, 'i'm r out of birds tfly. "i need you to help if yocan.' "a the vulture sai 'i can fly asong as you want.' "so he began to sail in, and he sailed until "he was about ready to crash into the soft mud, "and he started flapping those wings to get altitude. "and when the wings went down, they made the mountains. "when they ce back up, they made the valleys, "and the mountains, and the valleys. "and the cherokees appreciated the mountains, and the valleys, and the waters." so we must keep our roots in our minds

so that we don't go too far the wrong way. ♪ music ♪ first of all the cherokee consider the rivers as being very sacred. that was very important that they go down and do their cleansing exercises each and every day in the water. so the water itself was like a cleansing, a spiritual-type body. and they considered the river as being a long man, a living being. and so, they truly respected the water itself and made sure that they kept it clean. and you can tell by looking at the waters behind this, even

here today, we still have clear water. we call the water gvnahita asgaya, a "long man," beuse his head starts in the mountains way back. and as he comes out, he grows until his feet reaches the ocean. that's one of the reasons why the water is respected, because it connects everything. we believe in seven directions. there's your four cardinal directions, but there's also above, the center, and below. and the water, we believe, has the gateways to that lower world. originally, cherokees were put here after plants, and after animals, so their job was to take care of the things that were there before them, which would be waterways, land, and trees, and animals and plants. so they knew that they could use their natural resources to their advantage. t if they overused it or did something to pollute it or hurt it,

that resource wouldn't be there anymore. and that was survival. (betty osceola) with water, if you listen, whether you're indigenous or not, or anything in the environment, if you just slow down and listen, and if you learn to listen, you can hear it. it speaks his own language, just like that bird is just speaking to us right now, and it speaks its own language, just like the wind is speaking us right now. if you learn to slow down, absorb, and actually listen, you'll start understanding what it's saying. (maggy hurchalla) the first people in the everglades were actually the tequesta indians from way back in the 1500s. for them, it was a fantastic food source. it was something that, if you didn't mess it up, it gave you everything you needed. later, the miccosukees, who came all the way down from north carolina,

were looking for a place to hide from the american soldiers. (millie buchanan) it had been a pristine trout spring; had some of the best trout fishing in the southeast if not in the country and just a beautiful stream, and it flowed from north carolina into tennessee. (gay webb) apparently, the pigeon river was a sustainable river. if you had a spot on the pigeon river whether you're white man, whether you're indian, or native american, if you had a spot on this river, you can get all your food to get you everything you needed. you had it right there. the cherokees called it "beautiful maiden." that was the most beautiful word in their language. and that's what they used on the pigeon river, because to them, a beautiful young lady was the most beautiful thing in the world. this river was second to that most beautiful thing in the world. so that's why they named it. (bobby seay) the mountain folks had a wonderful way of life here. they had intergenerational exchange with the cherokee.

the river was plentiful with what is called a white suckerfish; they would actually net them and catch them. (jere brittain) neuse river's my place. i can feel it in my bones like an acquired genetic trait. when i was a boy growing up at the confluence of north and south in neuse river, my mother would occasionally play on an old pump organ, a little song called "the mills river waltz" she said it was written by a relative, perry orr. by the time i was 11 or 12, i began to understand why perry heard music in the river. where the river meets rocky outcrops, it makes music, sometimes as simple and clear as violin notes, sometimes loud and complex, as a full orchestra that flows on quietly and slowly as the waltz.

(dan pierce) people in the pre-industrial age related in a viety of wayto their water. i meanobviously, you had to have a reliable water supply, and wilma dykeman taught so eloquently about the importance of the spring to a mountain family, and how crucial that was, and the almost spiritual connection there between the people and the springs. (robert morgan) many things happened in the river and along the river that were very imptant. the baptizing was he in the river every year after the revival meeting. you have the great revival meeting in the summer, between the time you set the corn by, you quit cultivating it at harvest time. and after the revival, the people who had been converted would be baptized in the river. so i have a memory of all these baptizings, beautiful people singing by the river, and the reflections of the trees in the river, and the people lined up, usually wearing white.

(dan pierce) you get some very interesting connections between people that we would think of as traditional environmentalists and people who had deep roots in the region, who had very strong connections to water because of that connection to, "this is the place where "we baptized, and we want that water to be protected. "and so, don't dam this stream, don't pollute the stream," you know, "because it has a very important spiritual significance to us." (marci spencer) as long as people have been living inur country, dating back to the time of the indians' occupation. and when ty considered this their sacred homeland, thrivers and the streams were recognized as the lifeblood of the community not only the natural community but their human community as well. they use the rivers as their source of food, and water, transportation. and so, of course, they would set up not only their trading routes, but their villages and towns along that lifeblood of the community.

(robert morgan) the land right along the river was fertile soil, and the first settlers got that land. there almost was a class system between the people who owned the bottomland along the river this rich alluvial soil and the latecomers who had to settle on the sides of the mountains in poorer soil. (dan pierce) one of the issues that becomes apparent pretty early on is the issue of abundance and the fact that there is a lot of land, and apparently, plenty of good water. as james fenimore cooper put it in the leatherstocking tales, he talked about the wasty ways [sic] of pioneers, and that was a problem because it was a very mobile society. and if you look at census records and deed books and things like that, you see that a lot of people came through, stayed a few years, and moved on. (robert morgan) if you grow corn year after year, it will wear out e patch. and too many people in this region

would clear up a place on the mountain top or the side of the mountain, plant corn for a year or two, and it would wash out, and the ground would no longer be fertile, and they would move on and clear up another place. (david weintraub) with the coming of the railroad and major industry, communities forgot that it was working with nature that had enabled them to survive under difficult circumstances. the industrial era offered better living conditions than subsistence farming while bringing electricity and roads. but it also had consequences on the land and the water. but the watchword of the era was, "use it until it's all used up, and move on." of primary concern was logging, industrial pollution, dams, and the draining of the wetlands. (marci spencer) th northern logging companies had depletedany of the forests in the new england

and the northern states and were looking for greener forests for them to cut. and so they moved into the soutrn appalachians, then starting to cut the southern appalachian mountains and many different regions, clearing thousands and thousands of acres. the logging companies were primarily interested in getting the logs out of the area and to the market as quickly as they could. and they weren't practicing any sound logging methods. they would clear-cut whole areas, thousands of acres of land. they also would use the streams to send them out of the forest to the market. but that was creating stream bank erosion. it was creating silt to flood into the water sources themselves. (jere brittain) the rivers in general in those days, in the 40s and 50s, were taken for granted. and in the case of the french broad, for which mills river's a tributary french broad,whe,

was more or less a moving cesspool with industrial and municipal pollution. when you cross the river on the way to hendersonville, you could actually smell the pollution. (robert morgan) but this has always been an issue in american history. going back to people like daniel boone, who move into an area they love the wilderness. they go there because they love the indians, the woods, the mountains. then once the settlement starts, it begins to blight that, so they kill what they love. (david weintraub) with logging reaching a fever pitch, the paper industry moved into the southern appalachians in earnest. (dan pierce) champion being the largest paper plants in the world, so they own hundreds of thousands of acres in the smokies in particular because there are lots of red spruce. it became incredibly important to the economy of western north carolina. (david weintraub) however, champion paper's mill released its effluents directly

into the pigeon river, impacting western north carolina, but especially east tennessee. (news anchor) the governor says he canoed down the pigeon. above the canton mill, he says, the river is beautiful and thriving. wherter says it's a different story. (ned mcwherter) and that discharge comes out, and it's just an aolute sewer. (news anchor) mcwherter sa he met th champion's chairman of the board and studied 10 years of the paper company's annual reports. the governor said he learned that champion and its stockholders have been doing very well, while nothing has been done to clean up the river. (millie buchanan) chamon, in 1908, built a very large mill on a very small river, using a very toxic process on a river that at low flow, was totally diverted through the mill. what champion brought to north carolina were jobs that were very good paying for the area. the smell was really awful, but in canton, they'd say it smells

like money, where anywhere else it just stank. and in tennessee, there were none of the jobs, and some of the few jobs in that area needed clean water. (duay o'neill) in my earliest memories in the early 1950s, you know, the stench was horrible; big clots of brown foam, and of course, no one would dare eat any fish out of the river or drink any of the water from the river by then. (jamie branam brown) my first memory of anything related to the river was just that it was a horrible, stinking, awful mess. it was black. it was not tea colored. it was more like coffee color. it had foam. everywhere you looked, it stunk. you knew the minute that you entered the community, people would go, "what is that?" i realized that probably what should have been our greatest resource was our greatest liability in the community. (jill hodges) the first wave of pollution caused poisoning of cows and fish

were both dying along the river. so it impacted anybody that was trying to raise beef or dairy. it was virtually unusable. (gay webb) pollution kills so slow. that's what happened to hartford. it killed it so slow that you didn't see it dying, even though at the end of the day, the little town was no longer there, the schools were sick, people were sick. (jill hodges) when you live in a town whose population is about 500 people, and a majority of them have cancer, you know, you know what's going on. you may not know how it's going on, but you know there's something wrong in your community. but when you're going to funeral after funeral or helping with cancer patients th are your friends and family, you know there's something desperately wrong. (millie buchanan) people downstream saw a significant difference in the water. fish died. there were reports of cows dying or livestock dying

when they drank out of the water. over the years, that became clear too that human health seemed to be affected. (jill hodges) when we got the copy of greenpeace's no margin of safety, and it was a study of the great lakes area, pulp and paper industry. and they were finding that every mill was spewing out dioxin, and there has never been a safe level of dioxin for human consumption. (duay o'neill) during the hearings that were held at cocke county high school, they had a wall, and it was sort of styled after tha the vietnam war,cke cou wi the names l, of all the people from the community who had died of cancer. it was just a very sobering feeling to stand there and realize all the different people that i had known. there was one family from the hartford community that was pretty much wiped out at young ages from cancer. (sharon mcgaha) my mother and daddy, they had cancer then.

it was like our neighbors started getting cancer, and then it was just going from house to house. people were having cancer and dying with it. (bobby seay) there is a firm belief of a lot the folks at live here that the river has been so contaminated through the years, and every janitor that was at that old hartford school through the years, every male died with cancer, and four of the five teachers have died with cancer that actually drank that water out of that school well. (dan pierce) people like wilma dykeman would start to sound alarms and say we have done a really bad thing, and we have killed these rivers. (news anchor) in 1933, president franklin d. roosevelt established the tennessee valley authority the tva. 15,000 workers labor to build 32 dams that controlled floods

and provided power in an area where only two farmers in 100 had any electricity at all. tva maower foreople. (dan pierce) the tva in this part of the country was an incredibly powerful bureaucracy. and if tva wanted to build a dam somewhere, tva built a dam, you know. but that did begin to change in the late 1960s. and a lot of that had to do with a tva plan to dam basically every tributary of the french broad river in a massive project. (david whitmire) in the late 50s, the dam machine raised its head in transylvania county. the tva had proposed a series of dams that basically started in mills river and come all the way up the watershed with a series dams thatould hav definily impounded [sic] many of the communities along the french broad, silenced the second oldest river in the world.

(jere brittain) the communities affected, to name a few, would have been north, west, and east forks of the french broad, up in transylvania county. mills river, hoopers creek, cane creek, mud creek, little river, as well as the forks of ivy over in north buncombe. the swannanoa, which would have affected warren wilson college, among other things. well, the consequences would have been loss of farmland, loss of homes, loss of community centers, and churches. i think the total number is actually that would have been displaced by the project was around 3,500 people or 4,000 maybe. in every case, many of these families had been in the community for five or six generations. so the cultural impact would have been multiplied, i think, by the loss of the heritage aspect of these communities. interestingly enough, the first of the 14 dams they had selected, mills river, which was right on our doorstep. so the house where we were living,

an ancestral house, would have been taken by the reservoir as well as that of 60 or 70 other neighbors. so we were in the right place at the wrong time, or however you might want to state it. (ernst laursen) if the tva dams had gone in, the river is right there. and all this land, all the way to the barn down there would be at the barn, there'd be about ten feet deep, and all this and on the other side of the river, it would be full of water. there was an outcry of what people thought of this. it definitely would have taken the land that they used for making feed for the cattle. no question. to serve what? that is i think that the thing that got us all stirred up.

to serve what? (malnarrator) nature was prowling. the trouble was water; too much of it on one hand, not enough of it on the other. when the rains came, they inundated the flat lowlas of central and southern florida, overfilling the inland waters, flooding the rich soils, destroying crops, turning hard-earned farm profits into devastating losses, coveng towns ruining homes and businesses and roads, wrecking a desperate havoc that ran into millions upon millions of dollars a year. but we've got to control t water, make it do our bidding. this takes pumping stations, spillways, and dams all the way from the upper reaches of the kissimmee river basin, down to the southern tip of the mainland of florida. (maggy hurchalla) for people who thought they were civilized, as they moved into south florida, the first and most important thing in

everybody's mind, and probably best exemplified by napoleon bonaparte oward, an early governor of florida, back in the early 1900s was drain the swamp. and draining the swamps was about getting rid of malaria. draining swamps was about exposing south of lake okeechobee this fantastic flat muck to grow things on. draining the swamps was to keep you from getting flooded out when we had a hurricane, and we had a heavy rain a year, so they dug canals as fast ashey could dig canals. and the more civilized we got and the bigger the cranes we got, the more canals we built. so our first right on up probably until before world war ii was draining the swamp. (betty osceola) it wasn't until the later 1970s where we started getting notification about the water having too much mercury and not to drink or eat the fish from the water for more than once a week. so that kind of started changing our diet.

so we went from subsisting off the land to having to adapt to more store-bought foods. (connie washburn) the everglades has massive problems because of the polluted water full of nutrients that comes from lake okeechobee. we have an exceptional red tide over on the west coast that has killed an inordinate amount of sea life on the east coast. we have green algae sludge, which is extremely toxic, and it's not a matter of people drinking it. it's a matter of people can't even shower with that water. (marjory stoneman douglas) the wildlife, the birds and the animals and the snakes are an indication of conditions because while you ve the ldlife diminishing, as you do here in south florida, it means there are bad conditions that will also affect human beings.

(betty osceola) our elders told us that in our time of need, the everglades help hide us. it helped provide us food. it provided a shelter and comfort. now that she's in need, it's our turn to help protect her, to help shelter her, and to take care of her like she did to us. (david weintraub) a spark can start a forest fire. environmental devastation kindled the light in the early visionaries, leading to an outcry against the continued onslaught to mother earth and the long man. (wilma dykeman) but here was my river, a whole tributary thpigeon river. thwhole one whole tributary was killed by the pollution tha was dumped into it by a paper company. dead water came out with great chus as big as that piano, with white foam that came all the way down, and the odor along with it came down into tennessee. so i just said, "well,f i write

"this book, i have to have this chapter, "but i'll try to make it interesting. "i'll call it ho kille the frch broad?' and maybe they'll think it's a murder myery." well, it was a murder outright, but it wasn't any mystery. (robert morgan) this beautiful river, the french broad, heading in the mountains, flowing all the way down to the holston and the tennessee, was heavily polluted. one of the first persons i know of who becameoncerned aut the pollution of the water in western north carolina and east tennessee was wilma dyken, who in the early 1950s began studying and writing about issues of the environment and particularly the water. in 1955, she published her book on the french broad, which is a masterpiece. it's one of the most important books ever written about this region. wrote the french broad seven years before rachel carson wrote the silent spring ,

which had an enormous impact. she was the first person ever that i'm aware of to articulate that you can't have a good economy unless you have a good environment. (jim stokely) it would have been easy for her to take the easy way out and to say, "folks, we're okay." but there are some bad actors around, and the worst actor of all is champion fibre and paper. if we can just make them do right and become like us, we'll be fine. but she knew that was not true, because none of us was doing right. (millie buchanan) wilma dykeman certainly would be one of those heroes. she was seriously a champion, not just for the water quality, but for the whole environment. she was ahead of her time in thinking about the whole ecostem. (wilma dykeman) the french broad county is particulay a region of springs. e water of most) the of the brooks ounty

and streams and rivers they form is nearly as pure in its pristine state as wateran be. but when we turned away from this ring at the edge of the kiten yard and turned on the faucet in our porcelain sink, we turd off our interest. what came out of the spigot? one by one, we allowed ourselves and others to begin the rape, which finally in places ended in the murder of the french broad. and it has come about precisely because the headwaters were so pure. the sole blame for the rivers fouling could not be blamed to any onperson ogroup because it belongs to everyone. it's the possession of no one. (j stokely) i think be the thing that made some ne. of those early environmentalists, the john muirs going back there, the aldo leopolds, the wilma dykemans was their ability to inspire people to do better. the french broad has already, i think, stood the test of time as a timeless effication [sic] of a place,

and a culture, and a regio and i think that that book, as much as any, has established mother's place in envinmental inking, as well as regional respect. (david weintraub) back in east tennessee, wilma dykeman's legacy had inspired the rise of a river resistance by farmers, businessmen, and concerned citizens in towns throughout the region. (bobby seay) i announced that we were going to form a committee, and there's a little celebration on the river midnight, december 31 1996, and dubbed it the bell tolls for champion. we had over 100 people down there on the bridge in downtown newport. and as it happened, at midnight, the river was totally covered with foam and smelled. it was some malodorous that it smelled just like rotten eggs. there were people that actually

couldn't stay for the whole celebration. some of the ladies actually got sick. but that was the catalyst that actually started the movement with this county in east tennessee to really try to force champion to do the right, responsible thing. (jamie branam brown) and everything related to this community, it really comes down to this river. which side are you on? you're on the side of either not worrying about it, looking the other way, or being willing to be influenced by champion through money or resources or whatever they have to offer. then you're on the wrong side of cocke county. and if you're on the right side of the river, you're on the right side of cocke county, wanting it clean, wanting this to be right for our future generations. (jill hodges) once we could show that it wasn't just the river looks bad and it smells bad, but it is actually hurting us and killing us, a lot of people threw more support. even our county officials came on board. (dan pierce) particularly, once you get into the 1980s or so

when there started to be a lot of concern about dioxins and other cancer causing agents, and they started to do studies and look at cancer rates in cocke county. and there are probably a number of factors, but probably the condition of the pigeon river had some connection (news anchor) good evening, everyone it was a tough choice, but it w the right choice. that's what tennessee governor ned mcwhter says about his decision to deny a wastewater variance to canton's ampion paperill. today, the governor told reporters just how that tough decision was reacd. (n ned ray mcwherter or says he did a lot of studying and soul searching before shocking chaion and north carolina officials a few weeks ago. the company, the two states, and the epa had agreed on a compromise that would reduce the amount of color the agreement would keep the paper mill running and its 2400 employees on the job.