Save the Meramec

As a law student in the 1960s, I dipped into an anthology called The Law as Literature, which included an excerpt from Rebecca West’s scintillating coverage of the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker. Her example made me wonder whether it would be possible to bring literature to bear on a pending policy issue and carry the day. In 1975, six years after getting my degree, I was hoping to answer that question in the affirmative by recruiting another New Yorker writer to a cause I espoused.

My target was Berton Roueché, who had gathered several of his environmental articles into a book called What’s Left: Reports on a Diminishing America (1968). The report of most interest to me was “A Day on the River,” about a canoeing trip Roueché had taken on the Current River in Missouri, now part of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways but in need of preservation at the time of his visit. Growing up in St. Louis, I had canoed frequently on the Current, and I knew that before joining the staff of The New Yorker, Roueché had been a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In late February 1975, I wrote to him in care of his magazine about a threat to another Missouri river.

At the time, I was counsel to Nathaniel Reed, the assistant secretary of Interior who supervised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency primarily responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Signed into law by President Nixon in 1973, the act sought to protect animal and plant species slipping perilously close to extinction. It mandated the compilation of an endangered species list and prohibited federal agencies from taking any action likely to jeopardize the continued existence of an endangered species or to destroy its critical habitat.

The Army Corps of Engineers had in the meantime zeroed in on the Meramec River, which flows northeast from the Ozark Mountains to join the Mississippi just south of St. Louis. For the purposes of flood control and recreation, the Corps wanted to dam the Meramec, creating a 13,000-acre lake that would consign to watery oblivion a plethora of farms, bucolic landscapes, caves, and canoeing routes. Some of the caves were habitat for Myotis sodalis, the Indiana bat, which was on the endangered list. Although local residents and weekenders from St. Louis tended to prefer the river as it was, the dam was championed by labor unions for the construction jobs it would create; by chambers of commerce for the revenue it would bring from devotees of flatwater recreation (speedboaters, water skiers, resort owners, and the like); by land speculators anticipating a regional boom; and by the Meramec Basin Association, a lobbying group touting the lake as a driving force for economic stimulus. There was no doubt that the dam’s construction and operation would further endanger some Indiana bats, but thwarting a project with so much support was a tall order.

Like the Current, the Meramec meant something to me. One summer afternoon in 1961, three friends and I were playing cards at a picnic table overlooking the river when a drizzle of small, pale insects started falling. A fisherman identified them as mayflies, which spend most of their lives underwater before taking to the air, mating on the wing, and dying—typically within a span of 24 hours. When the drizzle became a blizzard, we retreated to our tents. The insect storm elevated the Meramec in my mind from weekend getaway to year-round incubator of Nature’s profusion, and 14 years later, I couldn’t stand by while a long stretch of the river and its environs were transformed into a monotonous artificial lake.

Not long after the Meramec file landed on my desk at Interior, the outlook for the river worsened. The Sierra Club had sued the Corps of Engineers for writing a shoddy environmental impact statement, but a judge ruled in favor of the Corps. What’s more, for one federal agency to take potshots at the work of another was both unusual and brash.