Zygmunt Plater

The Greatest Fish Tale Ever Told

This story may very well be a movie someday. In this episode of the Mother Earth Podcast we sit down with Professor Zygmunt Plater of Boston College Law School, who recounts his extraordinary journey seeking to save an endangered fish, a free-flowing river full of trout, family farms, and the ancestral Cherokee homeland.

You may have heard about the Tennessee Snail Darter and Zyg’s famous lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.TVA v. Hill is one of the most important environmental cases ever decided by America’s highest court.

But you simply will not believe the back story here. As a young, untenured law professor, Zyg and a ragtag army of law students and family farmers take on all three branches of the federal government and every corporate interest in the country that drinks from the public trough.Their battle to save the Little Tennessee River and the livelihoods of small farmers is an utterly epic tale full of twists and turns, replete with a presidential phone call from Air Force One. At one point, farmers trying to save their farms literally pass a hat around for spare dollar bills to fund the lawsuit while Zyg maxes out his credit card and then loses his job for his zealous pursuit of the case. His students sell T Shirts to raise money for the case. And while the lawsuit is ongoing,TVA tries to make it moot by bulldozing and burning farmhouses and barns to make way for a dam that makes no economic sense whatsoever.

Zyg recently wrote a book about this roller coaster of a legal thriller and I could not put it down. Moviemakers have begun looking into it.

Zyg's Supreme Court victory continues to stand as a bulwark of environmental protection. So it is no coincidence that right wingers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Roger Ailes and Devin Nunes continue to use the Snail Darter case to rail against the Endangered Species Act. In 2017, Senator Rand Paul and other Republicans introduced legislation to gut the law. And in 2019, the Trump administration announced new regulations that would weaken the Endangered Species Act and undercut Zyg’s historic legal victory. (See the show notes for this episode on our website for further info on how to help protect the Endangered Species Act).

Our in-depth conversation with Zyg comes in the midst of a full-blown extinction crisis that demands an end to habitat destruction, toxins and the climate crisis. Zyg remind us that our fellow creatures are canaries in the coal mine, that what befalls them ultimately befalls us too, and that good ecology is good economics.

And here is a special offer: the first ten listeners to make a donation to an environmental group protecting endangered species and to follow us on social media will receive a copy of the beautiful drawing of the Snail Darter that was Exhibit 12 at trial and handed out to the Justices of the US Supreme Court at oral argument, plus a Snail Darter T-Shirt just like the original fundraiser ones (depicting TVA as Jaws). For offer details please visit the show notes page for this episode on our website.

For People and Planet, thank you for listening,

Matt

(Please note that this episode was recorded prior to the pandemic.  Also a language warning: there are a couple F-bombs toward the end starting at 1:24:30 so if little kids are around you will want to use earbuds for a minute).