Instinctive inclinations to protect one’s back yard are going to have to be redefined if conservation and community organizations are to prevent a new Interstate highway from rampaging across Southern Appalachia.

These organizations also are going to have to resist natural inclinations to become their own worst enemies if the long, hard fight looming against “Interstate 3” is to succeed.

The back yard, for starters, is a whole lot bigger than many in the conservation community are used to dealing with – much bigger than a single ranger district, wilderness or wildlife management area, individual national trail, national forest, national park, stream, creek or wild and scenic river.

The proposed Interstate in question, pushed so far almost exclusively by several Congressmen from Georgia, is aimed at connecting Savannah (and its port) with Augusta, Georgia, (and the huge nearby Department of Energy nuclear complex called the Savannah River Site,) to Knoxville, Tennessee, (and its own federal nuclear facilities and the vast Interstate highway network that connects the deep South and its east coast to the Midwest.) The list of probable supporters includes trucking and trucking-dependent, big-box firms as well as the road-building lobby and the Georgia Department of Transportation, which is still mired in the old 20th Century mantra that only new pavement is progress.

There is no current preferred route for this vast clear cut, but several things are clear, no matter which alternative route is picked by the congressmen, the army of lawyer-lobbyists in the wings waiting to back them and the Georgia DOT and the Federal Highway Administration. To get from there to there, the proposed highway would have to cross over at least two national forests and countless sensitive areas and waterways, steamrolling a swath of territory three and one-third footballs fields wide in area that is enjoying a natural renaissance largely because it does not today have an interstate bisecting it in half.

Simply, all of Southern Appalachia is at risk.

Hugh Irwin, the well-known and soft-spoken senior planner for the Southern Appalachia Forest Coalition, put it this way last month before the more than 300 people who attended a public hearing in Murphy, N.C., to learn more about this roadway: “Wherever it would go …the mountain moving and the mountain sliding would bring profound changes to the landscapes and cause profound disturbance to the environment.”

Wherever the route goes between the Blue Ridge Escarpment and the Smokiest, he added, “the benefits do not outweigh the probable negatives that would occur with this road.”

Another speaker at the Murphy meet, Mary Olson, Southeast Office Director of the Asheville-based Nuclear Information & Research Service, told the hushed crowd that Southern Appalachia already finds itself at a “nuclear crossroads,” which would only become more crowded were I-3 built to completion. Interstates are used to transport nuclear waste from nuclear power plants, as well as nuclear weaponry material. (And it’s not for nothing that the I-3 proposal being championed largely by Rep. Charlie Norwood, the Augusta-area Republican congressman, is twinned with a proposal to run a second interstate, dubbed Interstate 14, from Augusta to Natchez, Mississippi. Nuclear shipments thus could run not only north and south, but also east and west.)

Finally, even the federal governments own studies suggest that Interstates in rural areas are no guarantee of economic advance, but, in some cases, even economic downturn (in stark contrast to the promise of economic Pablum being served up by likes of Norwood and former Rep. Max Burns of Statesboro, the original architect of the I-3 plans.)

(Burns, although defeated by Rep. John Barrow last November, is already running for re-election, dividing his time between his family arm in Sylvania, Georgia, and Washington, where he has morphed into a government affairs consultant for a law firm specializing in “government affairs,” among other areas.

(Although this move sounds very much like Burns walked through the traditional “revolving door” between government positions and government lobbying, his new employer, Thelen Reid & Priest LLP, skirted the issue in the announcement of his hiring.

(“While he is prohibited from lobbying the Congress for a period of one year, he will play a major role working with our staff of lobbyists and advising clients on policy issues related to agriculture, transportation, infrastructure and construction,” a Thelen Reid spokesman said.)

Meanwhile, the costs of building such infrastructure and Interstates in mountain territory are astronomical. For example, the North Carolina Department of Transportation projects the total cost of widening and tunneling 17 miles of roadway below the Great Smoky Mountains National Park at better than $600 million – or more than $35 million per mile! Some estimates peg the cost at interstate construction in mountain territory at a mere $25 million per mile. Whatever, the final cost to carve out a new 450-mile Interstate would be in the billions of dollars, at a time of escalating federal deficits.

In response, the people of Southern Appalachia mobilized rapidly to try to counter what they see as a very real threat to a way of life and the very special places they are lucky enough to call home.

Individual information and education organizations sprang up almost overnight to protest the Interstate 3 proposal, with Towns, White, Habersham and Rabun counties, Georgia; and Clay, Cherokee, Macon and Jackson counties, North Carolina, and residents of Oconee County, South Carolina and affected areas of east Tennessee jumping quickly into the fray.

County boards of commissioners in Habersham, Rabun and White counties, Georgia, promptly voiced their opposition to the proposed highway. Rabun, in particular, was getting an appalling preview of what vast road building entails, with ongoing widenings along U.S. 441 and U.S. 76. Mountains literally are being bulldozed, flattened and moved to make way for the paving machines. Nearby waterways, despite use of many silt fences, are running red with the ooze of crimson-colored Georgia clay.

Better than a dozen conservation groups, including ForestWatch, also have aligned themselves with the Stop I-3 Coalition, and other locales are expected to join soon.

The coalition bills, for now, bills itself as a loose confederation of interested groups and supporting organizations (see www.StopI-3.org for the latest line-up and the individual groups’ own web coordinates,) that boasts of a fast-growing mailing list of individual supporters, and its own information-packed website. The coalition is being coordinated by a strategy team lead by a chairperson, Elizabeth Wells of Sautee.

Coalition members are hanging together, realizing that if they do not pull in unison in opposition to this super-highway they will almost surely be defeated separately. The coalition, so far, successfully marshals groups that sometimes agree to disagree on details of specific conservation issues, or splinter in the not-so-gentle competition for new members and financial support. But there is little splintering this coalition, so far, other than from an occasional emotional appeal from individual politicians or editorial page writers hoping protect their own little back yards.

In fact, the coalition is growing bigger and stronger.

Friends of the mountains from near and far, from both the metro Atlanta area and mid-Atlantic states, have chimed in with ringing calls of support. They realize that much of the mountain territory at risk is the property of the federal government – and that they own it, too, both as taxpayers and as visitors to the very special places of Southern Appalachia. The Atlanta area also realizes that its drinking water supplies and the pristine mountain watersheds that feed them are at even greater risk from pollution and sedimentation if the Interstate proposal takes hold, and that no amount of new road-building will, by itself, solve Atlanta’s traffic woes.

This makes for a national network of Interstate opposition that will prove a mighty bulwark to the road machinations being hatched in the back rooms of Washington and Atlanta and Rep. Norwood’s private offices.

Augusta’s congressman began ducking and weaving on the Interstate during the Congressional recess last month, asking constituents and Republican party loyalists to hold their ire and fire until state and federal highway planners, in the words of the highway spending bill, “carry out a study and submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report that describes the steps and estimated funding necessary to construct a route” for both the proposed I-3 and I-14. The I-3 study, budgeted at a cost of $1.32 million, could take up to 24 months to complete, Norwood suggests.

But coalition members are holding the feet of the I-3 proponents to the fire and are not crawling into a silent corner to be hammered with this road two years hence.

The back yard at issue is one of regional and national proportion, too big for Southern Appalachia and its many friends to be sliced up by Interstate earth-moving machines.

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