BusinessTN

When early conservationist Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” he wrote the playbook for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), a study in powerful diplomacy.

The Charlottesville, Va.-based nonprofit, which advocates environmentally responsible law and policy in six Southeastern states, may not have the Sierra Club’s grassroots appeal or Greenpeace’s media presence, but it’s the outfit others turn to when the going gets tough. It was the SELC who in 2001 picked up a flagging, two-year-old Clean Air suit against Duke Energy (and, by implication, against a White House reluctant to enforce federal protections), muscled it through the appeals process and delivered it to a conservative Supreme Court, who in April ruled with the SELC—unanimously.

As it enters its third decade, the center’s 30 attorneys are finding that the bigger the stick, the less they have to swing it. In Tennessee, that trend is manifest in issues of road building and what historically has been the state’s “pave at all cost” mentality, according to Trip Pollard, an SELC attorney based in Sewanee. (A 2003 study showed Tennessee spent more of its flexible federal funding on roads than did any other state.)

Five years ago, the SELC used the threat of litigation to stop construction of Nashville’s 840-S, which was forcing muddy runoff into local streams and the public water supply. Ultimately, the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) agreed to spend $10 million not only to redesign remaining 840-S construction but to develop a storm water policy statewide.

Meanwhile, Pollard grabbed a ground-floor opportunity with a new Bredesen administration at a critical juncture: With the Southeast the nation’s fastest-growing region, Pollard says, sprawl is outpacing smart-growth policy. Now he and TDOT are engaged in an ongoing dialogue about the definition of progress and the true cost of sledgehammer solutions to population pressures.

Ed Cole, TDOT’s chief of environment and planning, says the state is committed to the SELC’s language of “context-sensitive” roads, whose modest and flexible design is, in the long run, more cost-efficient than a one-size-fits-all stretch of highway. And he points to still-unfinished 840-S as proof that while “good economic development is not inconsistent with the construction of roads,” diplomacy should underlay new asphalt.

And effective diplomacy, Pollard says, should only rarely involve the word “no.” “For almost every project, there’s a good reason for it coming forward, be it a transportation bottleneck or the need for economic development. It’s just that often there’s a better way of doing things.”