More than three years after passage of the Endangered Species Act,¹ the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has proposed regulations² to implement §7,³ one of the strongest statutory mandates for environmental protection presently on the books.⁴ Less than two weeks after the §7 regulations were proposed, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision strictly enforcing §7's mandate.

In Hill v. Tennessee Vally Authority,⁵ the court directed that a permanent injunction issue to halt final work on the nearly-completed Tellico dam project and, in effect, remanded the issue to Congress to resolve. The Tellico project had already been the subject of two prior rounds of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) suits in the Sixth Circuit by environmentalists seeking to preserve the free-flowing nature of the river.⁶ The reason for the court's decision is that completion of the dam and impoundment of waters behind it would most probably lead to extinction of the snail darter, a fish listed as an endangered species by FWS⁷ and found only in the portion of the Little Tennessee River that would be backed up by the dam. In the court's view, this would clearly violate §7's prohibition against federal actions which jeopardize the continued existence of an endangered species or destroy its critical habitat.