The Department of Conservation was first created in 1937 by the State Government Reorganization Act of 1937.
TDEC is legally responsible for the protection of Tennessee's air, water, and soil quality.
The current commissioner is David W. Salyers, who was appointed in 2019 by Governor Bill Lee.
[4] In 2016 the environmental watchdog group, the Tennessee Clean Water Network, published a press release directed at the department's Division of Water Resources, claiming that the division, under the direction of the state's governor, had shown a significant drop-off in the number of penalties for businesses committing clear acts of water pollution.
The state issues a certain number of permits to businesses to pollute local water, and if those permit levels are exceeded, the state has the option to enforce a penalty, which it had largely decided not to do.