Description:

In the wake of the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, the city of San Francisco desperately needed reliable supplies of water and electricity. Its mayor, James Phelan, pressed for the damming of the Tuolumne River in the newly created Yosemite National Park, setting off a firestorm of protest. For the first time in American history, a significant national opposition arose to defend and preserve nature, led by John Muir and the Sierra Club, who sought to protect what they believed was the right of all Americans to experience natural beauty, particularly the magnificent mountains of the Yosemite region. Yet the defenders of the valley, while opposing the creation of a dam and reservoir, did not intend for it to be maintained as wilderness. Instead they advocated a different kind of development--the building of roads, hotels, and an infrastructure to support recreational tourism. Using articles, pamphlets, and broadsides, they successfully whipped up public opinion against the dam. Letters from individuals began to pour into Congress by the thousands, and major newspapers published editorials condemning the dam. The fight went to the floor of Congress, where politicians debated the value of scenery and the costs of western development. Ultimately, passage of the passage of the Raker Act in 1913 by Congress granted San Francisco the right to flood the Hetch Hetchy Valley. A decade later the O'Shaughnessy Dam, the second largest civil engineering project of its day after the Panama Canal, was completed. Yet conflict continued over the ownership of the watershed and the profits derived from hydroelectrocity. To this day the reservoir provides San Francisco with a pure and reliable source of drinking water and an important source of power. Although the Sierra Club lost this battle, the controversy stirred the public into action on behalf of national parks. Future debates over dams and restoration clearly demonstrated the burgeoning strength of grassroots environmentalism. In a narrative peopled by politicians and business leaders, engineers and laborers, preservationists and ordinary citizens, Robert W. Righter tells the epic story of the first major environmental battle of the twentieth century, which reverberates to this day.

From The New Yorker

From 1901 to 1913, John Muir and the newly formed Sierra Club fought against the construction of a giant dam that would flood the majestic Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park, and, in the process, built the first nationwide environmental movement. The burgeoning city of San Francisco saw the dam as a solution to its chronic water problems (surrounded on three sides by salt water, it obtained all its fresh water from a monopoly) and as a way to generate cheap electricity. The environmentalists eventually lost the battle, but Hetch Hetchy became the rallying cry for many future victories, including the passing of the National Parks Act, in 1916. Muir's opponents could display a hysterical anthropomorphism—one said, "The mountains are our enemies"—but Righter's approach is unfailingly evenhanded and illuminates how the opposing ideologies formed in the Hetch Hetchy fight became the source of future environmental debates.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist

In this meticulously researched history, Righter examines the transformation of Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley from Sierra Nevada refuge to modern-day reservoir. Presented in the past as a fight between conservationists and big business, the Hetch Hetchy battle was actually over the valley's future as a site for water storage or a place to develop lucrative nature tourism. By the late 1890s, San Francisco politicians decided that the city should have a municipally owned water system, and that the water should come from a source in the Sierra Nevada. By 1901, San Francisco mayor James Phelan applied for reservoir rights in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Although the application was denied, opinions changed in the wake of the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. Righter employs dozens of characters--from naturalist John Muir to newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst--and follows the story from the completion of the dam in 1934 to the 1998 movement to restore Hetch Hetchy to create an engrossing chapter in the history of the American West. Rebecca Maksel
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