Hetch Hetchy and the Meanings of American Conservation

Robert W. Righter. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xxiv + 303 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Crashing and cascading, tumbling down mountains and flowing through forests, the waters of the Tuolumne River wind their way through California's Yosemite National Park, descending about 9,000 feet as they journey from the glacial peaks of Mount Dana and Mount Lyell to the Hetch Hetchy Valley, where, ever since 1923, the river has been stilled and impounded by the massive concrete structure known as O'Shaughnessy Dam. Two decades earlier, a proposal to construct the dam sparked a contentious battle, which was formally resolved in 1913 when Congress approved San Francisco's plans to turn the valley into a reservoir. But the controversy over Hetch Hetchy has never, even to this day, truly ended. During the early twentieth century, the raging debate would pull into its currents a multitude of local, regional, and national interests, stretching from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to involve a whole host of colorful characters, including Mayor James Phelan, President Theodore Roosevelt, and, above all others, the dueling doyens of American conservation: John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. In The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism, Robert W. Righter seeks to provide a new perspective on this legendary debate: first, by revising the standard interpretation of what the two sides were fighting over; and second, by extending his narrative to the present, to look at how the dam, even after its completion, continued to generate political and cultural conflict.

The familiar narrative of Hetch Hetchy, long considered a defining moment in American environmental history, goes something like this: in 1901, the city of San Francisco, desperately thirsty for a reliable source of water, set its sights on this remote valley located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Although many dams were constructed in the early-twentieth-century West without triggering any debate whatsoever, Hetch Hetchy would be different, for it was located inside the boundaries of a national park. Those who had visited the valley considered it at least as beautiful and impressive as the more fabled Yosemite Valley, for which the park was named. The battle over the dam would split the fledgling conservation movement into two camps: on one side, opponents of the dam like John Muir who valued the spiritual qualities of wilderness and wanted to preserve the valley in its pristine state; on the other, dam proponents like Gifford Pinchot who emphasized the ways nature could serve human society and believed the needs of the people of San Francisco trumped the aesthetic concerns of Muir.

This account of Hetch Hetchy received its most influential expression in Roderick Nash's 1967 Wilderness and the American Mind. Appearing at a fortuitous moment, three years after Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964, Nash's book was greeted with enormous acclaim and found its way to a broad general audience interested in the meanings of American wilderness. Within a sweeping narrative that encompassed over three centuries of thought, Nash devoted a pivotal chapter to Hetch Hetchy. He emphasized the stark division between those who wanted to preserve the sanctity of wilderness and those who wanted to dam the Tuolumne for the benefit of San Francisco. According to Nash, Hetch Hetchy marked the inaugural moment for the wilderness movement as a galvanizing force in American politics. Even though they lost their campaign to save Hetch Hetchy, wilderness advocates demonstrated that they could arouse public opinion in support of their cause. "For the first time in the American experience," he wrote, "the competing claims of wilderness and civilization to a specific area received a thorough hearing before a national audience."¹

In his introduction to The Battle over Hetch Hetchy, Righter admits that he had long...