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A dam and its enemies

Budget cuts crippled efforts to manage Yosemite's wilderness as a public recreation area, and Yosemite was overrun by poachers, vandals, timber companies and profiteers.

By TOM PELTON
Published August 21, 2005

DAM!

Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation

By John Warfield Simpson

Pantheon, $28.50, 384 pp

Yosemite National Park is a beautiful land of betrayal. The name of the valley was taken from the Yosemite Indians, who were massacred and driven from their sacred home by the U.S. Army in 1851. Fifteen years later, Congress pledged to preserve the land as the world's first national park. But budget cuts crippled efforts to manage the wilderness as a public recreation area, and Yosemite was overrun by poachers, vandals, timber companies and profiteers.

And in 1923 the federal government allowed San Francisco to flood a 1,900-acre section of the park and raise a 30-story hydroelectric dam and 8-mile-long municipal reservoir. The drowning of the park's Hetch Hetchy Valley under 117-billion gallons of water is the subject of Dam! by John Warfield Simpson, a professor of natural resources at Ohio State University.

The argument over the dam pitted preservationists against conservationists. The father of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, a Yale-educated Easterner from a wealthy timber family, argued that public lands were not meant for birds and animals, but for the well-managed extraction of trees, minerals and water. The founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir, a self-made son of a Wisconsin farmer, preached that unique wilderness areas like Yosemite had spiritual value that transcended economics.

Muir's eloquent appeals won popular support, but did not sway the power brokers in Congress, who supported the more pragmatic need for a dam. President Wilson signed the law allowing the flooding on Dec. 19, 1913; Muir died of pneumonia a few weeks later.

Dam! succeeds when it illuminates the characters of Muir and Pinchot and articulates why their clashing world views remain so important today. But vast stretches of the work are too narrowly focused on the eye-glazing minutia of San Francisco's local politics. More troubling, Simpson's views on the environment are a caricature of the romanticism that has left the movement on the fringes of American politics.

Simpson argues that - after making an expensive error in building the dam - the government should spend another $2-billion to tear it down. But he fails to provide any evidence of continuing environmental harm caused by the dam. He is probably right that the dam should never have been built. But now that it has stood for 80 years, generates enough electricity to light 325,000 households and supplies power and water to much of the Silicon Valley, pulling the plug would cause more damage than just letting it stand as a monument to our nation's utilitarian soul.

-- Tom Pelton covers the environment for the Baltimore Sun, where this review first appeared. It was distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

[Last modified August 20, 2005, 11:16:03]