Hetch Hetchy O'Shaugnessy Dam (#0634)

I see a lot of downsides to Hetch Hetchy, but I wonder if the environmental movement in the mid-20th century ever would have taken off without it. You can trace the beginnings of a lot of environmentalist thinking to this dam, and the controversy set the Sierra Club on the course to becoming the power it was. I wonder if Hetch Hetchy hadn't been dammed whether there'd be a big dam right now in the Grand Canyon.

Sort of along those lines, Glen Canyon seems to have been a watershed (bad pun) moment for the environmental movement about 50 years later, though its remoteness didn't have as much an impact. It's also hard to separate out how much of the irritation about Hetch Hetchy is the ongoing ego battles in the state where just about everyone outside of the Bay Area doesn't like the Bay Area, partly because the Bay Area can be quite snooty. LA destroyed the Owens Valley and Mono Lake in multiple ways, but that doesn't seem to draw the ire that Hetch Hetchy does.

I only have the vaguest sense of how Californians look at each other and draw their in-state battle lines. I think on the national scale, people don't know (or really, care) that much about the difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles and the fact that each city hates the other. (We also tend to think they're about the same size.) We tend to see all Californians as the same batch of people and dislike them all in equal measure.

But I think the reasons people outside California are so much more vocal about Hetch Hetchy versus the Owens Valley is much the same reason people are so much concerned about the possible extinction of pandas versus the Sacramento Delta smelt. The pretty one wins. People have their preferred aesthetics and base their outrage levels on that. The Owens Valley was someplace some might consider attractive, but ultimately seemed kind of plain, whereas Hetch Hetchy was a stunningly beautiful corner of a national park. Personally, I'm going to react much more vehemently to an incursion, past or present, in a place we've gone to the trouble of setting aside for protection than I am to a place that's largely farmland. That isn't to say I like what Los Angeles did any better or think it has any less environmental impact. I've read (and written) plenty about it, and I've watched Chinatown five times. But I understand why one seems worse to many than the other.

Continuing my reply to David.....

An interesting theme coming up in the multiple articles about the 100th anniversary of the national parks is that it took the NPS a long time to realize the value of preserving places that were not as dramatic in appearance as Yosemite/Yellowstone/Kings Canyon/Grand Canyon