Andrew Semenza - 2018 Near Scholar

2017-18 JOHN NEAR GRANT Recipient River to Reservoir: Changes in Philosophies of Environmental Preservation Argumentation in Relation to 20th-Century Dam-Building Andrew Semenza, Class of 2018

River to Reservoir: Changes in Philosophies of Environmental Preservation Argumentation in Relation to 20th-Century Dam-Building

Andrew Semenza 2018 John Near Scholar Mentors: Ms. Katy Rees, Mrs. Meredith Cranston, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan April 11, 2018

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The twentieth century saw some of the first battles of land conservation and preservation in American history. In 1891, Honorary Robert P. Porter, Superintendent of the United States Census, declared that “[u]p to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at the present the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.”1 Until it inevitably reached the Pacific, the westward movement of the American frontier obviated the need for conflicts over existing land as the land area of the United States was not yet fixed. Of course, the government did not shy away from evicting Native Americans from their lands far prior to the end of the 19th century, but there were few conservation conflicts. From Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 Yosemite Grant to Ulysses S. Grant’s declaration of Yellowstone as the first National Park in 1872, preservation of wilderness did occur, but there was little resistance from development groups.2 Preservation was largely preemptive: it would protect land before commercial interests might come into play.

Notably, the 1894 preservation of huge swaths of land in upstate New York State, consolidated as Adirondack Park, largely served to protect the watershed for commercial interests, not to protect the land from development. Nonetheless, the people of New York did support a clause written by the attorney David McClure in the 1894 State Constitution for the “higher uses of the great wilderness.”3 This phrase suggested the protection of land for some nebulous, non-utilitarian reason.

Yosemite National Park, designated as such by Congress in 1890, soon became iconic in its scenery, geology, and location critical to San Francisco, a city whose population was

1

Robert P. Porter, "The Eleventh Census" (speech, American Statistical Association, Boston, October 16, 1891).

2

Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 108.

3

Ibid., 120-121.

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exploding from the mid-century Gold Rush.4 With its growing needs in the early twentieth century, San Francisco looked to the Sierra Nevada for new water sources. San Francisco’s mayor, James Phelan, sought to glorify the burgeoning metropolis, and water would be essential to achieve such a goal. Even since 1890, Phelan had many times proposed a dam on the Tuolumne river, but the Hetch Hetchy Valley through which the river flowed was off-limits to utility development; it was only in 1908 that Secretary of the Interior James A. Garfield allowed San Francisco the development rights to the valley inside Yosemite National Park.5 In 1913, the Senate passed the Raker Act 43-25 allowing the valley’s development, and President Wilson signed the act on the 19th of December. Despite the proposal of multiple alternatives to the Hetch Hetchy Valley such as Lake Eleanor, San Francisco “dismissed or discarded other rivers and valleys that would have served them better [...] as if [Hetch Hetchy] was created for their purpose,” and John Muir’s death in 1914 at the beginning of the dam’s construction stole from the Sierra Club its leader.6 The dam, dubbed the O’Shaughnessy after its lead engineer, became the national symbol of environmental conflict. (See Figure 1).

4

National Park Service, "On October 1, 1890," National Park Service.

5

Robert W. Righter, The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 60.

6

Ibid.

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Figure 1. A map of the San Francisco, the Central Valley, and Hetch Hetchy Valley with the water supply system and elevation profile, 1925.

And so, Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park became the frontline for the first confrontation over wilderness preservation in American history. In modern parlance, the terms preservation and conservation are often conflated. Strictly, they refer to two disparate ways of thinking: conservation as the idea of sustainably utilizing land’s natural resources, and preservation as protecting land as it is for posterity. In considering land protection before the Hetch Hetchy debate, the two terms can largely be interchanged. As the Adirondack Park protection revealed, commercial and environmental interests were largely not at odds, so there was no reason to differentiate conservation and preservation. In the Hetch Hetchy debate,

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however, the clash of interests provoked a schism within environmentalists as a general group.7 With the proponents of developing the valley for public water supply pitted against the preservers of its scenic and innate charms, figures like Gifford Pinchot and Senator William Kent, opponents of unsustainable practices of old like clear-cutting, separated from the preservationists like John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. As Nash noted, the debate set these questions of the value of wilderness on the national stage: “For the first time in the American experience the competing claims of wilderness and civilization to a specific area received a thorough hearing before a national audience.”8 After the Spring Valley Water Company and San Francisco won the rights to build and completed the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley in the 1920s, the issue of land preservation inside National Parks did not spring up in a similarly public manner until after World War II during the proposal of the Echo Park and Split Mountain Dams in Dinosaur National Monument (DNM) by the Bureau of Reclamation as part of the comprehensive Colorado River Storage Project. (See Figure 2). Ultimately, environmentalists, led by the Sierra Club’s David Brower, in many ways an ideological to successor to John Muir, blocked both the dams in DNM. However, Brower, leading his members, allowed a great compromise, one he would rue to his death, to occur: Glen Canyon, miles downstream after the Green River flowed into the mighty Colorado, would be dammed in Echo Park’s stead. Crucially, Glen Canyon had no National Park protection, but as Brower later came to believe, its scenic beauty rivalled that of Echo Park and the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers. Even in the 1950s, the situation

The terms “environmentalist” and “environmentalism” here do not describe concrete movements as they would later signify; they are employed to describe a broad and not yet well articulated way of thinking about land.

7

8

Ibid., 162

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of a potential dam within a National Park reigned supreme, perhaps even more so than in the 1910s and ‘20s.

Figure 2. Map of proposed dams at Echo Park and Split Mountain in Dinosaur National Monumuent, Utah.

Harold Bradley, one of the key figures in fighting the dams, remarked that the arguments against the damming of Hetch Hetchy and Echo Park would be identical if only the names were changed.9 It may not have been so. Many have argued that Hetch Hetchy’s fall to utility interests was the sole spark in the success of the Echo Park Dam opposition, but in the three decades between these two integral debates, the attitude toward wilderness of the American public,

9

Righter, The Battle, 215.

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industry professionals, and activists shifted slightly, but fundamentally. As Michael Soulé and Reed Noss have noted, American conservation, at least of the preemptive variety, shifted from monumentalism to biological conservation throughout the twentieth century. 10 Particularly against utilitarian arguments, such a trend holds even more true in the context of twentiethcentury dam-building. Hetch Hetchy would reveal the failures of monumentalism. After the failure of the resistance against the O’Shaughnessy Dam in the 1910s, environmentalists' need for more utilitarian arguments for preservation and the development of ecology stimulated a shift from ideologies based on the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of nature to those based in greater part on the practical importance of wilderness.

The Wilderness and the Visual For Americans of the 19th century, the visual scope of the land before the eye was fundamental in determining the place of the landscape in the American consciousness. From the rise of the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements in the middle of the century, the value of wilderness remained tightly tied to aesthetic and spiritual qualities even into the beginning of the 20th century. Like in many European countries, wilderness had hardly any inherent worth in America before Romanticism.

Since the Puritans settled New England, wilderness remained an antagonist to the progress of American values, with the Puritan conception of wilderness as Satanic and evil stemming from Biblical roots. Roderick Frazier Nash noted: “wilderness retained its significance as the environment of evil and hardship where spiritual catharsis occurred. Jesus emerged from

10

Michael Soulé and Reed Noss, "Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation," Wild Earth, Fall 1998, 19.

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the wilderness prepared to speak to god.”11 William Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, lamented the isolation and difficulties of the early colonists: “Besides, what could they see but a hideous & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men? And what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pisgah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes.”12 Biblical passages even allude to the issues of water and conservation that flared up in the 20th century. As Nash noted, “To ‘give water in the wilderness’ was a way God manifested his care.”13 America fundamentally developed upon the backs of colonists who settled through religious fervor, at least in the Northeast. In many ways, New England served as a cultural nucleus for the expansion of the American state across the continent. After all, manifest destiny, the term bestowed upon this westward movement in the 19th century by John O’Sullivan in 1845, came to suggest the American people as God-chosen to develop westward through the arm of progress.14 When Americans sought to expand their dominion from coast to coast, the idea of civilizing the wilderness was not far behind the inexorable push of the frontier. In this way, manifest destiny also implied the improvement of the unruly wilderness into the godly pastoral, reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson’s philosophizing on the ideal of the American farmer upon his allotted plot of land. Early in “Self-Reliance,” many decades later, the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “no kernel of nourishing corn can come to [a man] but through his

11

Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 17.

12

Nash, Wilderness and the American, 14.

13

Ibid.

14

John L. O'Sullivan, "Annexation," The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July/August 1845, 5-6, 910.

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toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”15 Even well into the 19th century, this conception of land as a God-given right, a personal destiny, and a duty to improve to the pastoral ideal, persisted in the popular ethos.

In this way, a natural movement developed from this largely negative conception of wilderness: the pan-continental Romantic movement, situated in context of which were the uniquely American movements of Transcendentalism in writing and philosophy and the Hudson River School group of painters in visual art. Particularly in the Hudson River School, the visual aspect of the landscape became inextricably connected to its positive values and a spiritual import. Clarence Cook praised the British art critic John Ruskin in 1855 for his conception of art as the “mirror of nature” in his writings: “We love his love of nature, we love his love of God. He carries us along with him by his enthusiasm.”16 As Robert McGrath wrote in 2001, “there are today in the state and national parks and forests of the United States more topographic sites named after painters than in any other country in the world….[N]o other nation on earth has paid such high and enduring tribute to its cultural elite in the designation of scenery.”17 The undeveloped land of the West thus became the landscape, the vision of the land itself in the eyes of Americans.

The Transcendentalists affirmed the spiritual power of nature in their writings; critically, wilderness could give life and vitality to humans, not suck it away. Indeed, John Muir’s favorite works of literature were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal Transcendentalist essay, Nature, and

15

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," 1841, in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, ed. Nina Baym, 7th ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 1:269.

16

Robert L. McGrath, Art and the American Conservation Movement, 32, 2001.

17

Ibid., 33.

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the Bible.18 John Muir, the pivotal figure in the preservation of the American wilderness landscape, was thus inextricably connected to the exaltation of the aesthetic and the spiritual in wilderness. These values became the replacements for previous Puritan gravity with which settlers had approached their natural milieu. Nonetheless, the Puritanical fear of the wild persisted far into the twentieth century in the fringe communities of the American frontier, a nascent rural-urban cultural divide. For those living on the fringes of civilization, the wilderness certainly needed water. Such was the fundamental difference between the coastal classes appreciative of the unwetted wilderness and the rural locals themselves.

In San Francisco, the project of the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley between 1913 and 1923 became the symbol of development, of affirming the power of human civilization. Writing in 1922, M. M. O’Shaughnessy, the San Francisco city engineer and mastermind of the Hetch Hetchy Project, expected that the San Francisco Bay Area’s population would surpass four million in a century, and thus a water system carrying at least four hundred million gallons daily would be necessary after the population explosion since the Gold Rush of 1849.19 In the preservation movement’s rebuttals–led by John Muir and the Sierra Club–against the arguments for the O’Shaughnessy Dam and support for the valley in its present state, emotional subjectivity and nebulous claims featured prominently. Perhaps Muir’s most famous quip to endure from the debate was a line from his 1912 book The Yosemite: “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple

18

19

Nash, Wilderness and the American, 124.

M. M. O'Shaughnessy, "The Hetch Hetchy Water Supply of the City of San Francisco," Journal (American Water Works Association) 9, no. 5 (September 1922): 743.

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has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”20 For Muir, the valley was directly connected to a higher spiritual role; indeed, the beautiful valleys were themselves religious spaces, not merely symbolic. In Muir’s exaltation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, he allowed room for the dam’s proponents to later redefine what ought to constitute positive usage: “It is incredible that the people will tolerate the destruction of any part of the great Yosemite Park, full of God’s noblest handiwork, forever dedicated to beneficent public use.”21 Such ambiguity–and subjectivity–in tone allowed the dam’s supporters to take utilitarian stances. In his discussion of John Muir and William Kent, an early preservationist ally of Muir’s in the political sphere who later supported the dam, Nash suggested the importance of such subjectivity of “public beneficence,” arguing that the debate was less a question of “conservationists” versus “exploiters,” but rather a “conflict of diverse interpretations of the meaning of conserving natural resources.”22 In many ways, Muir did not fully distinguish between wilderness parks and artificial parks: “Witness the magnificent wild parks of the west, set apart and guarded for the highest good of all, and the thousands of city parks made to satisfy the natural taste and hunger for landscape beauty that God in some measure has put into every human being…”23 Just as the Hudson River School and government had celebrated westward movement and progress as the mission of a God-given manifest destiny, Muir believed the consumption of wilderness to be a God-given right to humans. The highest purpose of wilderness, to Muir, was this “landscape

20

John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912), 262.

21

Carolyn Merchant, Green versus Gold: Sources in California's Environmental History (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), 291.

22

Roderick Frazier Nash, "John Muir, William Kent, and the Conservation Schism," Pacific Historical Review 36, no. 4 (November 1967): 433, doi:10.2307/3636776.

23

Ibid, 288.

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beauty,” a natural form so perfect it affirmed his religious values. In the highly religious America of Muir’s era, such language would have struck a chord with much of Muir’s audience, too.24 Since the National Park Service had not yet come into being, the concept of the National Park existed independent of the system of which it would later become a part, meaning that Muir’s conflation of different types of parks would have allowed for the definition of a reservoir in lieu of Hetch Hetchy Valley as a park too.

On his more scientific side, Muir was also versatile naturalist, not simply an emotional ideologue. In a letter to Robert Underwood Johnson, a friend and supporter of the Sierra Club, Muir dubbed himself a “poetico-trampo-geologist-bot. and ornithnatural, etc!–!–!–!”25 Even in this jammed jumble of terms, Muir conflated his identities as poet and scientist studying the land and its denizens. In fact, Muir, the amateur–he never studied the sciences formally and was a foreigner to the scientific establishment–proved Josiah Whitney, the preeminent geological scientist of the region, incorrect when it came to the geological formation of Yosemite Valley, proposing glacial transformation as the mechanism, having come to understand “during the very first year of his residence in the Valley [...] that it had not been formed by a cataclysm, but by long, slow, natural processes in which ice played by far the major part.”26 In response, Whitney declared Muir a “mere sheepherder” and “ignoramus.”27 Muir even alluded to painting in one of his letters describing an excursion in Hetch Hetchy: “Meadows grassed and lillied head-high, spangled river reaches, and currentless pools, cascades countless and unpaintable in form and

It was twelve years after Muir’s death that the Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in 1926, often considered a marker of the overwhelming power of organized religion in the pan-American consciousness.

24

25

Nash, Wilderness and the American, 122.

26

William F. Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917.

27

Ibid.

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whiteness, groves that heaven all the Valley!”28 In his portrayal of cascades as “unpaintable,” Muir defined a positive quality of nature as not being able to be fully defined within the pictorial plane, that wilderness could transcend human representations, a thought somewhat contrary to more 19th-century conceptions of the visual wilderness. Notwithstanding his lavish descriptions of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in works like The Yosemite, much of Muir’s argumentation during the debate over the O’Shaughnessy Dam focused on more subjective Romanticized qualities of nature that harkened back to the artistic and philosophical movements of the mid 19th century rather than tabulating or exalting the biodiversity of the region or the pragmatic benefits of the valley as a wilderness space.

To be sure, as a spokesperson, Muir was perhaps the most influential figure of the debate, leading the opposition to the dam through the Sierra Club. In his letter to Representative Sydney Anderson of Minnesota, William Kent addressed what he saw as Muir’s fanciful preservation goals: “I hope you will not take my friend, Muir, seriously, for he is a man entirely without social sense. With him, it is me and God and the rock where God put it, and that is the end of the story.”29 Muir’s fascination with the present condition of nature and wilderness as a psychological concept overwhelmed his studies of nature as an extra-human force when he argued for the preservation of the land in its current condition. Although the Yosemite region had long been inhabited by native peoples, John Muir could not include them in his conception of the land despite valuing their work wrought upon the land, such as the controlled burning of the Hetch Hetchy Valley.30 As Daniel Duane noted of Muir, “the Indians he saw on trails struck him

28

John Muir to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, July 6, 1872.

29

William Kent to Sydney Anderson, July 2, 1913, Box 26, KFP.

30

Daniel Duane, "Goodbye, Yosemite. Hello, What?," The New York Times, September 2, 2017, Sunday Review.

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as filthy, and he was pretty sure nothing natural is ever filthy, so he concluded that they must not be natural [..] it allowed him to imagine the Sierra Nevada not as a deeply human landscape with centuries of cultural history but as the one thing he craved most, a place of spiritual purity.”31 Just as Muir chose to exclude native peoples from his wilderness conception, he sought to exclude future human influences, particularly the O’Shaughnessy Dam. While other less famous opponents of the dam argued for the practical utility of the valley as a place for camping and tourism, perhaps Muir chose not to simply for the reason that they too represented the unclean force of human civilization upon the pristine environment.

Others, too, espoused this conception of wilderness as “spiritually pure.” Henry E. Gregory, the head of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society described wilderness “as an educator of the people and as a restorer and liberator of the spirit enslaved by Mammon.”32 By declaring Mammon, the devil of covetousness in the medieval sense, a threat to Americans, Gregory invoked a moral conflict around wilderness deeply entangled with its spiritual significance. In this sense, civilization exerted a negative force that tainted the spirituality of humans in a manner exactly the opposite of the Puritans’ ideology that it was wilderness itself that wrought this Satanic or demonic force.

With much of the resistance to the O’Shaughnessy Dam predicated upon this valuation of wilderness based on its spiritual cleanliness and aesthetic features, the dam’s supporters found it easy to support their own claims for the dam with those very same values, as well as what they regarded as the inarguable pragmatic benefit: San Francisco must have water. In Nash’s words, “Kent’s problem was that the necessity to decide about Hetch-Hetchy left no room for an

31

Ibid.

32

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 60th Cong., 2d Sess. (1909).

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expression of his ambivalence. The valley could not simultaneously be a wilderness and a publicly owned, power-producing reservoir.”33 Kent, a senator otherwise supportive of preservation, symbolizes the political plight of so many of his colleagues who argued over the Raker Act. From a conservationist perspective, land was necessarily a human resource. Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt’s inimitable Chief of the Forest Service, opined that the “‘fundamental principle of the whole conservation is use’ … no ‘reasonable argument against the use of this water supply by the city of San Francisco.’”34 William Kent agreed, suggesting that he would use up Niagara falls if it could solve humanity’s water shortages.35 James Phelan, mayor of San Francisco, argued that “[a] large number of [San Francisco’s] population has been lost to Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley, by reason of the fact that [it has] never had adequate facilities either of transportation or of water supply to meet what would otherwise be a demand for residences on the peninsula.”36 For Phelan, the development of San Francisco, endangered by the dearth of resources, overshadowed the fate of any Sierra valley, not entirely that close considering the transportation of the era. Certainly, Phelan looked to profit enormously personally and politically from the building of a dam.

Additionally, the dam’s proponents sought to neutralize the detractors’ arguments by countering what they regarded as fanciful arguments speculation, quite different from the manner in which Muir compared flooding Hetch Hetchy to flooding the Sistine Chapel. Phelan even

33

Nash, "John Muir," 433.

34

Hetch Hetchy Dam Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 63d Cong., 1st Sess. (1913).

35

Nash, Wilderness and the American, 431.

36

Hetch Hetchy Dam Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 63d Cong., 1st Sess. (1913).

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went so far as to counter the arguments against the destruction of beauty by promising the reintegration of the artificial construction into the environment: “Constructing a dam at this very narrow gorge [...] we create not a reservoir but a lake, because Mr. [John] Freeman has shown that by planting trees or vines over the dam, the appearance of the dam is entirely lost.”37 Indeed, Director of the Bureau of Reclamation Frederick H. Newell testified that he appreciated the beauty of dams: “Now, on the question that has come up, touching the destruction of the natural beauty of the valley, I will say that, having been concerned with the building of many large reservoirs, I have naturally come to believe that there is nothing more beautiful than a well-built dam with a reservoir behind it.”38 By suggesting the possibility of hiding the artificial qualities of the dam, proponents affirmed what they viewed as the opposition’s frivolous love of nature: To both sides, the naturalism or artificiality of a location was fundamentally embedded in the view of the place, not in any less tangible qualities. To be natural was to be scenic.

Newell’s exaltation of reservoirs as reservoirs of artificial beauty continued in some ways into the 1950s, particularly in the field of mining. In 1959, Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit mine in Minnesota began to be considered a beautifier of the environment, ultimately dubbed by the the Hibbing Chamber of Commerce the “Man-Made Grand Canyon.”39 Again, though many of the dam’s opponents were amenable to compromise and simply saw the damming of the Tuolumne in Hetch Hetchy Valley as an unnecessary affront on nature, their conception of nature proved catastrophic in their aims. When Robert Underwood Johnson

37

Ibid.

38

Ibid.

39

Richard V. Francaviglia, "Mining and Landscape Transformation," in The American Environment: Interpretations of past Geographies, ed. Lary M. Dilsaver and Craig E. Colten (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 107108.

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wrote in his testimony, his claims could easily seem frivolous and ungrounded in reality: “I am aware that in certain quarters one who contends for the practical value of natural beauty is considered a “crank,” and yet the love of beauty is the most dominant trait in mankind….Without this touch of idealism, this sense of beauty, life could only be a race for the trough.”40 Johnson included but one line in his letter expressing concern at the fate of National Parks at large, following it with some lofty jabs at materialism and an allusion to the moral degradation of the country: What is at stake is not merely the destruction of a single valley, one of the most wonderful works of the Creator, but the fundamental principle of conservation [...] One has only to look about to see the rampant materialism of the day [...] The very sneers with which this type of argument is received are a proof of the need of altruism and imagination in dealing with the subject. The time has not yet come to substitute for our national motto those baleful words, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”41 For the dam’s proponents, “rampant materialism” and the wont of “altruism” hardly seemed as pressing as San Francisco’s need for a major water source. In Robert Righter’s estimation, Muir might have saved the Hetch Hetchy valley “for all time” if he had been more willing to compromise by allowing Lake Eleanor’s development first, extending the time frame of the Hetch Hetchy project for years to come.42 In that way, it was not just Muir who was incapable of

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid.

42

Righter, The Battle, 69.

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taking a pragmatist’s approach to the valley’s conservation: It was all of his followers in his spiritual quest whom he inspired.

Continuation of Aesthetic Valuation in the Echo Park Era Even in the 1950s, allusion to biblical scenes and the exaltation of nature’s scenic beauty remained prominent in both sides of conservation debates, perhaps becoming even more so in the argumentation of those advocating for dams such as the ones proposed at Echo Park and Split Mountain in Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument. Far more so than Hetch Hetchy Valley, located within the nationally recognized and loved space of Yosemite, Echo Park was not well known, situated within the borders of Dinosaur National Monument, a national park that remains obscure in the public eye to this day. Raising public awareness for the fight ongoing over the canyon’s fate was thus critical in rallying support for the preservation of the site, and it was in this aspect of the movement that the valuation of a wilderness location’s aesthetic appeal endured.

In exalting the charms of Echo Park, the preservationists relied heavily on the legacy of Hetch Hetchy Valley. David Brower, the director of the Sierra Club and in large part a successor to Muir’s persona, produced in 1955 the film Two Yosemites, an image-based condemnation of Hetch Hetchy’s damnation four decades prior. Throughout the film, Brower recounts San Francisco’s promises, none of which were fulfilled. Importantly, the camera pans to scenes of death and desolation, focusing on the “dead zone” left by the fluctuations of the water. A few shots focus on the wasteland of stumps laid bare in the silt at the reservoir’s head. This scene bore striking contrast to the photographs of Joseph “Little Joe” Nisbet LeConte from before the dam which the club also circulated. (See Figures 1 and 2). Philip Hyde, the same photographer who captured scenes of the wasteland of stumps exactly like those shown in Two Yosemites, also

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photographed Steamboat Rock in Dinosaur National Monument, an area of the Green River that would be flooded by the proposed dam. (See Figures 3 and 4). The film’s very nature as a visual work affirmed the importance of scenery for the movement, and Brower, the ultimate aesthete, loved the flowers and trees. Even more so, the visual elements of the film temporally and emotionally connected the canyons of Dinosaur National Monument with those of Yosemite National Monument. By way of these still and motive images, DNM, however unknown in the real world, rose out of its obscurity: Just like the paintings of the Hudson River School became the landscapes they depicted, Brower’s film and Hyde’s photographs become real symbols of the pristine wilderness in Utah. In that way, it mattered not how many visitors DNM had each year when the public, connected to the wilderness through these imaginal representations, could visit through their imaginations.

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Figure 1.

Figure 3.

Figure 2.

Figure 4.

Figure 3. Joseph Nesbit LeConte, Hetch Hetchy from Surprise Point, photograph.

Figure 4. Two Yosemites, directed by David Brower, Sierra Club, 1955.

Figure 5. Philip Hyde, Hetch Hetchy Field of Stumps, 1955, photograph.

Figure 6. Philip Hyde, Steamboat Rock, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, 1955, photograph.

In John McPhee’s 1971 biography of Brower, Encounters with the Archdruid, Brower wonders whether a mine in the Glacier Peak Wilderness would “affect anyone who looks at Glacier Peak….Good Lord! The mood would go. Wilderness defenders have to get into abstract

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terms like mood and so forth, but that is what it is all about.”43 Brower, like Muir, was not amenable to compromise and rued his great compromise, sacrificing Glen Canyon to save Echo Park, to his death. Indeed, Brower considered Glen Canyon anthropomorphically: “On January 2, 1963, the last day on which the execution of one of the planet's greatest scenic antiquities could yet have been spared, the man who theoretically had the power to save the place did not.”44 Brower’s language – “execution” and “scenic antiquities” – implies a concrete emotional attachment he felt to those places, and it was that very emotionality that imbued those same places with value.

Some of the anti-dam material produced by the Council of Conservationists extended the sanctity of scenery to the National Park system as a whole, such as the famous pamphlet “Will you DAM the Scenic Wild Canyons of our National Park System?”45 Bernard DeVoto penned an article in the Saturday Evening Post titled “Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?”46 The first argumentative section of the article, “Here is One of Our Great Scenic Areas,” begins with a lengthy description of the region’s aesthetic charms: Before entering Lodore Canyon, the Green flows tranquilly through a mountain meadow called Brown's Park. At the lower end of the canyon it emerges into another beautiful, high-walled valley which Powell named Echo Park. Massive rock formations rise from the floor of Echo Park, and here the Yampa River flows into the Green from the east, having just emerged from a narrow, twisting canyon wholly unlike Lodore, but equally overpowering. The Green then flows westward through two more canyons. The setting of

43

John A. McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 39-40.

44

David Brower, "Let the River Run through It," Sierra Club.

45

Referenced widely as a source in the literature. Since the document was a print pamphlet, the sourcing is unclear.

46

Bernard DeVoto, "Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?," The Saturday Evening Post, July 22, 1950, 17.

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these four canyons is a landscape of brilliantly colored, fantastically eroded mesas, buttes, mountains, gulches and high basins. A panorama of fantasy, overwhelming to the imagination, this high rock desert has certain resemblances to the Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon country and to Cedar Breaks, all in Utah, and to the setbacks and vistas of the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona. But as each of these tremendous spectacles is, it is unique, of its own individual character and quality. It is one of the great scenic areas of the United States.47 DeVoto’s choice to employ the phrase “panorama of fantasy” explicitly references the visual; as Richard White has noted, “What counts as being worth preserving very often is what can be encompassed in a single sweeping view.”48 A map of western National Parks in DeVoto’s article is captioned “[t]he great National Parks were created by Congress to conserve the scenery and leave it unimpaired.”49 However, the actual Act to Establish the National Park Service describes the purpose of National Parks more broadly: “[…] the fundamental purpose of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, [...] is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”50 This small discrepancy in definition in a figure’s caption nonetheless suggests the larger persistence of the conflation of wilderness value with scenic value.

47

Ibid., 18.

48

Richard White, e-mail message to author, December 13, 2017.

49

DeVoto, "Shall We Let Them," 18.

50

Act to Establish a National Park Service (Organic Act), Pub. L. No. 64-235, 39 Stat. 535 (Aug. 25, 1916)., 39 Stat. 535 (Aug. 25, 1916).

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On the other side of the debate, the dam’s proponents sometimes sought to affirm the necessity of dams with the same biblical allusion that the opponents of the O’Shaughnessy Dam employed. In the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) Hearings, Utah Senator Wallace F. Bennett testified that “If the prophet Moses and the legendary King Midas were to appear in the State of Utah, there is little doubt whom we would follow. There might be a handful who would prefer the touch of gold. But the multitudes would follow Moses, preferring that our rocks bring forth life-giving water rather than that they be turned to gold.”51 To Bennett, as well as many of his constituents and other inhabitants of the dry West, water had such a power that it verged upon the religious.

A Shift Toward Empiricism in Argumentation Over the course of the first half of the 20th century, new developments in scientific fields broadly encapsulated under the term “ecology” began to proliferate, both in theory and practice, and the popularization and publicization of these concepts affected a fundamental change in the core of wilderness preservation. The Hetch Hetchy debate occurred largely before the blossoming of ecology in America; it was not until 1935 that the British scientist Arthur Tansley even coined the term “ecosystem.”52 A utilitarian rationale for wilderness preservation existed long before the 1930s, however.

Adirondack Park’s preservation at the close of the 19th century developed from landowners’ and developers’ fears of a watershed ruined by logging.53 Although New York’s state constitution included the “Forever Wild” clause promoting “higher uses” of wilderness, this precedent

51

Colorado River Storage Project: Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation, 83d Cong., 2d. Sess (1954).

52

Environment and Ecology, "History of Ecology," Environment and Ecology.

53

Nash, Wilderness and the American, 118.

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remains an important indicator of the early basis for preservation: “The lands of the State, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands [...] nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed.”54 With New York’s population rapidly increasing, many inside and outside of government worried that the timber industry would too quickly diminish resources in the state’s many forests.

Muir himself, as a naturalist, studied the geology, flora, and fauna of the Yosemite region widely and was certainly acquainted with the value of Yosemite as a place in which one might study natural phenomena. Muir’s development of the correct theory of glaciation affirmed his legacy as a naturalist as well as an activist; indeed, his activism perhaps undermined the core tenets he was seeking to uphold by engaging in political struggle at all. As Robert Righter argues, Muir’s unwillingness to allow San Francisco to explore Lake Eleanor before Hetch Hetchy while keeping Hetch Hetchy as a possibility in perhaps a half-century might have derailed his crusade against the O’Shaughnessy Dam: Muir’s religious fervor for the preservation of the valley in its exact form might have been the very reason for its demise.55 Even at the beginning of the 20th century, the rationale for wilderness preservation as a necessary means to protect recreational spaces for humans emerged. A letter from New Hampshire’s Graffort Club against the Raker Act posits that “[t]he need for great public playgrounds is becoming vastly greater than diminishing,” of concern since the proposed reservoir would remove Hetch Hetchy Valley as a camping area.56 Many residents of the East

54

N.Y. Const. art. VII § 1.

55

Righter, The Battle, 69

56

Anne F. Howard to Jacob H. Gallinger, "Resolution from the Graffort Club of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, against Granting San Francisco the Hetch Hetchy Valley," February 4, 1910.

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Coast envisioned a grand sense of American recreation. For instance, Aldeh Sampson imagined far more people enjoying the park, often for extended periods: “We must also consider that there will be hotels there; there will be a great traveling public that will come in. There will be roads and trails in every direction, with small hostelries where people may be put up overnight, and there will be millions of people in the future who will enjoy the satisfaction of going through the park….[the reservoir] would injure the country tremendously for travelers, because the grass in the park is a very scarce article [for camping].”57 Nonetheless, arguments like this one often appeared as fanciful, considering the relative scarcity of visitors to Hetch Hetchy Valley in the early 20th century–even many of those testifying on the valley’s behalf had never seen Yosemite for themselves.58 Thus, this East Coast elite seemed fundamentally disconnected from the concrete concerns of San Franciscans; for them, the landscape was still a landscape, something to be looked at in painting or in person.

Robert McGrath cites this trend as “monumentalism,” with Acadia National Park’s establishment in 1919 the last bastion of this rationale for preservation, exactly contemporaneous with the Hetch Hetchy debate.59 In this way, Hetch Hetchy was perched on the edge of a historical divide; the arguments implemented largely relied on this monumentalism in a time when it was becoming obsolescent. Almost exclusively, this described shift has referred to preemptive conservation: conserving or preserving land before or while threats arise. However, dambuilding, a practice that threatens already preserved lands such as Yosemite National Park or

57

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 60th Cong., 2d Sess. (1909).

58

Ibid.

59

McGrath, Art a nd the American, 65.

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Dinosaur National Monument, provides a somewhat different setting for the move away from monumentalism.

As the historian Alfred Runte has argued, a shift occurred during the protection of Everglades National Park in the 1930s; McGrath calls it “a turn from painting to biology or from a museum to a sanctuary.”60 If the axis of preservation did shift thus from “monumentalism” to “environmentalism,” the development of ecology provides an answer for a motivator of this innate shift. In his 1943 essay “Wildlife and American Culture,” Aldo Leopold remarked upon the recent development of the science: The last decade, for example, has disclosed a totally new form of sport, which does not destroy wildlife, which uses gadgets without being used by them, which outflanks the problem of posted land, and which greatly increases the human carrying capacity of a unit area. This sport knows no bag limit, no closed season. It needs teachers, but not wardens. It calls for a new woodcraft of the highest cultural value. The sport I refer to is wildlife research.61 Aldo Leopold’s introduction of this “new” form of scientific enquiry drew explicitly from the American recreational tradition of hunting. In this way, Leopold recognized the importance of hunting in American society, and by connecting wildlife research in such a manner, he construed the science as a way of respecting the wildlife and biota of an ecosystem at large.

Leopold openly acknowledged the fallacy of conservation based solely on economic principles, noting that much of land would not be economically fruitful.62 Nonetheless, although

60

61

Ibid.

Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac; And Sketches Here and There., new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 156.

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he did support a slight removal from classical utilitarianism, Leopold upheld scientific principles in “The Land Ethic,” arguing that “if creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.”63 In the context of the Echo Park debate just a couple decades later, the damming of the Green River would clearly serve as a disruption of the ecosystem’s integrity. Admittedly, the dam’s opponents hardly explicitly linked their arguments to Leopold’s philosophies, but their impact was circumstantial: Conservation became much more rooted in preserving the integrity of an ecosystem than the integrity of a landscape.

These developments in the fields of ecology paralleled and sometimes begot a proliferation of conservation and preservation organizations not wholly rooted in aestheticism, but rather environmental protection, particularly of wildlife. New, more recreationally- or ecologically-focused groups emerged and began to proliferate. The Izaak Walton League was founded in 1922 to conserve natural resources for the future with uses like recreation. 64 On the ecological side, the Audubon Society, was founded in 1905 for the protection of birds. 65 Together, these two organizations exemplify this new line of thinking focused on conserving the components of an ecosystem. Whereas scattered associations like women’s clubs or other socially-oriented groups opposed the O’Shaughnessy Dam, organized civilian resistance became far more environmentally oriented after the Hetch Hetchy debate, exceeding merely Muir’s Sierra Club and Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club.

62

Ibid.

63

Ibid.

64

Izaak Walton League of America, "About Us," Izaak Walton League of America.

65

Audubon Society, "About Us," Audubon.

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In the preservationists’ opposition to the Echo Park Dam in the 1950s, then, the flora and fauna and artifacts of the region formed a greater basis for their argumentation, which in of itself was far more empirical in nature than that of the O’Shaughnessy Dam’s naysayers. In the book This Is Dinosaur, a 1955 compilation of perspectives on the monument compiled by the novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner, Stegner himself portends that humanity itself, not just “the buffalo and trumpeter swan” would need a sanctuary in coming decades, and thus the best mark of humanity “is simply the deliberate and chosen refusal to make any marks at all [original emphasis].”66 In this line, Stegner, a member very much in his era of environmentalism, articulated a view similar to Muir, who also wished to avoid staining nature with humanity at all costs. However, Stegner supported this ideology for a distinct ecological cause: to provide habitat for other species. In this way, Stegner aligned himself with Leopoldian views of the Land Ethic: Humans ought to find their sustainable place in a larger ecosystem. Even regarding one dam on one river, Stegner referenced a much larger impacted ecological space.

Other sections of This Is Dinosaur imply the greater spectrum of conservation organizations. Olaus Murie and Joseph W. Penfold’s essay “The Natural World of Dinosaur” linked the thread of time from the demise of the dinosaurs who once inhabited the region to the wide variety of flora and fauna representing the ecosystem in the 1950s.67 In this way, the fate of the current ecosystem was inextricably linked to external forces, the tacit suggestion being that of the proposed dam.

Perhaps the preservationists’ greatest win came from the Great Evaporation Controversy, the argument over whether Echo Park was really so perfectly devoid of evaporation problems.

66

Wallace Stegner, ed., This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park and Its Magic Rivers (New York, NY: AlfredA. Knopf, 1955), 17.

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Since one of the dam’s proponents’ most important reasons for situating a dam within a National Park was what they argued was Echo Park’s uniquely low evaporation rates, the issue rose to the fore. When the dam’s proponents were throwing out figures in vast numbers affirming the necessity of the dam to provide for the Colorado River Basin’s water needs, even slight issues with the soundness of their data called into question the true need for the dam, particularly if it must be at Echo Park. The tragedy of Hetch Hetchy’s inundation was always just in sight.

When the opposition testified in the Colorado River Storage Project hearings, they made sure not to come across as fanciful, like the opponents of the O’Shaughnessy Dam often did.

Fred Packard’s testimony affirmed the importance of safeguarding the sanctity of the National Park system as a whole, but he made clear that he did not want to “impede[] the orderly development of the water resources of the Western states.”68 In this way, Packard and other opponents at least attempted to be viewed publically as amenable to compromise and the plights of drought-stricken regions of the West.

Undersecretary of the Interior Ralph Tudor had recommended to Secretary of Interior Douglas McKay to proceed with Echo Park as a dam site in 1953 due to the steepness of the canyon’s walls that would minimize evaporation.69 However, Tudor was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of the dam, his language in a letter to McKay mirroring that of William Kent decades before: “the alteration will be substantial and if conflicting interests did not exist, I would prefer to see the monument remain in its natural state.”70 Whereas many of the O’Shaughnessy dam’s supporters such as Frederick Newell had even argued for Hetch Hetchy’s

67

Ibid.

68

Mark W. T Harvey, A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 183.

69

Ralph Tudor to Douglas McKay, November 27, 1953, Box 1, Tudor Papers.

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improvement with a dam, Tudor himself had personal issues with building the dams in Echo Park stemming not from its location in a National Park, but rather from its own inherent aesthetic, natural beauty.

As Mark Harvey noted, David Brower’s decision to confront Tudor and the Bureau of Reclamation on their figures proving the suitability of Echo Park and Split Mountain as dam sites constituted a bold move not supported by his colleagues, but Brower’s language was clear: “If I am wrong, it must surely be because [Tudor] is wrong, and he is not supposed to be wrong in engineering matters or figures.”71 With the long tradition of dam-builders supporting their positions empirically with data demonstrating the reservoirs’ necessity, Brower’s calling into question the Bureau of Reclamation’s figures represented a significant shift in preservationist argumentation. In past debates, the preservationists would uphold the abstract values of nature while the dam-builders would mock their frivolity before the Senate while bringing up indisputable data. By arguing in the same register of discourse as the Bureau of Reclamation, Brower grounded his side’s argument in the very same empirical fact that the Bureau employed: the arguments were comparable. Although Brower was eventually lambasted by the Bureau’s engineers for using incorrect math, his questioning of the figures both extended the hearings for more months, allowing the profile of Dinosaur National Monument to increase in the everimportant public eye and shifting the paradigm of argumentation to an at least partially empirical model. Perhaps this burgeoning development was best articulated by Benton MacKaye in his article “Dam Site vs. Norm Site” in The Scientific Monthly, in which he argued for ecologists to create a “currency” on par with that of water engineers so that they might speak the same

70

Colorado River Storage Project: Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation, 83d Cong., 2d. Sess (1954).

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technical language.72 However correct Brower’s reasoning was, it was nonetheless in this vein: Before, conservationists and hydraulic engineers had occupied separate spheres, the spiritualaesthetic and the pragmatic, from the 1950s onward, they would debate within the same combined sphere, one in which the physical and psychological benefits of wilderness were not so separate. Wilderness became an ecological, a scientific concept.

The O’Shaughnessy and proposed Echo Park dams stand as two remarkably similar developments of water usage in the first half of the 20th century, separated superficially by the success of the first and the failure of the second–although Glen Canyon was hardly a trivial compromise. However, as markers of the attitudes of those who sought to preserve the environment, the two debates surrounding the dams serve as useful tools in understanding the subtle shifts in the nuances of tone employed by the preservationists. Upon each debate was pinned the fate of the National Park system. With the National Park Service founded just around the time of the deciding of Hetch Hetchy’s fate, the precedent of dam-building in the park held far less sway than feared. Indeed, it was the horror at the inundation of the valley that shaped the movements centering around land use for years to come. From the establishment of Adirondack Park just before the turn of the century, the blossoming of 19th century Romanticism found its way deep into the ethos of preservationists, driving them down an emotionally and spiritually charged mission for the preservation of sacred lands. Both the revulsion at Hetch Hetchy’s figurative and literal damnation and developments in land-use philosophies spurred a fundamental paradigm shift in the nature of environmentalism, begetting environmentalism as philosophy distinct from Romantic preservation. In a time when water was far scarcer than in 1910s San Francisco and energy was an all-important focus of national security with the Cold

71

Benton MacKaye, "Dam Site vs. Norm Site," The Scientific Monthly 71, no. 4 (October 1950): 247.

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War looming, the defeat of the Echo Park Dam, albeit with the loss of Glen Canyon, serves as a marker of attitudes–not necessarily a milestone of environmentalist progress. Glen Canyon, to Brower and so many others, seemed at first to be an unfortunate, but far lesser casualty of the salvation of Echo Park. However, in a manner affirming the necessity of environmentalism, Glen Canyon’s true value revealed itself only after its fate had been sealed. Just as John Muir’s headstrong reluctance to compromise by postponing consideration of Hetch Hetchy as a water source might have lost it for good, David Brower and his colleagues’ religious fervor in successfully blocking the Echo Park Dam similarly blinded them to the hidden treasures of Glen Canyon.

Nonetheless, the axis of environmentalism had shifted. No more would passionate personalities solely defend the spiritual value of a valley’s flowers and the religiosity of a canyon’s silent walls. More so, in true environmentalist fashion, arguments to both proactively protect and preserve in the moment would center on the biota of an ecosystem, the recreational and economic potential of a location, and the folly of sacrificing the long term for the short term.

To be sure, the movements absolutely retained their ideals of beauty, particularly to stir up public interest and provide a moral center to their actions, but a broader, more nuanced, and more hidden shift occurred within Americans’ conceptions of wilderness. Contemporaneous with the fight against Echo Park was the wilderness movement, led by Howard Zahniser in The Living Wilderness, culminating in the Wilderness Act of 1964.73 After Echo Park, proposed dams in National Parks, such as the Grand Canyon, easily fell to environmentalist pressure, and the rate of overall dam building by the Bureau of Reclamation steadily declined. With such a shift in

72

Debra Elaine Jenson, "Dinosaur Dammed: An Analysis of the Fight to Defeat Echo Park Dam" (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2014), 266.

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environmentalism at large, it would be easily argued that the American public has grown dissociated from its natural surroundings, a condition Dennis Monbiot calls “ecological boredom.”74 Monbiot himself, and ardent proponent of what Soulé and Noss called “rewilding,” the successor to biological conservation, along with others represents this new era of conservation: the literary still remains a critical part of conservation argumentation. Indeed, such a phenomenon of ecological boredom or dissociation may have been already developing, but once the elites of the East Coast moved away from their religious awe of canyons, the greater public at large learned to appreciate the charms of nesting birds and the calm indifference of nature. As some of the Hetch Hetchy Valley’s defenders portended, National Park visitation rates have steadily increased, sometimes at the expense of the environment, but always with greater access for the public. Nonetheless, perhaps this focus on the scientific importance of a natural place has infringed upon the ability for the public to emotionally savor Nature. Have the crowds of the city and its suburbs spilled into the spaces of wilderness? Perhaps they have. Aldo Leopold always included the human factor in the ecosystem, and environmentalists of today would do well not to forget the integrity of an ecosystem, humans and all. John Muir fell into that trap long ago.

73

George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 7.

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Bibliography Act to Establish a National Park Service (Organic Act), Pub. L. No. 64-235, 39 Stat. 535 (Aug. 25, 1916). https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/anps_1i.htm.

The Act established the NPS, solidifying the structures in which National Parks were organized and the means by which they were declared.

Audubon Society. "About Us." Audubon. http://www.audubon.org/about.

The Audubon Society's website provides a background for the foundation of the ornithological society.

Badè, William F. The Life and Letters of John Muir. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/chapter_9.aspx.

Badè's compendium of John Muir's letters provides a voluminous basis from which to draw upon Muir's thought processes about science, land and religion. Muir's letters allow extensive looks into his day-to-day musings on these subjects, not just his published writings. Many of the most significant articulations of Muir's ideals, such as letters to William Kent, come from this archive.

Brower, David. "Let the River Run through It." Sierra Club. https://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/199703/brower.asp.

Brower's article proposes the removal of the Glen Canyon Dam, continuous lamenting the sacrifice of the canyon to save Echo Park.

Bureau of Reclamation Department of the Interior. The Colorado River: A Natural Menace Becomes a National Resource. Salt Lake City, 1945.

The Bureau of Reclamation's report on the Colorado River Basin is unparalleled in its characterization of the region's natural resources, from water storage to its flora and fauna to its recreational possibilities.

Colorado River Storage Project: Hearings before the United States Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation, 83d Cong., 2d.

Sess (1954). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d01984998h;view=1up;seq=3.

The Senate Subcommittee on Insular Affairs hearing on the Colorado River Storage Project provides access into the direct arguments given to the very people deciding the fate of Dinosaur National Monument, whether those testifying were for or against Echo Park Dam. DeVoto, Bernard. "Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?" The Saturday Evening Post, July 22, 1950. http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2016/03/29/history/postperspective/damming-the-parks.html.

DeVoto's Saturday Evening Post article laid the groundwork for the public response against the possible Echo Park Dam and consequently ostracized him from his home state of Utah.

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Duane, Daniel. "Goodbye, Yosemite. Hello, What?" The New York Times, September 2, 2017, Sunday Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/opinion/sunday/goodbyeyosemite-hello-what.html.

Daniel Duane's New York Times article provides a look into the place of Native Americans in the Yosemite region, the redefinition of wilderness to exclude these peoples, and their violent extinction. Particularly concerning John Muir's fundamentalist views on wilderness, Duane's piece elucidates some of Muir's rationale for pursuing such a strict preservationist policy.

Dunlap, Thomas R. Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance." 1841. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Nina Baym, 269-86. 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 2008.

Environment and Ecology. "History of Ecology." Environment and Ecology. http://environmentecology.com/history-of-ecology/132-history-of-ecology.html#The_biosphere__Eduard_Suess.2C_Henry_Chandler_Cowles.2C_and_Vladimir_Vernadsky.

Flader, Susan L. Thinking like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests. 3rd ed. Columbia, Mo.: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1974.

Francaviglia, Richard V. "Mining and Landscape Transformation." In The American Environment: Interpretations of past Geographies, edited by Lary M. Dilsaver and Craig E. Colten, 89-114. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992.

The geographers Lary Dilsaver and Craig Colten's compilation of studies of geographic environments that have changed throughout American history, whether naturally or artificially, lends an interesting view into attitudes toward geographic change. Of particular interest is Richard Francaviglia's section on the aesthetic changes of a landscape caused by mining in the arid West. Francaviglia is a geographer and historian at Willamette University.

Harvey, Mark W. T. A Symbol of Wilderness: Echo Park and the American Conservation Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.

North Dakota State University professor Mark Harvey provides a comprehensive overview of the development of proposals for the Echo Park Dam in the 1950s and the subsequent success of the fight to stop the Bureau of Reclamation's proposed dams in the Upper Basin of the Colorado River Storage Project. Harvey describes the controversy in painstaking detail from the very inception of the idea to its fall and the emergence of the Glen Canyon Dam project. A Symbol of Wilderness pieces together the extensive reports of the Colorado River Storage Project and all sorts of opposing perspectives in order to provide an unbiased portrayal of the various aspects of the controversy.

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Hetch Hetchy Dam Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 63d Cong., 1st Sess.

(1913). https://archive.org/details/hetchhetchydams00housgoog.

This 1913 hearing, four years after the previous one, was more defensive of Hetch Hetchy valley as the right site for a dam, especially with mounting pressure from the San Francisco government and the Spring Valley Water Company. In the intervening years, though, preservationist opposition had increasing, making the hearing a desperate attempt by the opposition in many ways.

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir Site: Hearing before the Committee on Public Lands, 60th Cong., 2d Sess. (1909). https://archive.org/stream/hetchhetchyrese00conggoog/hetchhetchyrese00conggoog_djvu .txt.

This Congressional hearing was one of the first to debate the Hetch Hetchy valley as a potential site for a dam for the San Francisco water system.

Howard, Anne F. Letter to Jacob H. Gallinger, "Resolution from the Graffort Club of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, against Granting San Francisco the Hetch Hetchy Valley," February 4, 1910. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7268048.

Anne Howard's letter represents a common current among private citizens fighting Hetch-Hetchy: A focus on the valley's aesthetic qualities. The Graffort Club was a New Hampshire women's club, and the resolution thus typifies the east coast elite's response.

Hyde, Philip. Hetch Hetchy Field of Stumps. 1955. Photograph. https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/hyde_hetchy_field_stumps.html.

———. Steamboat Rock, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado. 1955. Photograph. https://www.flysfo.com/museum/exhibitions/20885/detail?num=5.

Izaak Walton League of America. "About Us." Izaak Walton League of America. http://www.iwla.org/about-us.

The Izaak Walton League protects hunting interests in the environment, one of many long-standing environmental advocacy groups starting in the early 20th century.

Jenson, Debra Elaine. "Dinosaur Dammed: An Analysis of the Fight to Defeat Echo Park Dam." PhD diss., University of Utah, 2014. http://cdmbuntu.lib.utah.edu/utils/getfile/collection/etd3/id/3323/filename/3333.pdf.

Debra Jenson's thesis presents a detailed exploration of the various ways in which preservationists tried to convince the public to fight against Echo Park Dam. Jenson analyzes these strategies through the lens of Robert Cialdini, an ASU psychology professor: consistency, reciprocity, social validation, authority, scarcity, and liking are the six general strategies he has identified.

Kent, William. Letter to Sydney Anderson, July 2, 1913. Box 26. KFP. William Kent's letter to Sydney Anderson, with its scathing rebukes of John Muir's idealism, makes clear the critical difference they fought over when it came to pragmatism

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in conservation. Kent, otherwise supporting environmental preservation, having helped designate Muir Woods, drew a line when it came to natural resources.

LeConte, Joseph Nesbit. Hetch Hetchy from Surprise Point. Photograph. http://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/surprise_point.html.

Leopold, Aldo. "Ecology and Politics." 1941. In The River of the Mother of God: And Other Essays, edited by Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, 281-86. Reprint. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

———. Sand County Almanac; And Sketches Here and There. New ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac has served as one of the guiding texts in the human relationship with land, introducing Leopold's signature concept of his "Land Ethic." In his descriptions of his home of Sauk County, Wisconsin, Leopold, an employee of the United States Forest Service, developed principles behind conservation based off of ecological values of balance.

———. "Wilderness as a Land Laboratory." 1941. In Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, edited by Curt Meine, 454-56. New York: Library of America, 2013.

Letter to George E. Chamberlain, "Petition from the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society against the Raker Bill," June 25, 1913. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7268069.

The American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society's petition against the Raker Bill epitomizes the public's valuation of Hetch Hetchy Valley as a scenic locale and the damming efforts as unwarranted moves based on power. The Society's constituents rested their argument on scenery and camping spots, not any other more pragmatic reasons for keeping the valley untouched.

MacKaye, Benton. "Dam Site vs. Norm Site." The Scientific Monthly 71, no. 4 (October 1950): 241-47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20025.

Benton MacKaye’s article, while not particularly significant in the Echo Park debate, argued for land management–including whether, when, and where to build dams like Echo Park–based on ecology. MacKaye argued that dams should maintain balance in the ecosystem.

Map of Hetch Hetchy Water Supply. Map. San Francisco: Department of Public Works, 1925. https://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/yosemite_resources/images/illustration_117.jpg.

Map of the Proposed Echo Park and Split Mountain Dams in Dinosaur National Monument.

Map. Salt Lake City: Bureau of Reclamation, 1950. http://www.lib.utah.edu/collections/photo-exhibits/stegner-exhibit/exhibit.php.

McGrath, Robert L. Art and the American Conservation Movement. 2001. https://www.nps.gov/mabi/learn/historyculture/upload/Art-and-the-AmericanConservation-Movement-2.pdf.

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Robert L. McGrath's report Art and the American Conservation Movement sets forth a comprehensive study of the relationship of the Hudson River School and associated philosophers with the American preservation and conservation movements. In his study, McGrath seeks to demonstrate how art and the policy of everyday life were very much intertwined in the 19th century. Art and the American Conservation Movement establishes a baseline for an understanding of art and conservation by referencing an enormous selection of artworks and primary source materials, creating an extensive study of the field.

McPhee, John A. Encounters with the Archdruid. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

John McPhee's artful biography of David Brower provides an intimate perspective on the conservation giant. Through his descriptions of Brower's encounters with his enemies, one sees Brower as the utmost aesthete and perhaps somewhat uncultured and uneducated, a college dropout who was often ridiculed by the governmental establishment and mocked for his dearth of scientific knowledge.

———. Green versus Gold: Sources in California's Environmental History. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998.

Mitman, Gregg. "In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History." Environmental History 10, no. 2 (April 2005): 184-210. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3986112.

Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

George Monbiot's Feral epitomizes the newer movement in environmentalism and wilderness: Rewilding. After monumentalism and environmentalism, this modern movement calls for turning developed lands back into wilderness in order to maintain a proper ecological equilibrium.

Muir, John. "The Hetch Hetchy Valley." Sierra Club Bulletin 6, no. 4 (January 1908): 211-20. https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/hetch_hetchy_muir_scb_1908.html.

———. Letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr, July 6, 1872. https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/chapter_9.aspx.

Amid other elements, Muir spends much time describing his theory of glaciation in the Yosemite region, particularly versus Whitney’s ultimately incorrect geological theories.

For Muir, the value of a natural place was intrinsically connected with its geologic history.

———. The Yosemite. New York: Century, 1912. https://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_yosemite/.

The Yosemite is what John Muir, the author himself, called "an early history of Yosemite." Muir described historical, naturalistic, spiritual, and scientific charms and qualities of the Yosemite region in this seminal approach to the area.

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N.Y. Const. art. VII § 1. https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/55849.html.

Nash, Roderick Frazier. "John Muir, William Kent, and the Conservation Schism." Pacific Historical Review 36, no. 4 (November 1967): 423-33. doi:10.2307/3636776.

———. Wilderness and the American Mind. 4th ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Roderick Frazier Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind presents an integral study of the concept of wilderness in America, from the Judeo-Christian roots influencing the first settlers to modern-day principles. Nash writes as a long-time proponent of environmental history and espouses the positive principles it inspires in humans, closely connecting with wilderness. Wilderness and the American Mind enables a more informed discussion of transformation of the concept of wilderness through art and philosophy movements by defining the shifting American attitudes toward wilderness across a broad spectrum of time and location.

National Park Service. "On October 1, 1890." National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/yose/anniversary/timeline/on-october-11890/index.html.

O'Shaughnessy, M. M. "The Hetch Hetchy Water Supply of the City of San Francisco." Journal (American Water Works Association) 9, no. 5 (September 1922): 743-65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41224918.

O'Sullivan, John L. "Annexation." The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July/August 1845, 5-6. http://www.americanyawp.com/reader/manifest-destiny/johnosullivan-declares-americas-manifest-destiny-1845/.

The journalist John L. O’Sullivan’s piece in his magazine articulated the fundamentally pervasive and all-important concept of “manifest destiny” in the American ethos, one that had existed since colonial times in many forms, but without this significant epithet.

Perkins, Robert C. L. "Geography and Evolution in the Pocket Gopher." 1927. In The Essential Naturalist: Timeless Readings in Natural History, by Michael H. Graham, Joan Parker, and Paul Kuykendall Dayton, 486-97. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Porter, Robert P. "The Eleventh Census." Speech, American Statistical Association, Boston, October 16, 1891.

Richardson, Elmo. Dams, Parks & Politics: Resource Development and Preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower Era. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/37646.

Righter, Robert W. The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Robert Righter's work serves as the definitive study of the Hetch Hetchy controversy and the building of the O'Shaughnessy Dam, from the idea's inception to the usage of the dam in the 1920s and its long-term impact. Righter is an Emeritus Professor of History at the

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University of Texas at El Paso, and his book proves particularly useful in its compilation of many of the sources and argumentation on both sides of the debate.

San Francisco and the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Hearings Held before the Committee on the Public Lands of the House of Representatives: Hearings on S. H.J. res. 223., 60th Cong., 2d. Sess (1909). https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008607305.

Soulé, Michael, and Reed Noss. "Rewilding and Biodiversity: Complementary Goals for Continental Conservation." Wild Earth, Fall 1998, 18-28. http://www.michaelsoule.com/resource_files/167/167_resource_file1.pdf.

Stegner, Wallace, ed. This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park and Its Magic Rivers. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Wallace Stegner's collection of perspectives and photographs provided a public view into the scenic and scientific wonders of Dinosaur National Monument and Echo Park.

Taber, Isaiah West. Looking up Hetch-Hetchy Valley from Surprise Point. 1908. Photograph. https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/looking_up_hh_valley_taber.html.

Tudor, Ralph. Letter to Douglas McKay, November 27, 1953. Box 1. Tudor Papers.

Two Yosemites. Directed by David Brower. Sierra Club, 1955. https://archive.org/details/cubanc_000041.

David Brower’s film compared Hetch Hetchy valley before and after the O’Shaughnessy Dam, emotionally lamenting the destruction of natural beauty by the inundation caused by the dam’s construction. Much of the time is spent with close shots on the leaves and flowers of the riparian zone or the desolate expanses of the intermediary area between low and high water levels.

Webster, Edith. Letter to Frank P. Flint, "Petition from the Hypatia Women’s Club of San Francisco in Favor of Granting San Francisco Water Rights for Lake Eleanor and Hetch Hetchy," February 5, 1910. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7268040.

The Women's Club petition represents the typical public advocacy of the O'Shaughnessy Dam in arguing that the reservoir was absolutely necessary and that the construction of the dam would actually beautify the valley, two common sentiments of the time. Even the proponents of the dam were rooted in aestheticism.

White, Richard. E-mail message to author. December 13, 2017.

A conversation about John Muir, Spring Valley Water Company, and why the fight against the O’Shaughnessy Dam was not successful.

Why Echo Park Dam Must Be Stopped. 1955. https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/image/anti-dambrochure-1955.

This pamphlet exemplifies the literature often published widely for the public decrying the Echo Park Dam, warning against the potential collapse of the National Park System and employing strange Cold War era tendencies like warning against the Soviet Union bombing dams.

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