Theodore Roosevelt was a lover of grand rugged places. He wrote that, “There are no words that can tell of the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.” Roosevelt was also among those Progressives who worried that the nation’s natural resources were being depleted and thought those resources ought to be managed efficiently to offer the greatest good to the greatest number of people. As President, he withdrew hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands from sale and promoted policies to manage forests, grazing land, and water. He called himself a conservationist.
But when a dam-building project, designed to provide water to the city of San Francisco, threatened to flood the spectacular Hetch Hetchy Valley near Yosemite National Park, Roosevelt sided against wilderness advocates, such as Sierra Club founder John Muir, and with supporters of the dam. The controversy raged for six years. Finally, when Woodrow Wilson became President, he would sign the bill that authorized the Hetch Hetchy Dam.
Should Roosevelt and Wilson have been more active in preserving wilderness from development?
Yes: What if you knew that the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir would provide essential water for the city of San Francisco?
No: What if you knew that the Hetch Hetchy Valley was often referred to as “The Grand Canyon of the Yosemite”?
The Place of Cities
Roosevelt’s Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, was his closest ally in the conservation cause. Pinchot and a panel of expert water engineers told Roosevelt that the Hetch Hetchy Dam was the only practical solution to San Francisco’s chronic water shortage.
“I fully sympathize with the desire of . . .Mr. Muir to protect the Yosemite National Park, but I believe that the highest possible use which could be made of it would be to supply pure water to a great center of population.”
— Gifford Pinchot to Theodore Roosevelt, 1907.
John Muir argued that there must be alternatives to the Hetch Hetchy site and insisted that the wilderness was necessary for spiritual and aesthetic reasons.
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”
— John Muir in Outlook, 1907.
Should Roosevelt and Wilson have been more active in preserving wilderness from development?
Yes: What if you knew that some powerful members of Congress were dead set against even the moderate conservation policies Roosevelt advocated?
No: What if you knew that there was a growing grassroots movement to preserve wild places?
Politics
Congressman Martin Dies of Texas put the matter bluntly when the House of Representatives debated the Hetch Hetchy dam question. “I want them to open the reservations in this country,” said Dies. “I am not for reservations and parks.”
Thousands of letters protesting the Hetch Hetchy dam poured into Congressional offices from women’s groups, outing and sportsmen’s clubs, scientific societies, and college faculties. “The bill was opposed by so many public-spirited men. . . that I have naturally sought to scrutinize it very closely,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1913.’
Should Roosevelt and Wilson have been more active in preserving wilderness from development?
Yes: What if you knew that Indians who lived in Yosemite National Park were forcibly removed?
No: What if you knew that dams have flooded landscapes many Americans consider sacred?
In order to create the appearance of nature as it was in its authentic state, without humans, the U.S. government had to move Indian inhabitants out of National Parks including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier.
“The removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’ — uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place — reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is. . . .There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.”
— William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness”
John Muir saw the Hetch Hetchy fight as a crusade:
“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
Should Roosevelt and Wilson have been more active in preserving wilderness from development?
Yes: What if you knew that today, national parks are threatened by the pressures of too many tourists seeking to commune with nature?
No: What if you knew that today, millions of Americans consider themselves “environmentalists” who support the protection of wild places?
Contemporary Ironies
Efforts to preserve the scenic wonders of the country’s national parks have had to cope with the increasing pressures not only of economic development, but of tourism.
“Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out, all through the spring and summer, in numbers that would have seemed fantastic.”
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
Environmentalism has become the secular religion of millions of Americans.
“In the United States, this movement is advancing — slowly and sporadically — on a broad front. Its ranks are open enough to include radical Earth First! tree huggers and patrician big-game hunters, militant community activists and cool intellectuals cloistered in think tanks, hard-nosed lobbyists and dreamy bird-watchers.”
— Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire
Should Roosevelt and Wilson have been more active in preserving wilderness from development?
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