Author: Ethan Weiss, Opinions Editor
Oh, how the times change. Ninety-nine years ago, the city of San Francisco was fighting a fierce battle over the fate of the immaculate Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite, a battle whose outcome would threaten the destruction of America’s most sacred natural spaces, its national parks. Oddly enough, that city, which would become America’s bastion of progressivism and environmental consciousness decades later, was of a different mind then. Hetch Hetchy, but rather to construct a massive concrete dam at one end and turn the waters of the Tuolumne River into a reservoir for the city, thereby destroying much of the valley’s natural splendor. In the end, San Francisco won, and Hetch Hetchy remains its primary source of water to this day.
In spite of its tragic ending, the story of Hetch Hetchy remains one to hold dear, and not only as fuel for contemporary conservationists. The fight over a valley high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was not unlike the environmental controversies of today, involving interest groups, scarce resources and city politics – fights in which even the most dogged environmental advocates cannot help but become bogged down in the day-to-day details of the political system. But what came out of the battle over Hetch Hetchy was a clear declaration of things more basic and fundamental: nature’s restorative power; its enduring presence in the face of ephemeral human existence; its status not only as resources to appropriate, but as John Muir would write, “fountains of life.”
The consummate American prophet of nature, Muir was not American by birth, but Scottish, and perhaps that fact says something about what he saw in the immense wonders of the natural world. The question whether to preserve or exploit the land had to be divorced from utilitarian value or nationalistic fervor. The great arches of southern Utah were not meant for a grand Roman aqueduct. The thick, sulfuric mud pools of Yellowstone were not scouted for mineral exploration. Nature must be left unhitched from the designs of mankind so that human beings themselves might be reminded of nature’s designs for them. To that end, Muir could not possibly have fancied himself a designer when, during a voyage through Alaska, he wrote, “It seems as if surely we must at length reach the very paradise of the poets, the abode of the blessed.”
John Muir died just a year after the approval of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir project. From his masterpiece “The National Parks” to the tall redwoods of Muir Woods in northern California, his legacy offers not a precise plan of action but an attitude toward living on a planet that long predated human life and which will go on long after mankind is no more. It is a vision of democratic life reflected into common history, common values and common spaces. So long as Yosemite in California, Glacier in Montana and Acadia in Maine remain protected as refuges for all people, they will retain for humankind the idea that certain inviolable principles must be upheld in spite of the onslaught of 21st century life.
This Earth Day, then, should commemorate more than just the everyday ways to conserve. One less disposable water bottle will indeed mean one less piece of garbage to pollute a landfill. Riding a bicycle rather than driving to the store will save a bit of carbon monoxide and fossil fuel. But to celebrate Earth Day should also mean looking into the more primordial ways of relating to nature, so that the earth might impress a sense of wonder upon the casual observer who, as part of the quotidian rush, would otherwise pass by in ignorance. To leave one’s artificial surrounding and stand atop a mountain in the San Gabriels means experiencing something decidedly beyond one’s comprehension – a more immediate mode of being in a world of titanic and millennia-long change. Learning how much carbon a single individual pumps into the atmosphere is one way to be persuaded. But to see the clear blue of the desert sky or the vast building project of a mountain range is to be convinced that, in Muir’s words, “it is still the morning of creation,” and that this creation must not be tarnished.
Hetch Hetchy was for Muir “one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples,” but the idea need not be explicitly religious. Muir famously knew the entirety of the New Testament and most of the Old Testament by heart, but his relation to the natural world around him availed itself of the strictures of organized faith, and instead found religion in the steep, smooth granite walls of the Yosemite Valley and the untiring rush of the waterfalls pouring off them.
The trend among students of this age seems to be to eschew from their lives any notion of the divine. Not without reason, the idea of transcendence has for all intents and purposes been left out from the requisites for liberal democratic life. But amidst all the clamor, the turbulence, the uncertainty of modern life, perhaps the “scripture of nature” is one place where an exception should be made.
Ethan Weiss is a senior politics major. He can be reached at eweiss@oxy.edu.
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