Saturday’s New York Times carried an excellent guest essay by Kyle Paoletta, making the point that our national parks are in great demand and often overcrowded, and that we need more of them. As Paoletta notes, “more than 327 million people visited the public lands managed by the National Park Service in 2019” and too often “Going to a national park in 2021 doesn’t mean losing yourself in nature. It means inching along behind a long line of minivans and R.V.s on the way to an already full parking lot.”
The New York Times may be situated in America’s largest and densest city, but it has long championed open space and national parks. In 1913, the Times ran 6 editorials in opposition to the proposal to dam Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The New York Times was not alone. National parks were fairly new at the time, but more than 100 newspapers across the country opposed the Raker Act: The Journal of Lincoln Nebraska said the following:
A representative of the city was asked if they could not get the abundant and pure water in some other part of the Sierra Range than the Hetch Hetchy Valley. “Yes,” he said, “by paying for it”. There we have the milk in the cocoanut. And Congress seems determined to give the wild part of Yosemite away just because a rich and influential city wants it.
It seemed like a good opportunity to send a letter to the editor. We hope they will print it.
Re “Give the People What They Clearly Need: More National Parks” by Kyle Paoletta (guest essay, Aug. 28):
There is no better start to improving America’s national parks than reversing the damage to Yosemite National Park, now more than a century old.
Overcrowded Yosemite Valley is one of the world’s most popular natural attractions, drawing 4 million people annually. But Hetch Hetchy, the other spectacular glacier-carved valley inside the same great national park, was dammed and flooded by San Francisco in 1923 after bitter infighting in Congress – the only time any national park anywhere in the U.S. has been so hijacked for outside exploitation. Moreover, access to the Hetch Hetchy area of Yosemite has been further restricted, to “protect” San Francisco’s reservoir, so only a few thousand visitors a year get to see it.
The National Park Service should increase common-sense visitor opportunities at Hetch Hetchy. Better yet, San Francisco should be prodded to invest in water storage downriver, outside the Park’s boundaries.
Spreck Rosekrans, Executive Director
Restore Hetch Hetchy