It’s always nice when folks support restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park – even if their approach is a bit different from ours. San Francisco, as expected, continues with its own propaganda which ignores its destruction of the iconic landscape.
Edward Ring’s “The Hypocrisy of San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy Reservoir“, was published June 20th by “American Greatness”. The column is extremely critical of San Francisco – accusing the City of “self-congratulatory, performative environmentalism.”
We agree entirely with Ring when he writes “We can argue, and should, over what role environmentalism should play in the 21st century and how we can best balance the legitimate concerns over sustainability and ecosystem preservation with economic health and human prosperity. But there is one thing we ought to agree on: the water that serves San Francisco today, quenching the thirst of a population with probably the highest percentage of serious and committed environmentalists in the world, is the result of an abomination that broke John Muir’s heart.” We are less certain when he bashes the City’s other environmental commitments.
Jessie Dickson, aka “SacramentoFoodForest”, posted a strident video on Instagram which received more than 72,000 ” likes” and 4000 comments! The video declares that it’s time for San Francisco to find a new water source and describes Hetch Hetchy as “the original public land grab in the United States.”
Sacramentofoodforest describes damming Hetch Hetchy as a crime against Mother Nature.
Dickson/SacramentoFoodForest goes on to say damming Hetch Hetchy was “a crime against Mother Nature”, that it was “a biodiversity hotspot with grasslands old growth forests and a river fed by countless waterfalls” and that it “should have been protected since it’s part of a national park.” The City “needs to remove the O’Shaughnessy Dam and free Yosemite Valleys twin.”, Jessie concludes.
San Francisco, on the other hand, touts Hetch Hetchy as pro-environment and notes that the City has just won the U.S Conference of Mayors’ Top National Climate Award. The City’s press release conflates its CleanPowerSF program with its hydropower, and implicitly associates all its hydropower with “Hetch Hetchy”. (Restore Hetch Hetchy’s research explains that only about 20% of SF’s hydropower will be lost when Hetch Hetchy is restored and that hydropower changes in California are miniscule compared to the increases in solar, wind and other renewable technologies.)
Even if San Francisco continues to resist restoration, it would be nice if it conceded that damming Hetch Hetchy Valley buried a spectacular landscape – something the SF Public Utilities Commission seems to want us to forget
Restore Hetch Hetchy, on the other hand, is always prepared to engage in substantive discussion of the merits of restoration as well as its challenges.
Bring it on.