John Muir, of such currency in our culture that California’s quarter features him, died almost one hundred years ago today, Christmas Eve, at a hospital here in Los Angeles. On his death certificate, his occupation was listed as “Geologist.”

. . . the heavens draped in rich purple auroral clouds fringed and folded in most magnificent forms; but in this glory of light, so pure, so bright, so enthusiastic in motion . . . these glad, eager soldiers of light . . .sense of time was charmed out of mind and the blessed night circled away in measureless rejoicing enthusiasm—words on pages by John Muir’s hospital bedside the night he died December 24, 2013.

 

Muir was criticized for his Purple Prose, his “excessive” use of enthusiastic words. At least so he claimed. He complained that he was spending the morning at the command of a cruel editor “slaughtering glorious” to get his prose more in line with expected norms for reporting what Emily Dickinson called “nature’s news.” And I believed him, why would I not? (And haven’t been told all life, make it short, edit?).

 

But I found out differently—and the secret, I believe, to what makes John Muir a famous and beloved and important person in our lives today.

I was at the University of the Pacific’s international conference on John Muir. Distinguished scholars had flown in from around the world, including from the town of his birth in Scotland; his family was there (you can buy wine from the estate—he himself was as a brilliant manager and botanist of grapes, in Martinez, California–by the Hanna estate). I was actually keynoting the conference and led us off with a cheer from John Muir High School which I attended close to here, next to the arroyos where Muir walked, from visiting his mentor and friend Mrs. Jeanne Carr—now the site of the Norton Simon Museum, with a pond and sculpture garden and perhaps a tree he planted, and his writing eco-buddy John Burroughs, and his buddies hanging out with the

Throopites (The Throop Institute, later Caltech) at Charlie Vroman’s, still here. The cheer was a rousing JO JO JO HN MU MU MU IR, JOHNMUIR JOHNMUIR, JOOOHNNNN MUIR. Accompanied by claps, while rather startled people stared–well, it was 9 o’clock in the morning, it was a scholarly conference, I’ll give you that, and also, I did happen to be wearing a John Muir Mustangs knit hat, we were the mighty mighty mustangs. But I will argue that this cheer-ful opening actually was completely appropriate to John Muir’s M.O., hisapproach not only to writing poetry but to living and responding to what he saw. He favored leaping excitedly up and down, waving his arms, and when his

scientist colleagues folded their arms and looked at him, he was like, What, What, do you have a problem with enthusiasm, what is WRONG with you people. If we aren’t leaping and rejoicing, we are not being e-correct. When he was sixty, and had been ill, and wasn’t supposed to be straining himself, he tells his wife, there was the mountain, I got excited—see? Excited—and the next thing he knew I was on top. Or words to that effect. That is where enthusiasm will get us: on top of the mountain! So, there he is: and here is a story. He is on top of a mountain with Sargent, head of the U.S. National Forest, on Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, when “I couldn’t hold in, and began to jump about and sing and glory in it all. Then I happened to look around and catch sight of Sargent, standing there as cool as a rock, with a half-amused look on his face at me, but never saying a word. ‘Why don’t you let yourself out at a sight like that’ I asked. ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve,’ he retorted. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ I cried. ‘There you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say, ‘Come, Nature, bring on the best you have. I’m from BOSTON!'”

And in fact, Muir’s ecstatic journal entries which he scrawled scientist-observer-in-the-field fashion during his study rambles and recorded in his journal at the end of the day, and worked into editorials and letters and essays, are deliberately poetically enthusiastic and rich with joyous exclamation as a fruitcake with raisins. These writings ended up in many hands, including college presidents and scientists and ultimately U.S. presidents and Congress and media, newspaper editorials and ultimately the basis of laws that would preserve millions of acres of wilderness and ultimately the National Park Service.

The language that broke up our ideas about the wilderness that was defined—it still is as part of dictionary definitions of wild—as desert, wasteland, barren, ferocious, savage, the opposite of a holy night, of a shining universe, that we behold, and gaze and gaze and wonder, i.e., the purple prose, was deliberate. Muir may have complained that he had to edit his “gloriouses,” but the truth is in the manuscript collection at the Holt-Atherton collection at the University of Pacific papers of John Muir. There, I was shocked—but not surprised—to see that above the typescript of Muir’s opening words for The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, that he ADDS the words “glorious” to his opening sentences. He adds “glorious” as a chef adds the spice that makes the dish. He “plates” his statements, ensuring that nothing goes out to the reader without sufficient gloriousness.

Reality deserves MORE sense of its glory. He wanted to give “joy to the world,” to make us see our world with the amazement of the shepherd beholding a shining firmament, to be thrilled, and to be enthusiastic. I think of him today, and his dying surrounded by pages of a manuscript he took with him on the train, and then to the hospital, ever writing. On December 23 he was taken to California Hospital in Los Angeles, now California Hospital Medical Center. He had been working on it, at 76 years old, from 7 am to 10 pm.

When I think of these hours of writing, I remember what he told William Frederic Bade, who became his editor after he died: “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment—of work that is a steady delight. Such a life may really comprise an eternity upon earth.” I think living as William Blake would say, “kissing the joy as it flies . . . in eternity’s sunrise.” Knowing that his work on it was the last thing he did, I want to read you the last pages. He has reflected on seeing “the heavens draped in rich purple auroral clouds fringed and folded in most magnificent forms; but in this glory of light, so pure, so bright, so enthusiastic in motion . . . these glad, eager soldiers of light . . .sense of time was charmed out of mind and the blessed night circled away in measureless rejoicing enthusiasm.”

“ . . . [A]fter last night’s wonderful display one’s expectations might well be extravagant [see those e’s] and I lay wide awake watching. . . .I ran out in auroral excitement. . . I lay down on the moraine in front of the cabin and gazed and watched. . . . But just as I was about to retire, I thought I had better take another look at the sky, to make sure that the glorious show was over. . . .  Then losing all thought of sleep, I ran back to my cabin, carried out blankets and lay down on the moraine  to keep watch until daybreak, that none of the sky wonders of the glorious night within reach of my eyes might be lost. . . . Excepting only the vast purple aurora mentioned above, said to have been visible over nearly all the continent, these two silver bows in supreme, serene, supernal beauty surpassed everything auroral I ever beheld.” The End. This night he is dying, alive to him is a night of glorious light; he is beholding our universe, in majesty and glory. I like to think that this is how John Muir changed consciousness from a terran being to sun beam.

 

You can read and hear more about John Muir’s “e” poetry at BarbaraMossberg.com, podcast and link to the Poetry Slow Down, for Think for Yourself Radio, KRXA 540AM.

And I want to leave us with a positive memory of his life—he has been credited by many people as the most effective advocate for nature and wilderness who has lived, and I think it was the poet in him—don’t you? And when Hetch Hetchy was lost, to become a resevoir in the national park, for the city by the bay, the public outcry nationally was the first awakening of the environmental movement; it resulted in the creation of the National Park System, which was formally  born in 1916 culminating the effort to go on from John Muir’s death, and heartbreak of 1913, and do justice to the trail of enthusiasm that he blazed, by the way he gazed, and gazed, and thought, and taught, the way he slowed down, and read and wrote poetry. “I sat a long time beneath the tallest fronds, and never enjoyed anything in the way of a bower of wild leaves more strangely impressive. Only spread a fern frond over a man’s head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in. The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain, –a magic wand in Nature’s hand, –every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this? It would seem impossible that any one, however incrusted with care, could escape the Godful influence of these sacred fern forests.”

Muir answered his own question. He is the poet who has sung this, and today, in midst of carols of “joy to the world,” “O holy night,” “angels we have heard on high,” “wind through the olive trees,” “hark the herald,” “brightly shining night,” “rejoice,” and yes, even “rocking around the Christmas tree,” we think of him, and the way he connected a vision of gift of creation to the way we see, and care for, and love, enthusiastically, this world of ours.

For a podcast and link to Dr. Mossberg’s radio show on John Muir as a poet, see BarbaraMossberg.com, and The Poetry Slow Down (KRXA 540AM).

© Barbara Mossberg 2011

 

I am thinking of him today. I am retracing his journey as he died, from Martinez to Daggett. Yet I would not be thinking about Muir today if his life were known to us as a geologist. We wouldn’t be buying coffee with money that has his picture on it. I wouldn’t have graduated from John Muir High School. There would not be the John Muir Trail, or John Muir Redwoods, or the hospitals, ships, hotels, flowers, glaciers, or stars named for him. There would not be the national parks.

 

It is true that John Muir had great credibility as a geologist, long ago redeemed from the charge by Harvard-trained State Geologist Josiah D. Whitney that Muir’s theory of Yosemite Valley created by glaciers was to be dismissed as that of a “college drop-out sheepherder.” Professor “Joe,” Joseph LeConte of the new University at California at Berkeley, supported Muir’s theory. Eventually Muir’s geological studies were confirmed by the scientific community. Muir was fascinated by earth’s story, endlessly beholding evidence in its pebbles and stars and dust for the meaning of its creation.

 

He also was fascinated with what grows on earth. His discoveries are honored by fellow botanists.

 

But it is as writer he is known to us today, by writing that he achieved his influence, effectiveness, and fame in his lifetime as a man for whom the story of earth’s mountains and valleys and trees and flowers was cause for celebration.

 

It is not just as a writer, but as a writer of celebration that Muir’s life made earth-shaking (so to speak) impact on our life today. It is as a poet. John Muir’s purple prose, a poetry lit with epic, romantic, transcendental notes—both light and sound—is the cause of my thoughts of him today and what one man made of his life by loving our world. Muir’s was a life that passionately loved the tree, the stars, the lamb (but not the sheep), the morning light, the mountain–a mind awake to our world and lo and beholding it, harking heralds of its creation, a mind roused to glory, ears tuned to earth’s sweetly ringing o’er the plains and wind through the trees, eyes amazed by a shining presence. A conviction of holiness: in John Muir’s vision of the world, science—all we can see and study and know– is revelation.

 

As I was driving down from Monterey to Pasadena on December 23, the day he was sent to the hospital with pneumonia, I was hearing carols on the car radio, and each one was shining light into John Muir’s language. In his cadences we hear Homer and myth, Milton and Wordsworth and Shakespeare. But if we drill down in geological fashion we find a bedrock of words in the Bible. Psalms and lyric passages, hymns of praise and exaltation, joy, reverence, and rejoicing wired John Muir’s mind as boy memorizing the Bible by the time he was a teenager, and made his own response to being alive on earth one of wonder and awe, a continuous excitement, effusion, effervescence, enthrallment, enthusiasm, exhilaration, exultation, exclamation, exaltation. In this day of “e” this and “e” that, he is an “e” writer, if not also “ex”rated writer, but for eco- exuberance, energy, ecstasy, and I’m not ex-aggerating, it’s an ex-travagant , extra-vagant response to life, a belief in life as extra-ordinary.

 

E—a prefix that means, and this should not surprise us when we are thinking of a man like John Muir and his extravagant use of words—e words such as enthusiasm, energy, enthrall, come from a meaning of PUT INTO, or ON, and we certainly see John Muir putting INTO his experience of being conscious in our world his whole spirit of amazement and wonder of the original shepherds in the field long long ago. We think of the meanings of ex, meaning, OUT, UPWARD, COMPLETELY, and does this sound like our John Muir, who never wanted to be Inside, who always wanted to be OUTside, whose gaze was always looking Upward towards mountains and clouds and skies and trees and stars and rocks and whose soul embraced this External world completely, whole, which he said he could not see anything but: “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”

 

His words of excitement at all that is about us ring in me: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. . . .How glorious a conversion, so compete and wholesome it is . . . .” He describes himself in “these love-monument mountains, glad to be a servant of servants in so holy a wilderness.”—This is June 6, 1868 (My First Summer in the Sierra). Our botanist geologist is keeping a journal as he is a shepherd, literally, tending a flock of sheep, in the Sierras, beholding “a glorious tree,” and as he lies under the stars, “The place seemed holy. . . . singing Nature’s old love song with solemn enthusiasm, while the stars peering through the leaf-roof seemed to join in the white water’s song. Precious night, precious day to abide in me forever. Thanks be to God for this immortal gift.” “Glowing sunbeams. . . make every nerve tingle” and tree “shine gloriously.” “A peaceful, joyful stream of beauty. Every morning . . . the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, “Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come! . . . Everything kept in joyful rhythmic motion in the pulses of Nature’s big heart.”

 

So today I am hearing going sixty miles an hour, and in gas station stores, Muir’s own e way of rejoicing, of joy, which in his mind comes down to beholding, gazing with awe and reverence and wonder at this world, filled with gratitude, and convinced that what he sees, cause for glory, is heaven’s divine hand at work, creativity itself. John Muir as a memorizer of poetry slowed down to respect the wonder of it all, to write, even as in his mind, trying to get it right was slow as a glacier, in geologist-speak, a grinding process, a grind. Perhaps in his mind writing to capture earth’s exultingness had to be slow. I am thinking of Muir’s geo-poetic enthusiastic words which honor our earth.

 

A geologist, yes, but a geologist high on poetry:

“The sculpture of the landscape is as striking in its main lines as in its lavish richness of detail; a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds without leaving a single rocky angle exposed, as if the delicate fluting and ridging fashioned out of metamorphic states had been carefully sandpapered. The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awe-stricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever. I gazed and gazed and longed and admired until the dusty sheep and packs were far out of sight, made hurried notes and a sketch, though there was no need of either, for the colors and lines and expression of this divine landscape-countenance are so burned into mind and heart they surely can never grow dim.”—That is from John Muir’s journal of June 5, 1868, published in My First Summer in the Sierra.

 

John Muir was criticized for his Purple Prose, his “excessive” use of enthusiastic words. At least so he claimed. He complained that he was spending the morning at the command of a cruel editor “slaughtering glorious” to get his prose more in line with expected norms for reporting what Emily Dickinson called “nature’s news.” And I believed him, why would I not? (And haven’t been told all life, make it short, edit?).

 

But I found out differently—and the secret, I believe, to what makes John Muir a famous and beloved and important person in our lives today. I was at the University of the Pacific’s international conference on John Muir. Distinguished scholars had flown in from around the world, including from the town of his birth in Scotland; his family was there (you can buy wine from the estate—he himself was as a brilliant manager and botanist of grapes, in Martinez, California–by the Hanna estate). I was actually keynoting the conference and led us off with a cheer from John Muir High School which I attended close to here, next to the arroyos where Muir walked, from visiting his mentor and friend Mrs. Jeanne Carr—now the site of the Norton Simon Museum, with a pond and sculpture garden and perhaps a tree he planted, and his writing eco-buddy John Burroughs, and his buddies hanging out with the

Throopites (The Throop Institute, later Caltech) at Charlie Vroman’s, still here. The cheer was a rousing JO JO JO HN MU MU MU IR, JOHNMUIR JOHNMUIR, JOOOHNNNN MUIR. Accompanied by claps, while rather startled people stared–well, it was 9 o’clock in the morning, it was a scholarly conference, I’ll give you that, and also, I did happen to be wearing a John Muir Mustangs knit hat, we were the mighty mighty mustangs. But I will argue that this cheer-ful opening actually was completely appropriate to John Muir’s M.O., hisapproach not only to writing poetry but to living and responding to what he saw. He favored leaping excitedly up and down, waving his arms, and when his

scientist colleagues folded their arms and looked at him, he was like, What, What, do you have a problem with enthusiasm, what is WRONG with you people. If we aren’t leaping and rejoicing, we are not being e-correct. When he was sixty, and had been ill, and wasn’t supposed to be straining himself, he tells his wife, there was the mountain, I got excited—see? Excited—and the next thing he knew I was on top. Or words to that effect. That is where enthusiasm will get us: on top of the mountain! So, there he is: and here is a story. He is on top of a mountain with Sargent, head of the U.S. National Forest, on Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, when “I couldn’t hold in, and began to jump about and sing and glory in it all. Then I happened to look around and catch sight of Sargent, standing there as cool as a rock, with a half-amused look on his face at me, but never saying a word. ‘Why don’t you let yourself out at a sight like that’ I asked. ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve,’ he retorted. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ I cried. ‘There you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say, ‘Come, Nature, bring on the best you have. I’m from BOSTON!'”

 

And in fact, Muir’s ecstatic journal entries which he scrawled scientist-observer-in-the-field fashion during his study rambles and recorded in his journal at the end of the day, and worked into editorials and letters and essays, are deliberately poetically enthusiastic and rich with joyous exclamation as a fruitcake with raisins. These writings ended up in many hands, including college presidents and scientists and ultimately U.S. presidents and Congress and media, newspaper editorials and ultimately the basis of laws that would preserve millions of acres of wilderness and ultimately the National Park Service.

 

The language that broke up our ideas about the wilderness that was defined—it still is as part of dictionary definitions of wild—as desert, wasteland, barren, ferocious, savage, the opposite of a holy night, of a shining universe, that we behold, and gaze and gaze and wonder, i.e., the purple prose, was deliberate. Muir may have complained that he had to edit his “gloriouses,” but the truth is in the manuscript collection at the Holt-Atherton collection at the University of Pacific papers of John Muir. There, I was shocked—but not surprised—to see that above the typescript of Muir’s opening words for The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, that he ADDS the words “glorious” to his opening sentences. He adds “glorious” as a chef adds the spice that makes the dish. He “plates” his statements, ensuring that nothing goes out to the reader without sufficient gloriousness.

 

Reality deserves MORE sense of its glory. He wanted to give “joy to the world,” to make us see our world with the amazement of the shepherd beholding a shining firmament, to be thrilled, and to be enthusiastic. I think of him today, and his dying surrounded by pages of a manuscript he took with him on the train, and then to the hospital, ever writing. On December 23 he was taken to California Hospital in Los Angeles, now California Hospital Medical Center. He had been working on it, at 76 years old, from 7 am to 10 pm.

When I think of these hours of writing, I remember what he told William Frederic Bade, who became his editor after he died: “Longest is the life that contains the largest amount of time-effacing enjoyment—of work that is a steady delight. Such a life may really comprise an eternity upon earth.” I think living as William Blake would say, “kissing the joy as it flies . . . in eternity’s sunrise.” Knowing that his work on it was the last thing he did, I want to read you the last pages. He has reflected on seeing “the heavens draped in rich purple auroral clouds fringed and folded in most magnificent forms; but in this glory of light, so pure, so bright, so enthusiastic in motion . . . these glad, eager soldiers of light . . .sense of time was charmed out of mind and the blessed night circled away in measureless rejoicing enthusiasm.”

“ . . . [A]fter last night’s wonderful display one’s expectations might well be extravagant [see those e’s] and I lay wide awake watching. . . .I ran out in auroral excitement. . . I lay down on the moraine in front of the cabin and gazed and watched. . . . But just as I was about to retire, I thought I had better take another look at the sky, to make sure that the glorious show was over. . . .  Then losing all thought of sleep, I ran back to my cabin, carried out blankets and lay down on the moraine  to keep watch until daybreak, that none of the sky wonders of the glorious night within reach of my eyes might be lost. . . . Excepting only the vast purple aurora mentioned above, said to have been visible over nearly all the continent, these two silver bows in supreme, serene, supernal beauty surpassed everything auroral I ever beheld.” The End. This night he is dying, alive to him is a night of glorious light; he is beholding our universe, in majesty and glory. I like to think that this is how John Muir changed consciousness from a terran being to sun beam.

 

You can read and hear more about John Muir’s “e” poetry at BarbaraMossberg.com, podcast and link to the Poetry Slow Down, for Think for Yourself Radio, KRXA 540AM.

 

 

 

And I want to leave us with a positive memory of his life—he has been credited by many people as the most effective advocate for nature and wilderness who has lived, and I think it was the poet in him—don’t you? And when Hetch Hetchy was lost, to become a resevoir in the national park, for the city by the bay, the public outcry nationally was the first awakening of the environmental movement; it resulted in the creation of the National Park System, which was formally  born in 1916 culminating the effort to go on from John Muir’s death, and heartbreak of 1913, and do justice to the trail of enthusiasm that he blazed, by the way he gazed, and gazed, and thought, and taught, the way he slowed down, and read and wrote poetry. I sat a long time beneath the tallest fronds, and never enjoyed anything in the way of a bower of wild leaves more strangely impressive. Only spread a fern frond over a man’s head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in. The waving of a pine tree on the top of a mountain, –a magic wand in Nature’s hand, –every devout mountaineer knows its power; but the marvelous beauty value of what the Scotch call a breckan in a still dell, what poet has sung this? It would seem impossible that any one, however incrusted with care, could escape the Godful influence of these sacred fern forests.

 

By Dan Aiello 
California Progress Report

If qualified, a local ballot measure in San Francisco calling for the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park could play a decisive role in next year’s U.S. Senate race where the Democrat incumbent, Dianne Feinstein, already faces troubling poll numbers, a campaign finance debacle and a potential Republican opponent with a venerable California pedigree.

The expected 2012 ballot measure will ask San Francisco’s environment-leaning, progressive voters to right what has been called the greatest environmental wrong in the nation’s history by returning the Hetch Hetchy Valley to the National Park Service for the 8 mile long valley’s eventual restoration.

Feinstein has long opposed the proposition of restoring the valley famed naturalist John Muir himself fought to save. Muir described Hetch Hetchy as “one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples,” and even today visitors instantly recognize the Hetch Hetchy as Yosemite Valley’s twin.

 

While the hope Hetch Hetchy could be restored was once considered a pipe dream,  public education over the last decade that Hetch Hetchy is not the source of the city’s water but simply a holding place for it, has swayed many to the cause, including celebrities and even some conservatives with their own ideas on where storage dams should be built.

The valley’s restoration measure has a strong likelihood of garnering support from a majority of environmentally-minded San Francisco voters who may be disenfranchised with Feinstein’s decades-long role in preserving the valley as the city’s water receptacle, including personally removing from the Interior Department’s budget $7 million dollars earmarked by congress for a feasibility study to restore the valley. Her political opposition to the environmental cause could be seen as supporting corporations and special interests, potentially drawing away progressive campaign dollars and voter support from the Senator at a time when she is at her political weakest.

For the first time since being elected to the Senate in 1992, a plurality – 44 percent – of 
Field Poll respondents were “not inclined” to vote for Feinstein while 41 percent would, according to Joe Garofoli at the San Francisco Chronicle. The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

In September Feinstein’s campaign treasurer, Kinde Durkee, was arrested for the alleged embezzlement of nearly $700,000 in campaign funds from a state candidate. Feinstein reported last week that her campaign was “wiped out,” reporting nearly $5 million dollars in “unauthorized withdrawals.”

State Republicans are still unsure who they will choose to challenge Feinstein, but one Republican considering a run has a distinguished pedigree, Michael Reagan, son of California’s former governor and the nation’s 40th president. Reagan confirmed with The Chronicle his interest, but did not elaborate.

According to the Public Policy Institute’s statistics on California voters, San Francisco Bay Area residents account for 27 percent of the state’s Democrats and 27 percent of the state’s Independent voters, giving the local issue the potential of influencing the outcome of the state’s senate race.

“The California Department of Water Resources report confirms that dismantling O’Shaugnessy Dam and draining the Hetch Hetchy reservoir are unwarranted and the cost is indefensible, particularly given the tremendous infrastructure needs facing our State,” Feinstein’s stated when the state’s Department of Resources issued a report saying the cost of restoring the Valley, increasing water storage elsewhere and building a water filtration system (San Francisco is currently exempted from this requirement because the Hetch Hetchy is considered a pristine reservoir) would exceed $10 billion dollars. “I hope this report lays to rest any further consideration at the State and Federal level of dismantling Hetch Hetchy —a truly remarkable system which provides exceptionally high-quality, reliable water to 2.4 million residents in the San Francisco Bay area,” Feinstein said.

Mike Marshall, Executive Director of the Restore Hetch Hetchy non-profit organization, disputes the cost and offers his own cost estimates, including $75 million to control the draw down of the valley to ensure native species, not invasive non-native species repopulate the habitat, $250-300 million to “re-plumb” the city’s pipes to the Don Pedro reservoir and up to a billion dollars to build a filtration system for the city’s water, “Which will be required in 25 years anyway,” claims Marshall, due to climate change and the increasing turbidity of the water.

Marshall points to reports showing high rates of Giardia and Cryptosporidium in San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, all of which get the unfiltered water from the Hetch Hetchy as proof the city has long needed water filtration.

The RHH’s $1.5 billion dollar estimate is significantly lower than the DWR report, and Marshall says they don’t know why. “The DWR report has footnotes saying the report was based on figures provided by the San Francisco PUC,” but the PUC failed to back up their figures with documentation requested five years ago. “We sent a letter to [the PUC commissioners] last week requesting a meeting on the issue” but we haven’t heard from them yet.

California Progress Report is awaiting a response from the PUC on the questions raised by Marshall.

Criticized for their support of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, the Environmental Defense Fund is maintaining its public support for the Hetch Hetchy’s restoration, but it has stopped investing resources in the issue.  “We support restoration, we just stopped investing our resources in it,” said Jennifer Witherspoon, Media Director for EDF.   Witherspoon told CPR she has worked toward the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy for two decades, even securing actor Harrison Ford’s participation in a video supporting the cause.

Some insiders allege the EDF decision to stop working on the Hetch Hetchy restoration reflects the organization’s need for Feinstein’s support on other issues, but Witherspoon disputes that and contends her organization has been an environmental watchdog over the BDCP, not an unconditional supporter of the plan.

While Hetch Hetchy lacks a half dome, it features many striking waterfalls and once a meandering Tuolomne River, the actual water source for San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. The Hetch Hetchy simply became a reservoir when the O’Shaugnessy dam was completed in 1923.

Hetch Hetchy is a Miwok term for grassy meadow.

 

The Hetch Hetchy’s destruction ended a national political fight that started the country’s environmental movement while sending Muir to an early grave, heartbroken by the destruction of the uniquely Californian habitat. More than 200 newspapers across the country called for the valley to be saved, going just on John Muir’s description and sketches of the valley, but after President Woodrow Wilson appointed a San Franciscan to head the Department of the Interior the debate was over and San Francisco was granted the right to dam the Hetch Hetchy.

Marshall sees the restoration of the Hetch Hetchy leading the environmental movement from conservation to restoration, much as the Hetch Hetchy battle began the environmental cause in the nation a century ago. “There’s very little attention paid to the fact that deforestation is a part of the climate change. We have to reduce carbon and gas emissions but we also have to improve the earth’s ability to absorb those emissions,” Marshall told CPR. “We need to restore the environment and begin to rebuild some of the natural places that were destroyed. The Hetch Hetchy can be a blueprint for how our nation can begin to restore what we’ve destroyed.”

According to Marshall, his organization, which currently operates on a $300,000 annual budget, has completed its polling and is currently in the process of drafting the initiative with the assistance of Olson, Hagel and Fishburn, LLP. The initiative will be submitted to the San Francisco City Attorney sometime in the third week of December in order to qualify for the November, 2012 ballot. Proponents will then have 180 days to collect the 7,500 signatures necessary to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

(This is the first in a series of articles covering the possible 2012 San Francisco ballot measure to return the Hetch Hetchy Valley(hetchhetchy.org) to the National Park Service for its eventual restoration.)

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Dan Aiello is the Sacramento reporter for the California Progress Report.

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Editorial December 4, 1913

HETCH HETCHY

Does President Wilson know that the enterprising lobbyists for the seizing of the Hetch Hetchy valley in the interest of the power companies of San Francisco call their bill an “Administration measure”? The leading newspapers from Maine to California have expressed the strong public sentiment that exists against the spoilation of this national park. Will President Wilson let his name be used as favoring a local and very selfish interest against the best opinion of the country?

The lobby has had its effect with the Interior Department. Bureaucratic influences are at work in Washington to make it appear that the Administration stands back of the selfish measure. President Wilson can put a stop to this business by a word seasonably spoken.

 

Editorial December 9, 1913

Any city that would surrender a city park for commercial purposes would be set down as going backward. So far as we are aware, such a case is unknown. Any State Legislature that would surrender a State park would set a dangerous and deplorable example. When the Congress of the United States approves the municipal sandbagging of a national park in order to give some clamorous city a few dollars, against the protests of the press and the people, it is time for real conservationists to ask, What next?

The Senate passed the Hetch Hetchy bill by a vote of 42 to 25. The bill converts a beautiful national park into a water tank for the City of San Francisco. The San Francisco advocates of the spoilation handsomely maintained at Washington, month after month, quite openly, a very competent and plausible lobbyist, and save for a few hearings and protects he occupied the Washington field most comfortably alone and unopposed. For this first invasion of the cherished national parks the people of the country at large are themselves to blame. The battle was lost by supine indifference, weakness, and lack of funds. All conservation causes in this country are wretchedly supported financially, and this one seems not to have been supported at all.

Ever since the business of nation-making began, it has been the unwritten law of conquest that people who are too lazy, too indolent, or too parsimonious to defend their heritages will lose them to the hosts that know how to fight and to finance campaigns. The American people have been whipped in the Hetch Hetchy fight. They had the press and enlightened public opinion and all men of public spirit on their side. The lobbyist was too much for them, although at the end the bill was rapidly losing support. If the people had set up a lobby they might have won.

 

Note: President Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Bill into law on December 19, 1913.

 

 

The New york Times Editorials

 

When Woodrow Wilson signed the Raker Act at the end of 1913, giving San Francisco the final go-ahead to begin building in Hetch Hetchy, Muir sought a silver lining in “this dark damn-dam-damnation” with the thought that “the conscience of the whole country has been aroused from sleep” by the controversy.2 He was referring to the surge of public sentiment that had become a notable presence on the nation’s editorial pages and in the mailboxes of policymakers over the course of the debate. It was a level of popular interest unprecedented in previous environmental disputes, and historians often point to the Hetch Hetchy controversy as a turning point in the history of the American environmental movement.