Over the years, environmentalists have repeatedly vilified Los
Angeles for raiding the beautiful Owens Valley to satiate its
unquenchable thirst for water. Eventually, court orders forced LA to
curtail its Sierra water grab to save Mono Lake. But there is still one
major California city that takes far more water than Los Angeles ever
did from a once pristine, magnificent valley in the high country. And
yet for nearly a century, the City of San Francisco has managed to
avoid the same sort of scorn heaped on its neighbor to the south
— despite the continued environmental destruction it wreaks in
what is arguably the nation’s grandest national park.
It’s safe to say that most San Franciscans, or most Bay Area
residents for that matter, don’t view Hetch Hetchy dam inside Yosemite
National Park in those terms. Instead, they see the 380,000 acre-foot
reservoir as a birthright, if they know about it at all. In fact, most
San Franciscans probably don’t realize that when they turn on their
shower, or flush their toilet, the water comes from the Tuolumne River
160 miles away, from a breathtaking canyon of sheer granite walls that
their own city ruined when it dammed it up and filled it with water 86
years ago.
Doing something about that lack of awareness will be the next step
taken by Restore Hetch Hetchy, an Oakland-based environmental group
that has fought to tear down the 300-foot-tall O’Shaughnessy Dam on the
Tuolumne River for the last decade. Earlier this month, Restore Hetch
Hetchy moved its headquarters to San Francisco and plans to open an
education center on Market Street so that city residents and visitors
can learn more about Hetch Hetchy, a majestic valley with soaring
waterfalls that John Muir once famously described as “Yosemite’s
twin.”
The nonprofit, which began as an offshoot of Muir’s Sierra Club, has
hired a new executive director, Mike Marshall, who plans to launch a
grassroots campaign to educate San Franciscans on the environmental
destruction wrought by Hetch Hetchy dam. The first step is explaining
that tearing it down won’t mean losing their water. “I want to set up a
permanent exhibit, showing what restoring Hetch Hetchy would really
entail,” Marshall told Eco Watch. Marshall replaces Restore Hetch
Hetchy founder Ron Good, who took a job last year working for the
National Park Service at the John Muir National Historic Site in
Martinez.
For decades, the restoration of Hetch Hetchy valley has been viewed
as nothing more than an outlandish pipe dream. San Francisco’s
political movers and shakers are dead set against it. The most
prominent, and vocal, opponents have long been House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi and US Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has called restoring Hetch
Hetchy “indefensible.”
But Marshall is used to tilting at windmills. In 2000, he ran the
campaign against Proposition 22, the first statewide initiative that
banned gay marriage. In fact, Marshall is a longtime political campaign
consultant, and his hiring represents a shift from environmental to
political activism for Restore Hetch Hetchy. Marshall said that when he
first signed up to run the campaign against Prop. 22, his friends
thought he was crazy. “Nine years ago, no one wanted to take on that
issue,” he said. “No one applied for the job, and we started out with
no money, but by the end we had raised $6.5 million.”
Prop. 22 won by a landslide, but eight years later, its offspring,
Prop. 8, which sought to roll back the state Supreme Court’s decision
to overturn Prop. 22, only won by 5 percentage points. In the
intervening years, more and more Californians came to accept the idea
of gay marriage. His friends now think Marshall is crazy for taking on
the Hetch Hetchy fight, but he believes the same type of transformation
can occur. He hopes eventually to put the restoration of Hetch Hetchy
on the ballot in San Francisco, or to convince the board of supervisors
to rally to its cause.
But for that to happen, Marshall said his group has to convince San
Franciscans that they won’t lose their water. He points to studies
conducted by Environmental Defense, UC Davis, and the State of
California, which all concluded that tearing down the dam and letting
the Tuolumne River run free is “feasible.” San Francisco, as a result,
would not lose its water rights to the Tuolumne, but Don Pedro Dam,
farther down the river, would likely have to be enlarged to accommodate
more water, and new smaller, water storage facilities would have to be
built.
But the biggest road block for restoring Hetch Hetchy is the price
tag. The 2006 state study concluded that the total would cost between
$3 billion and $10 billion. That’s a huge number, but, in reality, it
is both an infrastructure and an environmental project. And with the
emphasis on infrastructure spending over the next several years to put
the country on better financial footing, rebuild America, and create a
green economy, there may never be a better time than the next decade to
restore Yosemite National Park to its original grandeur.
