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by Char Miller (Editor)
A documentary history of the early 20th century damming of Yosemite's Hetch Hetch Valley.
Back Jacket
In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation approving the construction of the O'Shaughnessy Dam to inundate the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park. This decision concluded a decade-long, highly contentious debate over the dam-and-reservoir complex to supply water to post-earthquake San Francisco, a battle that was dramatic, unsettling, and consequential.
Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents captures the tensions animating the long-running controversy and places them in their historical context. Key to understanding the debate is the prior and violent dispossession of Indigenous Nations from the valley they had stewarded for thousands of years. Their removal by the mid-nineteenth century enabled white elite tourism to take over, setting the stage for the subsequent debate for and against the dam in the early twentieth century. That debate contained a Faustian bargain: to secure an essential water supply for San Francisco meant the destruction of the valley that John Muir and others praised so highly. This contentious situation continues to reverberate, as interest groups now battle over whether to tear down the dam and restore the valley. Hetch Hetchy remains a dramatic flashpoint in American environmental culture.
Author Biography
Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California. His most recent books include Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (2018), San Antonio: A Tricentennial History (2018), Where There's Smoke: The Environmental Science, Public Policy, and Politics of Marijuana (2018), and The Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Political Change (2019).
