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.

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This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Hetch Hetchy: Its Origin and History Forty years ago my first public experience for San Francisco was in projecting new streets such as Market Street over Twin Peaks and via Sloat Boulevard to the ocean, and the extension of Potrero Avenue northerly and southerly to the County Line, coinciding practically with the existing Bay Shore Highway, so that it was with some hesitancy I again entered the City's service. All my other experience has been with Public Service corporations, such as the sugar plantations of Hawaii, where I served as Chief Engineer in building three large aque ducts from 1900 to 1906, and from 1907 to 1912 as Chief Engineer of the Southern California Mountain Water Company, San Diego, working directly under two Old San Franciscans - Mr. John D. Spreckels and Mr. A. B. Spreckels. San Francisco was engaged in the midst of a controversy in Obtaining rights on Hetch Hetchy, and all those matters are recited in this book from my actual contact with the subjects. I never handled any proposition where the engineering problems were so simple and the political ones so complex. I am very happy that the work is completed, at relatively moderate costs. This is due to the efficient camp and labor conditions I established and the good order and discipline which prevailed in all of our camps. One may forget the minor controversies that developed on the project. They have no bearing on its historical character and hence I confine my discussion to major problems. It is a great undertaking that has been brought to completion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Conservation was the first nationwide political movement in American history to grapple with environmental problems like waste, pollution, resource exhaustion, and sustainability. At its height, the conservation movement was a critical aspect of the broader reforms undertaken in the Progressive Era (1890-1910), as the rapidly industrializing nation struggled to protect human health, natural beauty, and "national efficiency." This highly effective Progressive Era movement was distinct from earlier conservation efforts and later environmentalist reforms. Conservation in the Progressive Era places conservation in historical context, using the words of participants in and opponents to the movement. Together, the documents collected here reveal the various and sometimes conflicting uses of the term "conservation" and the contested nature of the reforms it described. This collection includes classic texts by such well-known figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir, as well as texts from lesser-known but equally important voices that are often overlooked in environmental studies: those of rural communities, women, and the working class. These lively selections provoke unexpected questions and ideas about many of the significant environmental issues facing us today.