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A proposal to dam a river in Yosemite National Park exposed a fundamental disagreement within American conservation: should natural places be protected for their scenery, or managed to meet human needs? The National Park Service’s history of twentieth-century conservation describes how that disagreement came to a head in 1909 over a proposed dam on the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The project would provide a water supply for San Francisco. Gifford Pinchot supported it; John Muir and other preservationists fiercely opposed it. The two sides had previously found common ground. During the nineteenth century, supporters of resource management and scenic preservation often worked together on forest conservation and watershed protection. Their shared interest in protecting land, however, concealed different ideas about what protection meant. Pinchot, chief forester during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, championed sustained-yield management. For forests, the principle was to cut no more timber than could be replaced. He supported managing resources for multiple uses, including timber, wildlife, recreation, grazing and water. That philosophy also shaped government organization. In 1905, oversight of federal forest reserves moved from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, a transfer Pinchot had advocated on the grounds that forests should be managed as a crop. Muir’s preservationist position placed greater emphasis on keeping scenic wilderness intact. At Hetch Hetchy, those approaches produced opposing answers to the same proposal. The dam ultimately won approval. The Park Service identifies resource management, scenic preservation and wildlife habitat protection as three major traditions behind American conservation. Hetch Hetchy offers a specific example of why those traditions cannot always be treated as interchangeable: people committed to conserving nature can disagree profoundly about what a protected landscape should become.
A proposal to dam a river in Yosemite National Park exposed a fundamental disagreement within American conservation: should natural places be protected for their scenery, or managed to meet human needs? The National Park Service’s history of twentieth-century conservation describes how that disagreement came to a head in 1909 over a proposed dam on the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy Valley. The project would provide a water supply for San Francisco. Gifford Pinchot supported it; John Muir and other preservationists fiercely opposed it. The two sides had previously found common ground. During the nineteenth century, supporters of resource management and scenic preservation often worked together on forest conservation and watershed protection. Their shared interest in protecting land, however, concealed different ideas about what protection meant. Pinchot, chief forester during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, championed sustained-yield management. For forests, the principle was to cut no more timber than could be replaced. He supported managing resources for multiple uses, including timber, wildlife, recreation, grazing and water. That philosophy also shaped government organization. In 1905, oversight of federal forest reserves moved from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, a transfer Pinchot had advocated on the grounds that forests should be managed as a crop. Muir’s preservationist position placed greater emphasis on keeping scenic wilderness intact. At Hetch Hetchy, those approaches produced opposing answers to the same proposal. The dam ultimately won approval. The Park Service identifies resource management, scenic preservation and wildlife habitat protection as three major traditions behind American conservation. Hetch Hetchy offers a specific example of why those traditions cannot always be treated as interchangeable: people committed to conserving nature can disagree profoundly about what a protected landscape should become.
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