Call of the Not-So-Wild

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**

BRIAN: In 1906, an enormous earthquake rocked San Francisco. Much of the city was reduced to rubble. But the rebuilding effort that followed offered city officials the opportunity to realize a long-time goal– a new and expanded water supply. For years, city officials had been wanting to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley 167 miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountains. The valley, they thought, would be an ideal place for reservoir that would provide water for the city forever.

But there was a catch. Hetch Hetchy was part of Yosemite National Park, which meant that it was federal property. And so San Francisco couldn’t do anything to the valley without congressional approval.

PETER: Because Congress was involved, the question to dam or not to damn sparked a seven-year debate that was followed by Americans all over the country. City officials had the support of Gifford Pinchot, head of the US Forest Service, and close ally of President Teddy Roosevelt. But the plan met fierce resistance from legendary naturalist John Muir, who had been instrumental in making his beloved Yosemite a National Park. He wasn’t going to give up Hetch Hetchy without a fight.

BRIAN: Char Miller is a historian who has written about this battle. He sees Muir knew his best hope was to win over the American public, much of which had never heard of this place.

CHAR MILLER: For Muir, the case was easily made through religious language, language that he knew his audience would understand– straight out of the Bible, even though couched in more romantic terms. And from Muir’s point of view, what made mountains so important was their capacity to humble us. So to go up into the mountains is to get close to God. To get close to God is to realize how small we are. To realize how small we are would lead us to go back down into our valleys and lowlands and fight for the preservation of that experience.

And so his language was couched in not only the aesthetics and the beauty, but the subtext is, you are fighting for God. Well, if you’re fighting for God, the other side has to be the devil. For instance, when we think about the religious language, listen to this framing of John Muir in a chapter he wrote in a book published in 1911, as part of the opposition to Hetch Hetchy.

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for nature. And instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar. Dam Hetch Hetchy, as well dam for water tanks, the people’s cathedrals and churches. For no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

It’s powerful stuff. And so imagine reading this in the Century Magazine in New York City. And if you’ve got an ounce of sensibility in you, you are enraged. Because you’ve never seen Hetch Hetchy, you don’t understand, and who cares about San Francisco?

BRIAN: And you’ve got plenty of water.

CHAR MILLER: And you’ve got plenty of water. So this is not your struggle, but John Muir has made it your struggle because of the language of divinity framed around a political calculation that says, act, fight, now.

BRIAN: So I guess we’ll put Muir in the green trunks, that would make sense, weighing in at 190 pounds. In the black trunks, is Gifford Pinchot. Where was he coming from?

CHAR MILLER: The classic antagonist to Muir in the case about Hetch Hetchy is always framed around Gifford Pinchot, who, like Muir, was tall, spare, thin, deeply in love with nature. But his love of nature and its aesthetic power– and also spiritual ethos, which he felt deeply as well– is tempered by political sensibility. That part of the calculation that any land manager has to follow is that these lands produce value for community. Some of that can be aesthetic. But if you’re going to have National Forest and reservoirs and the like, they need to have economic value for the communities surround them and that make use of them. Or otherwise you’ll never get what you want. That is to say, people who don’t see value in these landscapes are going to devalue them, and thus not support them.

BRIAN: Use it or lose it would be Pinchot’s model, really.

CHAR MILLER: Yeah, I think if you did not use it, then the publics that surrounded it would say, you can’t have it anymore.

BRIAN: All right, I understand where Muir and Pinchot are coming from, but who are they appealing to? Describe some of the supporters for each.

CHAR MILLER: So if you think about Muir’s brilliant, evocative rhetoric, who’s reading that? Well, it turns out that much of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, the huge population base in the United States– and including the Great Lakes cities as well– these big industrial places where no one has seen anything like Yosemite, is transfixed by his language about this landscape. And they start to go out as tourists. I mean he’s really a kind of barker for Yosemite in a way.

Pinchot, whose language is not this divine flowery rhetoric in the ways that it is for Muir, speaks to the rising middle and upper middle classes in those same cities, who are also reading Muir, about the prospects for a more progressive society that would benefit enormously from those who have expertise, like Pinchot and like many of his readers, and who want the United States to be a better place than it is. And so, you could read Muir and Pinchot. You could be the same person reading them, and be pulled by both of them, because both of these men are offering dreams of a future that are pretty beguiling.

And so much of this is about an urbanized population drawing off of its own industrial energy that’s now beginning to think about landscapes in ways they probably had never thought about before.

BRIAN: Well how was this resolved?

CHAR MILLER: The dam was built. The water is still impounded. San Francisco is wet as a consequence of Hetch Hetchy disappearing under all of that volume of water. And so in 1913, the debate reaches its crescendo. In the end, Congress voted in a really interesting way to enact legislation that would provide money to build the O’Shaughnessy Dam. And the interesting way in which Congress acted, you can look at the votes, and the farther away the voter was from Hetch Hetchy physically, the more likely they were to vote with John Muir. The closer they were to Hetch Hetchy physically, the more likely they were to vote with Gifford Pinchot and those who were promoting the Hetch Hetchy dam.

Because the West saw its interests as allied with those of California. If San Francisco could do this, maybe Denver could do the same thing.

BRIAN: So this was the opposite of Not In My Backyard, which we’re so familiar with today.

CHAR MILLER: Oh yeah, no. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s kind of funny actually that the first great battle not only goes national, but it meant that it was about somebody else’s water that you are happy to either give away or take. And yet it also helped shape the dynamic that in time would say, wait a second. Maybe we don’t want these dams plural, because every river in California and most in the West have been dammed subsequently.

And part of what we’re looking at is the first shot across the bow, which says, maybe not all development is good. And what we’ve slowly come to over the last 100 plus years is figuring out what that actually means.

BRIAN: Char Miller is director of the Environmental Analysis program at Pomona College. He’s the author of Seeking the Greatest Good: The Conservation Legacy of Gifford Pinchot.

Ed, Peter, I want to go back to the beginning of that interview. Because I’m really struck by the degree to which Muir’s languages is simply steeped in religion. And I want to make a case for a religion in Pinchot’s view of the world. Pinchot felt that nature should be used in a practical, pragmatic, utilitarian way, which is the point at which I turn to you. Let’s talk a little bit about the history of the religious imperative to be useful, and to work, and to use nature.

PETER: Yeah, well I think the first thing to say, Brian, is that Pinchot’s religion, Muir’s religion, is not the good old time religion. Because if you go back to the 17th century, if you go back to the first encounters with the American wilderness, it’s not a great place. It’s not a cathedral. In fact, it’s the devil’s playground.

BRIAN: It’s a house of horrors.

PETER: It’s a dangerous place, and it really is a dangerous place. And there may be a certain amount of awe involved in that, but there is more a need to overcome that wilderness, that wild place, because that is emblematic of the wilderness inside. Because we are the devil’s playground, just as the wilds are the devil’s playground. So that theological orientation is very alien to both of your guys in this dialogue they’re having in the early 20th century.

I would say, Brian, you’re exactly right about Pinchot drawing on a religious tradition. It’s not that he’s a secularist, and that he doesn’t care about nature, he does. He has religious feelings, sensibility. But it comes from really the enlightenment, natural religion, Deism, think of nature’s God. That’s in the Declaration of Independence. What does nature’s God intend for us to do? Nature’s God is disclosing his secrets to us, that is the laws of nature, so that we can flourish. We can develop wilderness into a cultivated landscape.

And there’s an aesthetic there, that is a notion of beauty in development.

BRIAN: So it’s really about realizing God’s intent for man by getting the maximum use and value out of nature.

PETER: You might say higher use. The first English settlers in America were quite aware that they were human beings in that nature, that wilderness. They were the minions of the devil, that is Native Americans, they were savage. And the settlers put that savagery at the beginning of civilization. You had to overcome that savagery. You had to displace those people.

Be fruitful and multiply, because that land can sustain a great and flourishing population. And the fact that there are few Indians running around hunting animals, in effect the Indians are animals. You need to cultivate and civilize them to bring them to a higher state. So what’s beautiful in 18th and 19th century America is improved and perfected nature.

BRIAN: Got it, and that clearly is where Pinchot is coming from. But Muir has this very flowery vision of nature, if you will. Ed, where does his very different kind of religious language come from?

ED: Well let’s think literally we’re Muir is coming from. First of all which is Scotland, but he moves to the United States to Wisconsin when he’s 11. There he memorizes– Brian this will give you some hint– the entire New Testament and most of the Old Testament. He can recite it. And then he and his brother both avoid the draft of the Civil War, and go to Canada where they work at a sawmill. And then during–

PETER: He just couldn’t cut it.

ED: Ah, apparently he could. And so then he walks all the way to Florida from the upper Midwest, in 1867, in the midst of the wreckage of the Civil War. And so, we pick up our story with Muir as an old man in which he’s basically retreated to the far west as his last refuge to protect wilderness. But he has watched the story that Peter’s describing unfold over 200 years. That story of reducing the wilderness happens over and over and over again, over this vast territory of the United States.

By the time Hetch Hetchy comes along, there’s been a whole lot of development going on.

BRIAN: Do you think that that clears the way, clear cuts in a way, the way for a more romantic view of wilderness, Ed, in the second part of the 19th century?

ED: Yeah, you talk about Muir’s language, it is romantic, but it’s also desperate. I mean it’s filled with a sense, this is our last chance.

PETER: Right, in a way, development is degradation. Development is a forfeiting God’s gift to us. Nature is something to cherish. It becomes something outside of us, just as the wilderness was outside of early settlers. It was a dangerous place. Now this precious place depends on us, on our stewardship, or it won’t exist anymore.

BRIAN: It’s time for another short break. When we get back, the tricky business of clearing a landscape of people so that tourists can enjoy a wilderness view.

PETER: You’re listening to BackStory, and we’ll be back in a moment.