Yosemite is a place of many mountains, canyons and lakes.
There are so many that some of the best even go unnamed. It is also
home to a diverse variety of flora and fauna. Transport any of these
named and unnamed wonders in the backyard of any metropolitian area of the
world and you'd have created an eighth wonder of the world -- at least until
it became overrun with urbia. However, if you lived in an a particular
city called San Francisco, and this place called Yosemite was about 200 miles
away, you'd find it OK to take one of these wonders of nature and :
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you'd dam this unique place and fill it with water to generate cheap power
to run the local mass transit;
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you'd drink the water from this wilderness. It is so clean and fresh
that it doesn't hardly need to be treated.
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you'd make extinct the mountain sheep in North Yosemite and endanger the
lives and well being of many wilderness species by taking away their wintering
grounds and use the electricity so you can sit in your subsidized mass transit
using electricity;
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You'd make sure the enviromental education of our schools didn't include
the meaning of "hetch hetchy" as a grass with edible seeds.
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You'd vote for an ex-mayor and now US Senator to stand on the dam and say
'this is a nice dam, why would anyone want to tear it down';
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You'd form an internationally recognized environmental group, the Sierra
Club, to first challenge the ecocrime;
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Then you'd let that organization be taken over by others who would ignore
that crime in favor of scamming money from those who care about the environment
to keep the Sierra Club's leadership rolling in special interest money and
power.
This place is called Hetch Hetchy, the drainage
of Northern Yosemite. It was once the home of big horned mountain sheep.
(The horn in the picture was found in the Tilden Lake area of NW Yosemite)
No more are the high mountain routes traveled by these spectacular animals.
Instead, Hetch Hetchy has joined the list of many other outdated,
failed and/or failing government do-gooder programs.
Make no mistake, the Hetch Hetchy dam's original original
intent was all fine and good. There were few alternative energy resources
at that time. There was no interstate energy grid to share and provide
energy amongst the people of this nation. Environmentalisms were
unknown sciences. There was a need for water and there was lots of
water to be had. Time has passed. Power is available from numerous
sources. There are many ways to get the same water without damming
this precious natural area in a national park.
What to do? Take up the challenge and assess the
situation in light of new technology and resources. Then get busy and
fix the problem :
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Take out Hetch Hetchy dam
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Use modern technology to ecologically deliver water to remote resevours.
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Use alternate sites outside of the park for flood control.
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Restore the Hetch Hetchy ecosystem as best as possible.
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Bag the excess silt and sell it to the populace to help fund the project.
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Renovate the meadows and valley forests to allow for reasonable wintering
forage and hunting grounds.
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Keep the valley in a reasonably pristine condition by the prohibition of
vehicular traffic.
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Allow development of limited bike, XC and hiking trails in and out of the
valley.
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Charge a modest fee for access if this seems reasonable.
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Rebuild the lost animal trail system to the higher summering grounds.
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Restore lost stocks of big horned sheep and other depleted species.
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Politically, (sadly politics is involved in everything important these days)
schedules tours and backpack trips for CongressCritters to oversee the project.
Do what is right for all, not just the special interests
of the residents of San Francisco and the Bay Area. For more on this
issue, take a look at the
Congressional Debates of
Hetch Hetchy way back when...
BTW, I grew up and lived in San Francisco Bay Area for
about 30 years. My first visit to Yosemite was in the early 1950s.