Restore Hetch Hetchy

Hetch Hetchy Valley is the place John Muir called "a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples."

I have a dream of a restoration industry. It is a dream in which Big Engineering is directed not at war, but instead is harnessed into an economic and social force that awakens man's natural sense of being proprietor and caretaker of the Earth. Both concepts are important, but an ecologically minded person such as myself may well cringe at my use of the word "proprietor", which we can discuss in comments if anyone is inclined.

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The power of major engineering projects to drive change is clear, technological but also social progress can and has been achieved by things such as the interstate highway system (war related), the space program (cold war related) or the wave of dam building that occurred last century, to cite three very different examples.  For environmentalists this has always tended to be a negative thing, with projects usually being more destructive of the Earth than the Space Program and more along the lines of dam projects which destroy miles of vibrant and pristine habitat.

Big engineering projects have been decidedly anti-green. Restoration is our chance to make big engineering green.

The picture above is an accurate artist's rendering of Hetch Hetchy, a glacial valley in Yosemite, dear love of John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club and a figure commemorated on California's state quarter.  Well, it's not that accurate currently... because the valley floor depicted above is under water, dammed and filled by the City of San Francisco.  

It was called the second Yosemite Valley, and anyone that has visited Yosemite Valley itself will recognize how horrible the reality of filling such a stunning piece of nature truly is.  The movement to restore Hetch Hetchy has gained steam this year, and not only do I support it, but it's about much much more than getting this valley back.

It's about progressive engineering, and ultimately, a progressive economy.

The job of restoring Hetch Hetchy will run in the billions, estimates range from 4 billion to 10 billion dollars.  Yes, that's a lot of money.  But where will the money go?  It will go funding green technology companies, it will go to massive amounts of labor as young naturalists and the willing are recruited for surveys and the manual labor involved.  It will fund research into habitat science.  It will employ a lot of people and yield a lot of science and engineering, all aimed at leaving a place better than how you found it.

It is about Big Engineering finally being used to directly improve the planet we live on.  And there is a lot of this kind of work and worse to do besides Hetch Hetchy.  We need to funnel this energy of man to construct and control into the green and progressive goals.  I hope not only that Hetch Hetchy is restored, but that it should spark a restoration economy, in which mankind invents a new kind of technological infrastructure which nurtures the Earth as the Earth has nurtured us.

The main purpose of damming Hetch Hetchy has always been providing water for San Francisco, and so it is of concern if this resource is taken away.  However, subsequent massive dams further downstream in the foothills and in the San Joaquin Valley exist to hold sufficient water for San Francisco.  Hetch Hetchy is no longer needed for the practical reasons which have cause San Francisco to hold onto it so dearly.

Big Engineering has a hold on the modern human culture and that is not going to change.  A progressive world vision has to imagine how such forces can be put to progressive use.  A strong restoration industry would be a boon for progressives, a source for positive job creation all aiming to rectify our mistakes, restore our urban wildlands and would educate mankind in the specifics of how to caretake our planet for the next few thousand years.