Back in November the Schwarzenegger administration gave the go-ahead to an assessment examining the feasibility of restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, which was dammed and flooded in the beginning of the 20th century to provide water and power to the city of San Francisco.

This photo of the O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir was taken by David Cross in July, 1987. Protesters had put in a simulated "crack" on the face of the dam, and inscribed the text, "Free the Rivers! - J. Muir."

I always try to consider environmental issues with respect to how smart ecological practices benefit humans. I even criticize other environmentalists for placing aesthetic and emotional values ahead of human ecological interests, which I generally view as politically unrealistic. I am what you might call a conservationist rather than a preservationist. But every once it a while a cause comes along that seems to me so ethically right that I stop caring about human costs and benefits, and I am reminded that there is a little John Muir in each and every environmentalist.

Yosemite is so wonderful that we are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, but Nature is not so poor as to have only one of anything...

...Hetch Hetchy, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have no seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, their brows in the sky, their feet set in the groves and gay flowery meadows, while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to stir all the air into music – things frail and fleeting and types of permanence meeting here and blending, just as they do in Yosemite, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.

-John Muir, The Yosemite

Of course, we can wax aesthetic until the cows come home, but any environmental policy still has to pass through the political gauntlet in order to become reality. And there are plenty of people with trepidations about removing Hetch Hetchy’s O'Shaughnessy Dam. A series of editorials in the Sacramento Bee covers the dreary policy details better than I can (trust me, I’ve been trying for well over an hour now), but suffice it to say that there is quite a bit of disagreement on the economic feasibility of draining and restoring the valley.

Independent of the cost-benefit calculus, there are two main reasons that I support the dam’s removal. The first is John Muir’s legacy. Preventing the dam was the last cause that Muir championed before he died in 1914 and was the first major public environmental debate. Some would argue that it was actually the beginning of the environmental movement. From a purely symbolic perspective there are few greater environmental victories that could be won.

The second and more important is the obvious historical parallel between the original battle to prevent the damming of Hetch Hetchy and the current public debate over drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Damming the valley was proposed in very beginning of the 20th century, but did not garner sufficient public or political support at the time. After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 the original proponents of the dam used the disaster as political capital to argue that water and power from proposed dam were necessary for the city’s full recovery. They ignored alternative possibilities, such as other reservoirs in other locations, and within seven years managed to push through the Raker Act, which allowed the construction of a dam inside a National Park.

Like drilling the Arctic Refuge, there was uncertainty about whether the dam was necessary, like drilling the Arctic Refuge, other options – possibly better options – were not considered, and like drilling in the Arctic Refuge, a precedent was set for the use of public lands. I want to see the Tuolumne River undammed in recognition that damming Hetch Hetchy was a mistake, just as it will be if we proceed to drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.