When it comes to self-congratulatory, performative environmentalism, San Franciscans probably lead the pack. They declared a “climate emergency,” and then, in defiance of a court ruling, they banned natural gas hookups in new buildings. To further their war on personal automotive transportation, they closed Highway One to traffic, a vital north/south thoroughfare. And they’re creating “urban biodiversity” by planting trees and “restoring natural ecosystems.” But there is one natural ecosystem that San Franciscans destroyed and will not restore, and the magnitude of this ongoing crime cannot be erased or even assuaged by creating bike lanes and banning gas stoves, or by planting a few trees.
In the heart of California’s High Sierra, amid towering pines and granite rock, 3,800 feet above sea level, a reservoir captures some of the finest fresh water in the world. For over a century, pristine snow runoff into this man-made alpine lake has cascaded through an aqueduct that stretches 167 miles westward down the mountains, across California’s great Central Valley, skirting the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, to gush into the Crystal Springs Reservoir nestled in the northern reaches of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
And for over a century, approximately 265,000 acre-feet per year of this pure mountain water has flowed out of faucets and shower heads, filled washing machines, and watered lawns from San Francisco to Palo Alto. It is arguably the finest urban water in the world. But there was a high price to pay.
An iconic hero of the environmental movement, revered even by informed observers who are skeptical of what the environmental movement has become, was John Muir. In 1892, witnessing unregulated logging practices that would have stripped the mountains bare without some protection, Muir founded the Sierra Club in San Francisco. Muir’s legacy is profound. He was instrumental in forming the National Park Service and was personally involved in the creation not only of Yosemite National Park but also of Sequoia, Mount Rainier, and the Grand Canyon national parks. He is considered one of the founders of the conservation movement.
We can argue, and should, over what role environmentalism should play in the 21st century and how we can best balance the legitimate concerns over sustainability and ecosystem preservation with economic health and human prosperity. But there is one thing we ought to agree on: the water that serves San Francisco today, quenching the thirst of a population with probably the highest percentage of serious and committed environmentalists in the world, is the result of an abomination that broke John Muir’s heart.
The reservoir that has supplied water to San Francisco for nearly a century inundates a valley that Muir and many of his contemporaries deemed not just equal to, but even more spectacular than Yosemite Valley. Just like Yosemite still is today, the Hetch Hetchy Valley was once a narrow ribbon of alluvial flatland, over which flowed the headwaters of the Tuolumne River. It was studded with groves of sequoia and cedar and dotted with small lakes and ponds that mirrored walls of granite that rose thousands of feet on either side. It was stunningly beautiful.
One of the last battles of John Muir’s noble life was to prevent the construction of the 430-foot-high O’Shaughnessy Dam that drowned that beauty beneath 360,000 acre-feet of water. Although successful throughout his 76 years in many ways that overshadow this setback, at the end of his life, Muir could not stop the project. In December 1913, President Wilson authorized construction of the reservoir. One year later, John Muir died. Hetch Hetchy’s natural paradise was submerged, and so it remains.
When searching for something, anything, that can unite environmentalists and conservatives, reclaiming the Hetch Hetchy Valley is an inspiring prospect. It is certainly feasible, and more feasible than even proponents of such a project may realize. A recent bestseller, avowed by the authors to be written by Democrats for Democrats, is Abundance. In this book, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson acknowledge the near impossibility of doing anything big in America, and they focus considerable attention on California. They advocate a “paradigm shift” in how things get done, a move away from bureaucracy and litigation and from “process” merely for the sake of process, in favor of results.
The authors of Abundance accurately expose the reasons why we have paralyzed our ability as a society to do big things, and they ask good questions. But their bias pours off every page. They advocate for more infill, more solar panels, more subsidies, but all of it with regulatory streamlining. They don’t address the bigger problem, which is that most of us don’t want infill. While solar panels have merit, they don’t need subsidies, and they’re not the only energy solution. And here, then, is where the big question of consensus gets real. What sort of grand bargain would attract broad popular support powerful enough to get big projects funded and built? What vision might generate enough universal appeal that we could build big things with the same urgency and speed that leaders of previous generations accomplished?
The answer is abundance, but more broadly conceived, calculated not just to enable infill, but also to support new suburbs—California has 38 million acres (that’s nearly 60,000 square miles) of cattle range. At the same time, 94 percent of California’s nearly 40 million people live on less than 8,000 square miles. There is plenty of room for a few new cities and towns along California’s Highway 101 and Interstate 5 north/south corridors. For energy, we need an abundance vision calculated not only to encourage privately funded solar panels on rooftops and commercial buildings but also to tap California’s vast reserves of natural gas to generate additional electricity.
And when it comes to water, we need a unifying vision of abundance that permits and helps fund projects that add 10 million acre-feet per year to the state’s water supply. Projects and policy revisions to accomplish this include forest thinning to allow more runoff and healthier trees, dredging delta channels and tributaries to add more flow capacity in order to save more water in reservoirs for summer use (deeper channels will also help the salmon), restructured delta pumping rules and new facilities to safely divert flood runoff from the delta, expanded surface storage, additional runoff harvesting from Sierra tributaries, urban runoff harvesting and wastewater reuse, and desalination.
Investing in projects that would supply that much additional water offers a grand bargain that unites environmentalists with California’s businesses and households. With that much new water, the state’s farms can thrive, the cities will not have to ration water, and the state’s ecosystems can be not just saved but enhanced. From the Salton Sea and Mono Lake to the entire Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, surplus water will be available to ensure these ecosystems and others will be restored and will thrive.
The centerpiece of this grand bargain and of this broad vision of abundance can be the demolition of the O’Shaughnessy Dam, since San Franciscans losing 265,000 acre-feet per year of alpine runoff is easily compensated for by the addition of 10 million acre-feet of water from new water projects.
It is only a small stretch to imagine walking in cool groves of Sequoia Redwoods along the rewilded Tuolumne River as it meanders again through the floor of the revivified Hetch Hetchy Valley. San Franciscans, every one of them, as citizens of the city that gave us the Sierra Club and as stewards of John Muir’s legacy, should be the first to demand Hetch Hetchy Valley be returned to its former glory.
And it doesn’t have to take decades. Get out the dynamite. If they could do it on the Klamath, they can do it on the Tuolumne.
Alternatively, San Franciscans can continue down their current path—creating bike lanes and banning cars, indifferent to the inconvenience these actions wreak on the lives of people trying to get to work on time. And as they indulge in this petty, delusional cruelty, they can absolve themselves of any duty to negotiate an end to an epic hypocrisy. This is what “environmentalism” has descended to in San Francisco. A misanthropic con. An ego trip. A tragic waste of passion. A misguided sideshow, while the main event, a drowned valley, waits in vain for relief.