Ken Burns National Parks PBS series and the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley

I've been watching the Ken Burns PBS television series on the national parks, and I am transported through time and space to Yosemite where I've been going since I was very young.

I am old enough to remember the fire fall. As an adult, I've camped on the Valley floor and hiked in the high country, caught trout in Tuolumne Meadows, and stood in the spray of water falls. I've slept under Yosemite skies so clear I could practically touch the Milky Way.

Yet this television series is not an exercise in sentimentality. I am very grateful that Ken Burns highlighted the travesty of a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, built in the early 20th century. John Muir called Hetch Hetchy "Little Yosemite," a glacially carved canyon that San Francisco entombed behind a dam for its water supply. It is hard to believe now that a dam could be built in a national park, but it was.

And the dam is still there.

What is even more hard to believe is the

opposition to removing the dam from San Francisco's supposedly green-leaning political leaders, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a former mayor, and former mayor Willie Brown. They've opposed even studying whether San Francisco could obtain water from downstream on the Tuolumne River. They are apparently afraid to know the answer.

Our generation has the opportunity to set right this crime against the earth. John Muir saw the dam as an affront against God. "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." Muir once wrote.

There is an organization that has worked tirelessly for years to remove the dam and restore Hetch Hetchy. It is worthy of your support. You can find more information on Restore Hetch Hetchy by clicking HERE. We've been involved with this organization for many years, and it has new and inspired leadership with Mike Marshall.

Awhile back I wrote an opinion piece for the San Francisco Examiner, aimed at the religious community, on this topic. Here it is again:

Why the religious community should care about Hetch Hetchy

By: The Rev. James Richardson Special to The Examiner | 5/8/09 4:14 PM

With the dire threat of climate change and with one-third of the planet’s population lacking safe drinking water, it’s a reasonable question to ask: Why care about a relatively small mountain valley in California?

For those of us in the religious community, it’s especially fair to ask that question given our seemingly stretched resources and the priority extended to alleviating the suffering of the poor. Would we not be better served to spend our resources elsewhere and on some other cause than the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley?

Let me suggest looking at this differently, and I am speaking primarily to my brothers and sisters in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious communities. It’s a central tenet of faith common to all of our religions that God provides. And God does not provide meagerly, but provides abundantly. God gives us all that we need to heal the sick, bind the wounds of the injured and to care for this planet, our island home.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy would be a spectacular declaration that we believe in God’s abundance, that we take seriously our calling to be faithful stewards of all God gives us. If we have just enough faith to restore one wounded valley, we can move other mountains — we can reverse global warming, we can clean the watersheds and bring safe water and food to every corner of the Earth. God provides everything we need to fully heal our planet. Do we really believe that?

As pressing as large-scale issues like global warming are, we ignore at our peril the smaller-scale issues of environmental restoration. It would be doubly tragic to fail in our efforts at the large issues while also failing to restore the jewels of our planet, like Hetch Hetchy. I believe God calls us to do both.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy also is about how human beings touch the sacred. We are not the first generation to experience God in the wilderness. The ancient Celts called the mountains and river valleys “thin places,” and Yosemite is certainly one of those amazing thin places.

John Muir’s Celtic spiritual roots were on full display when he fought San Francisco’s proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley. For the great naturalist, damming the valley was not only an attack on nature, but an attack on God.

“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,” Muir wrote in 1912. “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.”

The Rev. James Richardson is an Episcopal priest and the former Chaplain of the California state Senate.

Photos show Hetch Hetchy Valley before the dam, and now.

Restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley

Recently I was asked to write an op-ed piece about my conviction that the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park should be restored (the artwork here is a rendering of what the valley would look like if San Francisco's dam was removed). It is a cause I have been long associated with, and I was happy to share a few words (I wrote this while waiting for recent flight at Dulles). This short piece ran in the San Francisco Examiner Sunday May 10, and I share it with you:

Why the religious community should care about Hetch Hetchy

By: The Rev. James Richardson Special to The Examiner | 5/8/09 4:14 PM

With the dire threat of climate change and with one-third of the planet’s population lacking safe drinking water, it’s a reasonable question to ask: Why care about a relatively small mountain valley in California? 

For those of us in the religious community, it’s especially fair to ask that question given our seemingly stretched resources and the priority extended to alleviating the suffering of the poor. Would we not be better served to spend our resources elsewhere and on some other cause than the effort to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley? 

Let me suggest looking at this differently, and I am speaking primarily to my brothers and sisters in the Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and other religious communities. It’s a central tenet of faith common to all of our religions that God provides. And God does not provide meagerly, but provides abundantly. God gives us all that we need to heal the sick, bind the wounds of the injured and to care for this planet, our island home. 

Restoring Hetch Hetchy would be a spectacular declaration that we believe in God’s abundance, that we take seriously our calling to be faithful stewards of all God gives us. If we have just enough faith to restore one wounded valley, we can move other mountains — we can reverse global warming, we can clean the watersheds and bring safe water and food to every corner of the Earth.  God provides everything we need to fully heal our planet. Do we really believe that? 

As pressing as large-scale issues like global warming are, we ignore at our peril the smaller-scale issues of environmental restoration. It would be doubly tragic to fail in our efforts at the large issues while also failing to restore the jewels of our planet, like Hetch Hetchy. I believe God calls us to do both. 

Restoring Hetch Hetchy also is about how human beings touch the sacred. We are not the first generation to experience God in the wilderness. The ancient Celts called the mountains and river valleys “thin places,” and Yosemite is certainly one of those amazing  thin places.

John Muir’s Celtic spiritual roots were on full display when he fought San Francisco’s proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy Valley. For the great naturalist, damming the valley was not only an attack on nature, but an attack on God.  

“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,” Muir wrote in 1912. “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.”

The Rev. James Richardson is an Episcopal priest and the former Chaplain of the California state Senate.

Global warming, global restoration and journalists

Many years ago, in my journalism career, I wrote extensively on environmental issues, and in the 1980s I was among a group of journalists who established environmental investigative reporting as a distinct discipline within journalism (and in those days we spoke primarily of newspapers as the platform of journalism). My speciality was watersheds and pollution from toxic waste dumping. 

The stories that I and others wrote resulted in the federal "Superfund" to cleanup such sites. I bring this up today to point out a number of global trends that are disturbing and which the faith community has a stake in because the faith community, by definition, is part of the global community.

First, journalism: Newspapers are in a major economic meltdown and are closing or seriously downsizing. That ought to bother you mightily. Newspapers are still the major platform for serious journalism in the world; when you read a story on the internet, chances are a newspaper reporter wrote it and an newspaper editor edited it. The fallout of the economic collapse of car dealers, retailers and real estate marketers is that they have pulled their ads from newspapers, and the newspapers are collapsing. That is the result of an economic model too dependent on those sectors, and not the result of falling circulation or bad journalism (the rise of the internet is a convenient excuse for newspaper executives who made bad business decisions in the last 10 years). All of that is background for where I want to go with this.

Today marks the last day for Chris Bowman at The Sacramento Bee, where Lori worked as an editor for 20 years and I worked for 10 years as a reporter. Chris was among many journalists laid off earlier this month, caught up in the mass of layoffs throughout journalism. Chris is among my oldest friends, he was one of my two "best men" at my wedding (and my other best man, Tony Ramirez, was laid off by the New York Times last year). 

Chris is a leading environmental investigative journalist. He is a former Nieman Fellow from Harvard, which is the most prestigious fellowship in journalism. Chris is a founder of an organization that promotes environmental journalism, and he taught environmental journalism in Zimbabwe back when Western journalists had access to that country. With Chris removed from journalism (and we hope only temporarily), there is one fewer trained set of eyes and ears documenting the threats to our environment. That is an incalculable loss to all of us and to the environment.

Next, to related trends in the politics of the environment: Earlier this week, Lori and I participated in a meeting in Washington DC to hear from Mike Marshall, the new executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy, a decades-long effort to remove the dam from Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Mike outlined a long-term political strategy to convince Congress to remove the dam built in the 1920s by San Francisco (this post includes an artist's conception of what the Hetchy Hetchy Valley would look like without the dam). I will say more about this issue in another post. 

Last night, we joined members of St. Paul's who live at Westminster-Canterbury in seeing a film about an appalling proposal to build a strip mine in the Bristol Bay watershed of Alaska, the richest salmon waters in the world (the top photo on this post is from that watershed). The proposed Pebble Mine would include building the world's tallest dam to hold toxic mining sludge, theoretically keeping the sludge poisons out of the rivers. If you are wondering at the reliability of such dams, check out the Iron Mountain sludge dam in California, now a federal EPA superfund site, and earlier this week labeled the "worst water in the world" in the San Francisco Chronicle (another newspaper soon to fold).

I mention all this by way of pointing out the confluence of a number global trends: it takes journalists to investigate and highlight threats to the environment, especially those in places remote from the rest of us, like in Alaska. Journalists are in shorter supply today, and that ought to alarm us.

Related to this is a conversation that needs to happen (and the work of journalists can help us make it happen) around the sometimes competing politics of the environment. The dire need to reverse global warming is now the necessary focal point of the major environmental lobbying organizations, like the Sierra Club. The danger of that focus is that the specific localized threats, like the proposed Pebble Mine, will slide through unexamined by the nation, and remain only feebly opposed by environmentalists who can't be in two places at once.

This is also an issue about world poverty. Worldwide, mining companies are stripping poor countries of their resources with little return to those countries, and that is an issue for the faith community if we take seriously that greed is a sin. There is a report issued today on how mining companies are depriving African countries of much needed tax revenue (click HERE.)

Moreover, restoration of the earth -- symbolized by removing the dam at Hetch Hetchy -- must remain on the environmental agenda because restoration is part of the healing of our planet. This past Monday in Washington DC we heard just how stretched environmental organizations are in working on both global warming and restoration issues. There is much work to be done, and much organizing and conversation that needs to happen around all of this.