DAM! Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park.DAM! Water, Power, Politics, and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park Yosemite National Park (yōsĕm`ĭtē), 761,266 acres (308,205 hectares), E central Calif.; est. 1890 as a result of the efforts of conservationist John Muir. Located in the Sierra Nevada, it is a glacier-scoured area of great beauty; Mt. JOHN W. SIMPSON John W. Simpson (25 September, 1914 – January 4, 2007) was an electrical engineer, who made significant contributions to the development of the nuclear energy. [] He was born in 1914 in Glenn Springs, South Carolina. In the 1920s, the Hetch Hetchy valley Hetch Hetchy Valley, in Yosemite National Park, central Calif., on the Tuolumne River. It once rivaled Yosemite Valley in beauty and grandeur. O'Shaughnessy Dam (completed 1923; enl. 1938) turned the valley into a lake c. and the Tuolumne River The Tuolumne River is one of the major rivers draining the western slope Sierra Nevada mountains of California. It is the slightly larger northern neighbor of the Merced River; both originate in Yosemite National Park. that flowed through it in California were transformed from a protected wilderness area into a reservoir. The O'Shaughnessy Dam was constructed to supply both water and electricity to San Francisco, but only after years of debate about the environmental cost of offering these benefits to the city. Simpson declares the confrontation, which featured conservationist John Muir and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted on one side and the U.S. Forest Service on the other, as the seminal U.S. environmental battle. The author, a professor of landscape architecture and natural resources, describes the political maneuverings that both sides used to fight their campaigns, foreshadowing fore·shad·ow tr.v. fore·shad·owed, fore·shad·ow·ing, fore·shad·ows To present an indication or a suggestion of beforehand; presage. fore·shad the environmental battles that have come since. Simpson argues that the Hetch Hetchy, in the middle of Yosemite National Park, should be drained and restored. Pantheon, 2005, 384 p., b&w illus., hardcover, $28.50. |
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