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Show 525. growth of the c i t y and the preservation of wilderness. Muir saw this, quite simply, as the question of Evil versus Good. And iff a s M u i r a rgued, the only reason San Francisco preferred to dam Hetch Hetchy was monetary, if they could get their water elsewhere by paying a l i t t l e more, then he questioned the conservationists' chief value: efficiency. If they called it progress, then he would question that too, but not in public. It was by t h i s , the deepest issue, that Muir and the Sierra Club would be most troubled, and i t was on t h i s issue that the Owens Valley formed an analogue to Hetch Hetchy. At the same time as San Francisco was trying to lay i ts hands on the watershed of the Tuolumne River, Los Angeles was attempting to buy up the watershed of the Owens Valley. If San Francisco wanted to drown Hetch Hetchy, Los Angeles wanted to drain the Owens Valley dry. If James Phelan, the proposer of Hetch Hetchy dam, represented a c a p i t a l i s t i c evil to Muir, "To the farmers of the Owens Valley [William Mulholland] represented greed, arrogance, and overwhelming financial power. . . . " Just as Pinchot had supported San Francisco, so he helped Mulholland and Los Angeles in 1906. Clearly, the same conservationist e t h i c was at work on the east and west sides of the Sierra simultaneously. And the same argument in favor of the c i t i e s , "efficiency" and centralized urban power, under the rubric of "the g r e a t e s t good for the greatest number," was a t work. There were two significant differences between the s a c r i f i c e s of the Owens and the Hetch Hetchy valleys. pirst of a l l , the Owens Valley was not a National Park, and |