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Show 423. seeing them all. If Nature wasn't poor, then neither need America be. Further, the Hetch Hetchy Valley had virtues which Yosemite Valley lacked. It was still wild and untrampled. If the whole Sierra was like a forest of Yosemities, Muir was only asking for two of them, one of which had already been harmed. The Park would contain two parts of a larger whole of the Sierra, really two Parks, one wild and the other "improved," two trees, one trimmed, and the other still whole. Thus Muir hoped to save Hetch Hetchy by making it a wild and inaccessible hinterland of a larger centrally improved Park. Even while he realized that there was no such thing as large-scale recreational use and wilderness in the same place, he was willing to sacrifice Yosemite Valley, if he could preserve Hetch Hetchy. This kind of bargaining has, by our age, become a standard preservationist strategy. It didn't work for Hetch Hetchy, and it hasn't worked elsewhere. The sanctity of Hetch Hetchy was not assured by its inclusion in the Park. Poor Muir had no idea of what was to come, when the developers would try to divide and destroy the Park. In May of 1890, he wrote to Johnson, The Tuolumne Canbn is so closely related to the Yosemite region it should also be included, but whether it is or not will not matter much, since it lies in rugged rocky security, as one of Nature's own reservations. |