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Show 492. and it goes like this: the Sierra Club was really a small organization; it had very little power and only a couple of hundred members; and so it had to focus its attention on gaining power, and limit its influence, mostly to the running of yosemite National Park. All right. So the Club never said a word about the desertification of the Owens Valley, which was precisely contemporaneous with the Hetch Hetchy controversy. And the Club instigated a policy as a result of its own limitations, directed largely at protecting and developing National Parks. These were the practical decisions we might expect. But it turned out that the power of the Club was not in its political clout, butin the attractiveness of the ideas it promoted. So it was of the highest importance that the Club promote carefully a coherent and far-seeing plan for Parks and Wildernesses. They failed to do this, and when one of their own converts, Stephen Mather,- gained power and took charge of the Parks, becoming the Director of the newly formed National Park Service, then the ideas were put to the test. Mather believed in good roads, good meals, and comfortable accommodations in the Parks. He was an effective bureaucrat but hardly a great intellect. His ecological education was embarrassingly poor, even by nineteenth century standards. He applied the methods of Sierra Club Outings to his own Political machinations, taking Congressmen into the wilderness, and the gospel he preached was a vulgar form of that he learned from the Sierra Club. So it should be no surprise that we have a system of National Parks designed by a vulgar intellect, |