Published, 'Fresno Bee', 6 April 2001
The continued P.R. push by The Wilderness Society in support of the Yosemite Valley Plan ( re.: Editorial by Jay Thomas Watson, Fresno Bee, 23 March 2001) deserves a serious and overdue response from knowledgeable environmental and social justice advocates.
While no one disputes that the Valley Plan does institute the removal of 38% of the Valley's camping, a stables, and an obsolete dam, an honest reading reveals an alarming litany of expanding and new environmental harm. To name a few examples from the text: the asphalted surface area of Yosemite Valley would increase; air quality would degrade; about half of the Valley's roadways would be significantly widened (including a court-enjoined riverside segment); two new segments of roadway would be built and one removed; a ten-acre "check station" would be built in the pristine West Valley; hundreds of new Valley hotel rooms would be built, and two of three hotel complexes would expand beyond their current borders; restaurant seating in Yosemite Valley would expand significantly; a 22-bay bus station would be built in Yosemite Village, pushing functions to other areas, and the Village would increase in size. Even greater environmental impacts would occur outside Yosemite Valley: extensive new parking lot developed areas would be built; yet another road segment would be ploughed through an ancient forest; development at park entrance areas would expand dramatically; and park employment and operating costs would increase, even as large new tracts of housing and administrative development would be built on undisturbed land at El Portal, Foresta, and Wawona; sensitive and endangered species habitat would be destroyed, and widespread construction would destroy or degrade at least 58 known native American prehistoric sites. An "elegant balance"?
The Valley Plan raises serious questions about its commercial versus public values. Besides the removal of camping, the plan would enact a thorough shift in overnight accommodation type: 54% of inexpensive rustic units would be removed simultaneous to the construction of 24% more hotel rooms. Predictably, the new units would cost more, and the footprint of two hotel complexes would expand beyond their current size ( the Awahnee would remain the same ). Yet the text offers nothing to justify such choices. Still, although the accounting is unclear, the Draft Valley Plan predicted major enhancement of Delaware North's bottom line as commercial service levels and prices increased. Unbelievably, the Final Valley Plan now suggests abandoning cost controls and raising hotel, food, and service prices to assure profits. Economic discrimination haunts the plan, and the smell of big-business welfare pervades it.
In fact the Valley Plan defies fairness and environmental constraint as plainly as it violates federal law. Although a court ordered the preparation of a "legally valid" plan to protect the Merced River in 1999, officials prepared a River Plan based instead on permissive land-use zoning, while deleting protected values, and deferring the fundamental question of user capacities to future study. At the same time, the Draft Valley Plan was prepared in response to earlier development decisions, not the constraints of a legally valid river plan. Much that is wrong with the Valley Plan should have been avoided through the remedy of first establishing protection for the Merced, and by heeding public outcry for true restraint, and restoration. Officials actually printed the Draft VP before the public comment period for the River Plan had even closed. A federal court will now hear legal challenges.
As Congress begins deliberation on funding the Valley Plan, it is the public's unambiguous desire for a less commercial, more natural Yosemite which is really at stake. That desire runs across the political spectrum in California. But the Valley Plan of parking lot and roadway construction, of hotel and restaurant development, and of infrastructure expansion for an unlimited transit concession and mass-transit tourism reveals a plan for growth, not restraint; a disposition toward profits over public values. Public relations "spin" for the plan will eventually fail, and already some officials are hardly bothering; Interior spokespersons talk openly of a wide-open future of 8 million or more annual visitors (Yosemite's 1980 GMP prescribed 2 million, today there are 3.6 million). Gateway towns and counties, intimate with Yosemite, and knowing that unlimited growth would not be confined to the park, are awake to the serious threats of diesel toxicity, sprawl, and an outside push toward large scale commercial development.
At least until a federal court has heard legal challenges, Congress should not fund the Valley Plan. For as is widely known in California, it was congressional funding which animated illegal post-flood developments in Yosemite since 1997 -- the illegal proposed expansion of the Yosemite Lodge, the illegal widening of the El Portal Road -- yet it was committed, grassroots citizen and environmental plaintiffs, and the courts, which provided oversight. The late David R. Brower was one of these, and vocally opposed the Valley Plan to his last day. Founder of the modern environmental movement, and a Yosemite lover since his youth in the mountains, David became fond of quoting an early Park Service Director named Newton Drury, and applied Drury's caution to Yosemite which Congress would now be wise to heed:
"We have no money, therefore we can do no harm."