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In recent weeks, Yosemite Valley has been in the news a great deal and a group of activists known as Friends of Yosemite Valley have come under enormous fire. Park spokesman Scott Gediman, in an article published just days ago in the San Francisco Chronicle, portrayed FoYV as a "fringe group pushing a radical agenda". I hate to have to say this, but park officials lie and Gediman should be ashamed of himself.
 Pasted below is another article on this topic, also published in the San Francisco Chronicle. This one was written by David Brower and it speaks a truth we all need to remember.
The National Park Service is most of the way through a radical transformation begun more than twenty years ago. Our once proud parks are well on their way to becoming commercial theme parks. The Park Service's once proud employees are now demoralized and have been beaten down to the point that they will brutalize anyone who dares reminds them that THEY are at least partially to blame for the downfall of our park system.
Were David Brower alive today, Gediman would have held his tongue --- for Brower was FoYV's friend, and to his dying day vigorously supported FOYV's work. Brower died on November 5, 2000 and his commentary was published three weeks later. May Brower's words forever haunt Gediman and anyone else engaged in perpetuating "The Corporate Takeover of Nature and the Disneyfication of the Wild."
Scott
--- begin quoted ---
November 20, 2000
David Brower on the Yosemite Valley Plan
by David Brower - in the San Francisco Chronicle
[ Editor's note: This commentary on the proposed final management
plan for Yosemite Valley was written before Brower's death Nov. 5.
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt unveiled his proposal Nov. 14.]
RIGHT NOW, the National Park Service, which has heretofore cherished
Yosemite, seems intent on converting this temple into a profit center,
with pricey hotels, scant camping, few modest accommodations, wider
roads to field bigger diesel buses, ecological roadside mayhem,
atmospheric damage and requiring people who want to celebrate Yosemite
Valley to park outside the park in various still unspoiled places that
are soon to be paved. This is all to exploit what you can do when you
have $200 million or $300 million dollars to spend instead of the
discipline former National Park Service Director Newton Drury enjoyed
when he said, "We have no money, therefore we can do no harm."
The National Park Service is trying to do too much, too fast in
Yosemite, forgetting that protecting the park, not the Yosemite park
service revenues, is the most important thing here. It's time it
remembered what Yosemite is all about.
Anyone who has been visiting Yosemite for almost 82 years is likely to
brag about it, and I do incessantly. I started going to Yosemite in
1918. There were 37,000 visitors that year and I celebrated my sixth
birthday camped alongside the railroad that was helping construct an
alien dam in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley. Restoring this lost
treasure should be an ongoing part of the park service agenda.
Unbeknown even to many in the National Park Service, Yosemite was the
first national park, set aside eight years before Yellowstone, and its
mission clearly stated a year later by none other than Frederick Law
Olmsted. After he had done his bit for Central Park in New York City,
Olmsted came to California and the Fremont Estate to recover and to
advise California on how to take care of the best of its nature,
including Yosemite.
Mountains have a voice, and Olmsted was one of the first to try to
speak for them. He proposed the rights for nature implicit in the
national park idea.
"The first requirement is to preserve the natural scenery and restrict
within the narrowest limits the necessary accommodation of visitors.
"Structures should not detract from the dignity of the scene. In
preventing the sacrifice of anything that should be of the slightest
value to visitors to the convenience, bad taste, playfulness,
carelessness, or wanton destructiveness of present visitors, would
probably yield in each case the interest of uncounted millions to the
selfishness of a few."
Thus, in 1864, did an idea born on one coast reach another.
Maybe Olmsted can help all of us, including the National Park Service,
remember what the national park idea is all about. It was probably not
just to let people who can afford the Ahwahnee or Yosemite lodges to
luxuriate there, but to be a place to celebrate a bit of equity in a
magical place meant to be shared with the current brief tenants of the
Earth, but most importantly, one held in trust for the "uncounted
millions" not yet born. The greatest luxury in Yosemite comes from what
the Valley has to say, not just from its structures. If Old Dave Brower
wants to go slumming at the Ahwahnee, OK. But maybe his kids and
friends would rather camp, as he used to.
I am deeply concerned these days about Yosemite. I am old-fashioned
enough to believe that national parks were not set aside to create
profit centers for concessionaires nor to pad National Park Service
construction budgets for park officials to shortchange the future.
Large crowds are seasonal, but new roads, hotels and parking lots
despoil the park year-round.
I saw the trouble begin with an earlier development policy, Mission 66,
when then-National Park Service Director Connie Wirth went to the
American Automobile Association, not to conservationists, for advice.
What he let happen to Yosemite in the controversy over rerouting the
Tioga Road was a disaster, which the Sierra Club let happen by not
opposing it strongly enough. Park service people should have been
jailed for what they destroyed at Tenaya Lake, just as I would now urge
long prison sentences for engineers who molest roads until they are
wide enough to accommodate big diesel buses. Left alone, the park
service would get rid of Yosemite's autumn color with 2-stroke leaf
blowers.
In the 1950s, my attempt to save Yosemite from what photographer Ansel
Adams described as National Park Service vandalism at Tioga Pass was
enthusiastic enough to bring Horace Albright, second director of the
National Park Service, to San Francisco to try to get me fired as
executive director of the Sierra Club.
He was not successful, but neither was I successful in stopping the
National Park Service from demolishing Tenaya's granite domes. I have
had more than one park ranger lament how right we were to have opposed
that project and how our alternative would have been better. We have
seen this pattern repeated in the Merced River Canyon, where Judge
Anthony Ishii confirmed the righteousness of our protest against
illegal National Park Service vandalism of the river, but mostly too
late.
When I see the war-zone that used to be the Merced River Gorge in
Yosemite, I am furious that the perpetrators, who pushed this project
through in violation of the National Environmental Policy and the Wild
and Scenic Rivers acts, are allowed to continue their shoddy planning
in the rest of the park rather than taking some time out to rethink.
On the contrary, no one is taking time out and no one is rethinking and none of the lawbreakers is in jail, or even repentant.
The Merced River Plan was rushed through using old wildlife data (the
wildlife situation may have changed a bit since one bank of the river
was paved by the National Park Service). The river plan was not meant
to be a formality; it was intended to be the biological foundation of
planning efforts for the entire valley, Judge Ishii's statements in the
courtroom indicate that he would concur. If the National Park Service
is not violating the letter of his ruling, releasing the draft valley
plan before the river plan was finalized, it certainly is violating the
spirit of Ishii's call for sound planning. I call on the park service
to submit a complete plan for the Merced River before asking us to
comment on a draft Yosemite valley plan. The National Park Service
seems to be drunk on appropriations money. This time, I don't have
another 40 years to wait for the park service to realize their mistake.
It's time to wake up, and for God's sake, no more construction on the
river between the Highway 120 junction and Yosemite Valley!
This brings us to the next major disaster contained in the alternatives
of the valley plan. Why did that road need to be widened (other than to
spend some of the congressional cash)?
In a private statement to me in a meeting last year, Regional National
Park Service Director John Reynolds said that the road had to be
widened because buses were a necessary piece of Yosemite's
transportation future. He repeated this once to the press, but has been
denying it ever since. The emphasis on diesel buses in the draft
Yosemite Valley plan force me to infer that he was telling the truth
the first time. With both the Environmental Protection Agency in
California and Washington, D.C., currently cracking down on diesel as a
carcinogen and a massive air pollution problem, it is unconscionable
for the National Park Service to advocate a dramatic increase in diesel
traffic in Yosemite Valley.
Yosemite gets more pollution than it needs already from the Central
Valley without creating a new toxic menace locally. Until clean-fuel
buses can make the grade, we are stuck with diesel buses, which is far
dirtier than gasoline- burning modern cars, even per passenger-mile.
The Central Valley is beginning to look to rail as a solution to its
air problems, and I strongly encourage the National Park Service to
climb aboard this statewide effort, which can be part of the solution
for Yosemite as well.
Finally, let's put the brakes on any new parking lots. Parking is
currently sited in areas long-since developed while the draft Yosemite
Valley plan suggests that we pave over huge lots in unspoiled areas of
the park so diesel buses can serve expanded hotels in the valley on
widened roads. All of the alternatives are based on the assumption that
it is inevitable that we will continue to try to pack as many people
into the park as possible at any given time.
Congestion problems are relatively easy to solve; as Ansel Adams said, "When the theater's full, they don't sell lap-space."
National parks were created to be a natural haven from the world of
mindless development and endless growth. Placing no limit on the number
of current visitors who can visit the park at one time is a violation
of the Organic Act and a breach of our contract with future
generations. This may be easy to miss with so much
fee-demonstration-project money pouring into Yosemite, but it is your
job as the appointed guardians of Yosemite not to miss it.
So skip the hotel expansion, replace lost camping sites instead, and if
you want parking lots, limit them to impacted nonriparian areas where
other structures are being removed. As for restoring Yosemite, I'm glad
the park service is at least aware of the concept, but I don't see much
restoration in the plan that isn't undone by destruction elsewhere.
That's not restoration, it's called mitigation, as your highway
building friends can tell you.
If you widen Southside Drive and pull out other roads, there is no net
ecological gain, especially if the other roads are not actually
removed. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and others have said
that the future of the parks is in restoration. I heartily agree and
will begin applauding the moment that the National Park Service gets
done using this kind of language as green-wash for half-baked
development plans like the draft Yosemite Valley plan.
David R. Brower was the founder of Earth Island Institute and the
Friends of the Earth. He was also first executive editor of the Sierra
Club.
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