You Decide: Wilderness Preservation? | A Biography of America | Social Studies | Interactive

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You Decide: Wilderness Preservation? | A Biography of America

In this interactive from A Biography of America, decide whether Presidents Roosevelt and Wilson should have been more active in preserving wilderness from development. In 1908, when a dam-building project designed to provide water to the city of San Francisco threatened to flood the spectacular Hetch Hetchy Valley near Yosemite National Park, President Theodore Roosevelt sided against wilderness advocates, such as Sierra Club founder John Muir, and with supporters of the dam. When Woodrow Wilson became President, he announced he would sign the bill that authorized the Hetch Hetchy Dam.

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Background Essay

The Hetch Hetchy controversy was the single most famous incident in the early history of American environmental politics, galvanizing a wilderness protection movement that inspires public passions to this very day.

By the end of the twentieth century, environmentalists were proposing that dams had become so ecologically destructive that the only solution was to tear them down, an idea that found support even among some powerful government officials.

In a 2012 election, nearly 100 years after the project was approved, San Francisco voters decided against an initiative to demolish the dam.

Discussion Questions

What do you think is the purpose of wilderness?
How did the Hetch Hetchy controversy set the agenda for the environmental movement?
What are the potential environmental costs and benefits of economic development?
What are the economic costs and benefits of environmental protection?