Editorial

When it comes to San Francisco's environmental sensibilities, no cause is too distant, no endeavor too bold.

In recent years, San Francisco has vowed to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 20 percent and to produce enough electricity from ocean tides to power 1,000 homes.

Sell It Yourself It has voiced its support for tightening hazardous chemical regulations in the European Union and protecting arctic Alaska from oil development.

It has discouraged consumption of Chilean sea bass and promoted the pro-vegetarian Great American Meatout.

It plans to recycle 75 percent of its garbage and wants to convert restaurant grease into fuel for city buses.

It promises someday to appropriately honor an environmental hero of the Bay Area, the late David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute.

"[He] awakened us to our responsibility to enrich and protect our habitat," according to a city proclamation, which calls for "a suitable and permanent memorial."

But did Brower truly awaken San Francisco? He certainly didn't think so, at least where it mattered most.

Brower spent a half-century following the lead of the great naturalist John Muir. Like Muir, Brower championed the goal of providing two spectacular valleys in Yosemite National Park, not just the Yosemite Valley most tourists see today. Like Muir, Brower failed.

Muir died in 1914, having failed to stop Congress from approving a plan to flood Hetch Hetchy Valley with 300 feet of Sierra water. Brower died in 2000, having failed in his efforts to restore Hetch Hetchy to the American public.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, San Francisco has been steadfast in its contention that a municipal reservoir is the highest use of Hetch Hetchy. In 1913, Congress agreed with San Francisco and approved the dam's construction. Since 1923, Hetch Hetchy has been underwater, relegated to obscurity. Today, it is the least visited natural feature in the park.

Like Muir, Brower implored San Francisco to get its water elsewhere on the Tuolumne River, outside Yosemite National Park. San Francisco never did.

"It belongs to everybody," Brower said of the Hetch Hetchy Valley when he visited it in May 2000, six months before he died. "We happen to be the current custodians. And San Francisco happens to be the current pirates."

Hetch Hetchy is San Francisco's great civic contradiction. While the city's environmental agenda spans the globe, it keeps a glacial valley locked away close to home. San Francisco claims part of a national park, a public treasure, for its own utilitarian purposes of securing water and electricity.

Hetch Hetchy provides nearly 85 percent of San Francisco's water and a major portion of the supply for San Mateo, Santa Clara and Alameda counties. The system, then and today, is an engineering marvel. It captures and conveys water for 160 miles solely by gravity's force, along the way spinning turbines that provide electricity to run the city's famous cable cars and other municipal services.

The water system is no ordinary source of civic pride. Hetch Hetchy, said the former mayor Dianne Feinstein, is the city's "birthright." No wonder that by 1988 she had quashed the effort by Interior Secretary Donald Hodel to study the valley's restoration.

Nothing, in San Francisco's view, seems broken. What is there to fix? Nothing, if the view is a narrow one.

But if Californians pull back and take a broader look, they will see that Hetch Hetchy is not San Francisco's birthright. It is the country's. In Yosemite, buried beneath glacial waters, is part of a park that was set aside for all Americans. Surely San Franciscans and Feinstein, now a U.S. Senator and the state's most seasoned leader on water issues, can envision the grandeur of a national park made whole.

Modern-day environmentalism calls for examining old assumptions, rebalancing public values and accepting new findings. Some decisions need recalibrating, especially ones made 90 years ago.

Could San Francisco, as Brower and Muir said, get its water someplace other than Yosemite National Park? Researchers at the University of California, Davis, asked the question and, with a computer's help, found that it could. San Francisco could take its water downstream, from the New Don Pedro Dam, whose reservoir is more than five times Hetch Hetchy's size. A replacement reservoir, Calaveras, proposed in the East Bay, would be larger than Hetch Hetchy.

There is ample reason to ponder a different future for Yosemite Valley's little twin - to talk about restoring Hetch Hetchy, modifying the Tuolumne River water system, replacing lost hydropower and removing San Francisco from the national park.

This will be a serious and contentious discussion for the state as well as for San Francisco. But it will be worth the trouble.

Imagine the possibilities. No longer would San Francisco be, as Brower declared it years ago, the pirate with the stolen national treasure. Instead, a city that prides itself on environmentalism could set its sights on a new cause: restoring Hetch Hetchy, a public jewel close to home.