More than an oil spill (LA Times Op Ed)

[pinto]

Interesting take about possible impacts of the spill on long term environmental movements ~ pinto

More than an oil spill
Disasters helped launch, and have reinvigorated, the environmental movement, but not all such events are equal.

James William Gibson
May 11, 2010

We may well be living with the consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for the rest of the 21st century. But judging by past environmental disasters, the spill also has the potential to reinvigorate the environmental movement going forward. For more than a century, ecological crises have often strengthened environmental movements.

Take the fight over preserving the scenic Hetch Hetchy Valley just outside Yosemite National Park. The biggest environmental battle of naturalist John Muir's life was one that he lost — the fight to keep the city of San Francisco from erecting a dam on the Tuolumne River and flooding Hetch Hetchy.

The very idea of it appalled Muir: "These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for nature," Muir wrote at the time. "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated in the heart of man."

But although the dam was approved by Congress in 1913 and the valley ultimately destroyed, the fight helped embolden a fledgling environmental movement, and the memory of Hetch Hetchy became a rallying cry for future struggles.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-gibson-20100511,0,4021708.story

James William Gibson is a professor of sociology at Cal State Long Beach and the author, most recently, of "A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature."

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