The East Bay Express co-editor calls foul on the city that prides itself as ecologically conscious while wasting vast sums of water. Specifically: for having neither a recycling program nor a system for recapturing rainfall that’s equal to about half its water need. Which brings him to that once-lovely, now sunken, paradise submerged in the reservoir from which most of the water San Franciscans drink comes—Yosemite’s late, great Hetch Hetchy Valley:
In order to maintain this incredibly wasteful habit, and keep its collective head planted firmly in the sand, San Francisco also continues to act as if one of the most egregious environmental offenses of the 20th Century was no big deal. It's as if the destruction of a magnificent valley in Yosemite National Park, a place that John Muir fought tirelessly to save, never occurred.
But it did, of course. And it wrecked the wondrous Hetch Hetchy Valley, along with it’s towering waterfalls that cascade down canyon walls, in order to make way for O’Shaughnessy Dam and the massive reservoir behind it.
Image: Hetch Hetchy before it was flooded/ Restore Hetch Hetchy
