| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 11.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism. By Robert Righter. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. illus, notes, index, xxiii-303. $30.

The Hetch Hetchy dam controversy stands as perhaps the most well-known legal and political contest in American environmental history. From the outset, environmental historiography framed the events surrounding the construction of O'Shaughnessy Dam in terms generally set forth by John Muir, Robert Underwood Johnson, and other proponents of what has come to be labeled the preservationist camp of the American conservation movement. Typically, the events themselves have served historians as a backdrop for discussion of other issues, most notably the fracturing of the conservation movement into resource-management and nature-preservation factions, or the precursor to the aggressive wilderness preservation advocacy of the mid-twentieth-century environmental movement. In this role, Hetch Hetchy has served environmental historians as both myth and symbol. Robert Righter takes a closer look at the debate surrounding the proposal to dam the valley, the actions of political activists on several sides of the issue, the actual construction of the dam, and the problems created by the Progressives' notions of how the Hetch Hetchy system should best be utilized. In so doing, Righter pierces the mythic shell encapsulating this tale, and revealed it for the complex story it is, a story that defies the easy black hat/white hat dichotomy of an earlier era.

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