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In 1897, one of the richest men in San Francisco, James Phelan, became mayor.
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He had imperial ambitions, intending for the city to become the economic heart of the Western United States. Obsessed with images of Rome, he envisioned a future of fountains and aqueducts, water in excess. San Francisco had very limited access to fresh water, so Phelan decided the city needed a reservoir that could provide water in plenty not just for the city he governed, but for the large, prosperous city he hoped to develop. He set his sights on Hetch Hetchy and the Tuolomne River that ran through it.
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‘Hetch Hetchy Valley… is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples,’ wrote John Muir, a leader of the environmental movement. Hetch Hetchy was formed by the same glacier as the famed Yosemite Valley, one of the most iconic landscapes in the world. ‘As in Yosemite,’ Muir wrote, ‘the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike… while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to stir all the air into music.’
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Phelan had no feeling for the wilderness that Muir revered. Beauty for him was urban and luxurious. In his article, ‘Hetch Hetchy for the Wealth- Producer’, he argued for the ‘unobstructed prosperity’ of San Francisco. He claimed that those who would deny them the valley were ‘obstructing the wheels of progress’.
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Muir believed that access to natural beauty was not a luxury but a necessity, the perfect antidote to an overworked, industrialised, class- divided nation and he fought passionately to save Hetch Hetchy. ‘Dam Hetch-Hetchy?’ he railed. ‘As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the hand of man.’ He called men like Phelan, ‘devotees of ravaging commercialism’ who worshipped money instead of God in Nature.
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Not all environmentalists sided with Muir. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the US Forest Service, was a powerful advocate for the dam, ‘our worst enemy in the park fight’, according to Muir. Pinchot exemplified the utilitarian approach to conservation, arguing that the best use for nature was always that which generated the greatest good for the greatest number, for the longest time. From this perspective, utility always trumped beauty.
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When my son Zephyr was diagnosed, an opthalmologist told us that the tumour was in the macula, the most important part of the retina, so vision in that eye would be severely compromised, if his brain chose to use it at all.
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If an eye is not useful for vision, is it necessary? Is beauty and symmetry enough of a reason to preserve something?
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We call the eye the window to the soul, and it is one of our most unique physical attributes, but modern prosthetic eyes are phenomenal works of art, and many are difficult to distinguish from real eyes.
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And yet, of course, something must be lost.
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My husband, David, had retinoblastoma as a child, and his left eye was removed when he was nine. He is a poster child for enucleation, a perfect example of how confident, well-adjusted and happy a person can be despite having a prosthetic eye.
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But sometimes when I sit on my husband’s left side, I am struck by the uncanniness of his prosthetic. That side of his face is more blank, less alive. The eye sits there gazing ahead, an illusion, plastic, hard, communicating nothing. An eye that looks but does not see. An eye that is not a window but a closed door.
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Now I sit talking with David about whether we made the right choice. If we could magically tally everything, all the good and bad of the past and future, have we made a worse life for Zephyr or a better one in seeking to preserve his eye?
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When I ask him if he thinks we should have chosen differently now that we know how much we’ve had to go through as a family, he says to me, ‘I’m with Muir. I’m with Beauty.’
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Muir felt Nature’s beauty was not just aesthetically pleasurable, but an expression of perfect harmony, truth and love; when immersed within it people would be inspired to create a more just, harmonious society.
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Beauty’s utility was obvious to Muir, and modern scientists agree. In an interview, Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate and Professor of physics at MIT, explained how beauty was used as a guiding principle for people in his field. ‘In 20th-century physics… the right strategy was to guess that there might be a simple, beautiful underlying description and then work out its consequences…,’ he said. ‘How do you guess? You have to be consistent with everything we know… but secondly, you look for things that are beautiful. You look for things that are symmetrical, that are compact. These kinds of aesthetic considerations have more and more come to dominate how people try to find new laws of fundamental physics…’.
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Beauty can be an expression of universal principles, just like Muir believed.
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It wasn’t the earthquake of 1906 that destroyed San Francisco, it was the fires that raged afterwards. When opened, the city’s hydrants only trickled because the water mains had burst, so firefighters stood by helplessly as the city burned.
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Up to this period, water in San Francisco was provided by a private company. After the earthquake, San Franciscans began to insist on controlling their own water supply. They wanted Hetch Hetchy.
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Between 1908 and 1913, Congress debated the issue. In his congressional testimony, Pinchot used his ‘greatest good’ principle to argue in favour of the dam. ‘We come now face to face with the perfectly clean question of what is the best use to which this water that flows out of the Sierras can be put,’ he said. ‘As we all know, there is no use of water that is higher than the domestic use.’
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Public opinion was divided, but the earthquake generated national sympathy for the plight of the destroyed city. Even people who had been inclined to side with Muir began to shift allegiance. Andrew Carnegie, for example, told an SF newspaper, ‘John Muir is a fine Scotchman… but for all that, it is too foolish to say that the imperative needs of a city to a full and pure water supply should be thwarted for the sake of a few trees or for scenery, no matter how beautiful it might be.’
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Congress eventually agreed to the creation of the dam, and President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law in 1913. John Muir, exhausted by the failure, died the following year of pneumonia.
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Zephyr has often received a treatment called intra-arterial chemotherapy where a radiologist pierces his femoral artery and then navigates the waterways of his body. They thread a catheter up past the heart, via paths that fork and narrow until finally they reach his eye and his oncologist slowly injects chemo into the retina.
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I have seen x-rays of how they wend their way along the rivers of the body, and I have learned about all the dangers en route. You cannot interfere with the body in such an extreme way without expecting it to react. Sometimes Zephyr’s heart seems to detect the foreign object moving past it and begins to slow. The doctors do not know if his heart plans to stop altogether, so they give Zephyr shots of adrenaline, as many as it takes to artificially keep his heart rate up until they are finished with the procedure.
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When Zephyr comes out of anaesthesia he is often in profound distress, screaming with an almost primal anguish. As his mother, I interpret this as an accusation. When I go to the recovery room I imagine his body is vibrating and convulsing with the question, ‘Where were you?’
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We cannot expect his endless resilience or his every emotional resource to be replenishable. How much more can the ecosystem of his body, his being, take before some kind of damage is irreversible, before something precious is lost?
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I teach my children to value being unique and push back against conformity. And yet why – in this particular instance – do I so desperately want my child to be like everyone else?
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I make all sorts of reasonable arguments to myself: how Zephyr may have useful peripheral vision in his bad eye; that medicine might improve his vision in the future; that a prosthetic comes with discomfort and complications, etc. I tell myself that preserving his eye is a healthier, more advantageous choice.
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But there is more to it than that.
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Is it because I want to protect him from cruelty and judgment? Because I want him to be more happy? Successful? Loved?
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According to studies, while attractive faces are subconsciously associated with positive character traits and social skills, people with facial disfigurements or noticeable asymmetry are often assumed to have negative personality traits. Not only are they seen as less attractive and less desirable as romantic partners, but they are often treated poorly in social interactions, due to the subconscious biases against their atypical appearance.
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I want to protect Zephyr from this fate. I’d prefer he stand out for his personality, not his asymmetry.
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But is this truly why I’ve fought for the eye? Or is it for a more shallow reason?
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If I am honest, I feel some primal, animal instinct to preserve it that goes beyond reason or utility. I just want to keep my child’s beautiful face.
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Proponents of the dam claimed a reservoir would enhance the beauty of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, not diminish it. After construction was completed, the valley was clear-cut, all its ancient redwoods felled, and in 1923 it was flooded. It is now a man-made lake that few ever visit, a closed door, a faint, synthetic echo of its former beauty. For all it reflects, the valley is no longer alive.
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If the debate had occurred today, Hetch Hetchy would never have been dammed. An Environmental Impact Assessment would have to be undertaken, evaluating the potential impact of the project not just on humans but on the whole ecosystem. It would be clear that the cost outweighed the benefits.
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Arguments for the dam were misleading at best; a reservoir for San Francisco could have been constructed in multiple other less majestic locations more easily and affordably. Today, the city sources water from nine separate reservoirs and only gets 25% of its water from Hetch Hetchy.
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The debate focused on the idea of what nature should be for – utility or beauty. I think Muir understood this was not the right question.
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According to his biographer, Donald Worster, ‘he was intrigued by system and relationship, by the role that each piece plays in the whole, as well as the dynamics of change’. For Muir, the beauty he advocated stood for something larger – harmony, utility, science, love, and all that is good and true. He was anticipating the concept of holism – that the greatest good was located in the balance of the whole.
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But how would San Francisco be different now if Hetch Hetchy had not been dammed? Would it have languished without a dependable supply of public water? Or would the city, under pressure, have developed a better solution? Would it still have become a cultural epicentre – known for music, art, writing and, later, technology? Would Silicon Valley tech still have changed the world?
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How can you make the right choices when you don’t know how the pros and cons add up, let alone what all the rippling effects of your actions will be in the future?
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Muir was devastated by the loss of Hetch Hetchy, but he hoped there was a silver lining. ‘The long drawn-out battle for nature’s gardens has not been thrown away,’ he wrote. ‘The conscience of the whole country has been aroused from sleep, and from outrageous evil, compensating good in some form must surely come.’
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He was right. His vocal effort to save Hetch Hetchy and the ensuing public debate resulted in the beginning of what we now call environmental activism. The public outrage in response to the damming of Hetch Hetchy helped spur the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, with a responsibility ‘…to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein… as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations’. All subsequent proposals to develop portions of National Parks have failed. Muir lost the battle, but not the war.
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What I wish is to see the biggest picture, to find an equation or to undertake an environmental impact assessment and decipher the path to my son’s greatest good.
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But I can’t. I will never have enough information to make the absolute best choices for him. I will never know where the other paths we might have taken would have led.
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In Travels to Alaska, John Muir wrote that ‘the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. That mountains, long conceived, are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.’
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Nature’s beauty is not static, but a process of continual adaptation that incorporates destruction, and there is a lesson in how it moves ever onward, finding new balance and harmony.
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So we must make our choices, watch the outcomes and try not to regret. We must keep moving forward, whatever has been lost, whatever has changed, and find the beauty in that process.
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Muir knew that nature made beauty even out of catastrophe. ‘All Nature’s wildness tells the same story,’ he wrote. ‘Storms of every sort, torrents, earthquakes, cataclysms, “convulsions of nature”, however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation.’
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True beauty incorporates every scar, stretch mark, heartbreak and growing pain. Zephyr will be his own kind of beautiful, with or without his eye. That beauty will be defined not by the symmetry of his face, but by how he is cut through by the challenges of life, like a glacial valley, and the growth, change and wisdom born of this evolution.
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