Hodel’s Plan for Hetch Hetchy

Hodel’s nutty idea to return Hetch Hetchy to Yosemite National Park in its natural state should be rejected out of hand by the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations.

Here’s a scheme designed to split the environmental movement wide open and lose it thousands of supporters in San Francisco and other parts of the state and country as an old and long-forgotten “water war” wound is reopened by Hodel.

The environmental movement--including the Sierra Club--is fighting Hodel on half-a-dozen fronts: offshore oil drilling in California; oil drilling in the Alaska wilderness; Sen. Alan Cranston’s (D-Calif.) bill to create three national parks in the California desert, which Hodel strongly--and wrongly--opposes; Interior’s virtual abandonment of strip mine reclamation by Hodel’s own actions, and his constant harassment and undercutting of efforts of the National Park Service to maintain the integrity of our national environmental and scenic “jewels.”

Now more than ever before the environmental movement needs a strong, united front against the unprecedented assault by Hodel on the nation’s public lands and parks.

As Cranston said in testimony on his Desert Protection Act legislation recently:

“Hodel almost makes one yearn for the ‘good old days’ of (former Interior Secretary) James Watt!”

The Sierra Club should not play footsie or any other game with Hodel.

LU HAAS

Pacific Palisades