Yosemite Housing

Hearty cheers for Edgar Wayburn’s opposition to the National Park Service plan to build housing for a thousand employees in Foresta (letter, Sept. 4), creating a new town where none should be--and needlessly threatening the endangered gray owl. We agree that this urban development should not be built.

But neither should a thousand employees be moved to El Portal, forcing urban development of the wild south side of the Merced River. Accommodating their daily commute to Yosemite to work could require widening the now-scenic highway from El Portal to the valley, massively and permanently scarring that beautiful Merced River Canyon approach.

And no cheers for the further proposal to have another 500 employees move to private-sector housing in nearby communities. This would require the same scarring of the Merced Canyon. In addition, it is unrealistic.

There is a better way. Let employees continue to live in the Yosemite Valley near their work. This is a rewarding part of their compensation. We know, because we used to live there. Their housing is reasonably well hidden and occupies but a tiny part of the several thousand acres of the valley floor. Undeveloping these few acres would cost millions of dollars per acre and produce an almost imperceptible change in the level of development planned to continue in the valley.

What Yosemite suffers from is an all-too-frequent and superficial diagnosis of its ills. We know of no great natural wonder on Earth that entices and pleases so many people as Yosemite does with so little impact on the place. The need is not to spare the place from people, but from too many polluting automobiles. End the frantic burning of fossil fuels and the global deforestation that can change Yosemite irrevocably. And bring back a Yosemite railroad, perhaps up the old alignment, perhaps up the Highway 41 corridor.

GARRETT DeBELL

Director, Yosemite Guardian

DAVID R. BROWER

Chairman, Earth Island Institute

San Francisco