Those outside of California might be only dimly aware that there’s a “second Yosemite Valley” that happens to have 300 feet of water in it. It’s called Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, and it was created in the early 20th century, much to the dismay of John Muir, to provide a stable water supply for San Francisco, which burnt to the ground in the great quake of 1906. I saw Hetch Hetchy for the first time last month and was stunned more than I expected to see that anybody had even considered placing a dam in such a place, much less actually done it. Here’s what the Hetch Hetchy valley looks like today:

The latest rage in environmentalist circles is to correct the ecological crime of the century by draining the reservoir and letting nature take its course (what to do about the dam is a whole other matter; it wasn’t built with the idea of ever being removed). In an odd moment of thoughtfulness, the Bush administration budgeted several million dollars to study whether it’s feasible.

My takeaway after visiting the reservoir is that even if we can make the valley “whole” again, we’re better off letting it stand as a monument to the cost of so-called modern civilization. Some people want to imagine a world in which we get to have all our favorite toys and our favorite wilderness sites. Well, we can restore this Hetch Hetchy, but it’ll just require the creation of another one somewhere else. Fixing one ecosystem by ruining another is a strange kind of environmentalism.