Dan's Outside

Muir Woods 100th Anniversary

From an article in SFGate:

It is difficult to imagine a time when anyone would contemplate chopping down the magnificent redwoods in Muir Woods, let alone drowning the valley under hundreds of feet of water. Those scenarios were actually being contemplated 100 years ago, until one of the Bay Area’s first conservationists stepped forward.

U.S. Rep. William Kent, the heir to a Chicago meat-packing fortune, had purchased what was then the last stand of old-growth redwoods in the Bay Area. He donated it to the federal government just as a local water company was preparing to condemn it and build a dam.

This month marks the beginning of a yearlong celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the establishment of Muir Woods as a national monument.

Kent’s decision to thwart industrial progress is now considered one of the most courageous acts of land preservation in U.S. history, and it will play a major role in the events planned over the next year by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service.

Follow the link for the whole story.

This is an example of something that should be obvious to anyone who thinks about questions of land conservation in the US and elsewhere – the value to future generations of places like Muir Woods far exceeds the short-term value of alternative uses. We don’t need to look into the future and imagine that this might be true; we can look into the past and follow forward to the present to see plenty of evidence for this.

December 17, 2007 - Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary