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Sierra Club Bulletin 



scenery as a whole. I am never unmindful of the advantages of variety; 

 I am well aware that to be able to point out all other obviously different 

 landscape features in the vicinity would provide another excursion and 

 hold many visitors longer in the Park, and might, other things being 

 equal, attract more people to it in search of enjoyment; just as it is 

 certain that the establishment there of a well conducted resort for purely 

 social and gregarious pastimes, especially if provided with a good 

 gambling casino like those in many popular European resorts, would 

 attract enormously larger numbers to the Yosemite, and give to many 

 of them resources of enjoyment which they would rank higher than 

 those of the natural scenery; but any of these kinds of advantages 

 would in my opinion be purchased at far too high a price by impairing 

 the full enjoyment of these landscape qualities which, in all the world, 

 are peculiar to the Yosemite scenery, which are even now seen and 

 appreciated by considerable numbers and which in the next few cen- 

 turies will, I believe, become of incalculably larger value to humanity. 



SCENERY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 



I acknowledge that it is fairly debatable how much of this commodity 

 called Yosemite scenery the world will be able to put to effective use 

 as the centuries go by, and acre by acre the lands of all the earth must 

 be put to more and more intensive use. It is debatable how much such 

 land the world can in the long run afford to segregate for the sake of 

 its highest recreative values when those come into conflict with the full 

 economic use. The last century, however, has shown such an enormous 

 increase in the appreciation of and resort to the wilder and less man- 

 handled scenery as a means of recreation from the intensifying strain 

 of our civilization, and the amount of that scenery is so rapidly shrink- 

 ing that it is a very rash and unconservative thing, in the present time 

 of transition to abandon or to make over into an essentially different 

 thing any piece of such scenery that has once been deliberately set 

 apart, to be saved, as a sample for the use of posterity. 



The number of people who now visit the Hetch Hetchy, or even the 

 portions of the Yosemite Park which have been rendered more easily 

 accessible, is no measure of the extent to which its scenery will be 

 enjoyed throughout the twentieth century,, and the crowded centuries 

 to follow it. What my father wrote in his report on the Yosemite in 

 the sixties points this out very clearly: 



It is an important fact that as civilization advances the interest of 

 men in natural scenes of sublimity and beauty increases. Where a 

 century ago one traveler came to enjoy the scenery of the Alps, thou- 

 sands come now, and where even forty years ago one small inn accom- 

 modated the visitors to the White Hills of New Hampshire, half a 

 dozen grand hotels, each accommodating hundreds, are now over- 

 crowded every summer. In the early part of the present century the 

 summer visitors to the Highlands of Scotland did not give business 

 enough to support a single inn, a single stage coach or a single guide. 

 They now give business to several railroad trains, scores of steam- 

 boats and thousands of men and horses every day. It is but sixteen 



