Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play…

The sentence comes in the last chapter of The Yosemite, “Hetch Hetchy Valley”. Muir has just denounced the plan to dam that valley, “one of the greatest of all our natural resources for the uplifting joy and peace and health of the people”, to supply San Francisco with water, flooding its gardens and groves a hundred feet deep though water as pure could be had elsewhere. The making of gardens and parks, he goes on, grows with civilization everywhere; then comes the line, and he sees the same “beauty-hunger” in the window-sill geranium of the poor as in the rose gardens of the rich and in the national parks. The chapter ends with the cry “Dam Hetch Hetchy!”, as well dam “the people’s cathedrals and churches”.

Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, published the book in 1912 in the thick of the fight. He lost it: Congress approved the dam in 1913, and he died a year later.

The line is now a favourite of park services and city planners, a plain case for beauty as a public need.

The Yosemite, chapter 16, “Hetch Hetchy Valley”, 1912

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work