Image Gallery 6 - Project Learning Hetch Hetchy - Once & Future? from Hetch Hetchy: Dam Removal?

The effort to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and a part of Yosemite National Park was one of the country’s first national environmental battles. Environmentalists led by John Muir and his Sierra Club twice defeated the city of San Francisco’s proposals for the dam in the U.S Congress. They ultimately failed, though, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed proved the city’s water supply inadequate in the face of disaster. Congress approved granting San Francisco the right to dam the valley in 1913 and construction was completed in 1923.

The idea of removing a century old dam and reservoir, a significant part of a major city’s water system, all to restore a mountain valley seems folly to many, yet the height of good sense to others. The proposal to restore Hetch Hetchy was first advanced by Donald Hodel, Secretary of the Interior for George Bush, in 1988. Hodel's proposal has been followed over the last two decades by a series of increasingly more comprehensive studies by a variety of groups and agencies including:

The issue is extremely complex, involving not simply the removal of a dam and a portion of San Francisco’s municipal water supply, but also replacing hydroelectric capacity, honoring irrigation water rights, filtering of a replacement source of water, and physically restoring the vegetation in a valley flooded for nearly a century. Cost estimates for the completed project vary from $3 to $10 billion (California Department of Water Resources, 2006). Widespread, often contentious, debate of these issues has characterized the Hetch Hetchy question for well over a century. Why not in your classroom? The Hetch Hetchy: Dam Removal? web page provides the resources for an exercise in project learning leading to classroom debate and publication of personal position presentations by students.

Vega (2013) has synthesized extensive research on project based learning and suggests the following components of an effective and rigorous project experience:

The Hetch Hetchy project is clearly a real and significant problem. A structure is provided to make it manageable. Suggested assessment is both group based and individual and includes mutual assessment by group members. As with any group project, accountability is critical. Group members need to agree on the division of labor and hold themselves and each other responsible. The group assessment sheet linked in the lesson plan has proven effective in getting students to accept their responsibilities primarily because they recognize that their grade may be adjusted up or down by their classmates as a reflection on how well they hold their own.