Daniel P. Selmi - Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law

Daniel P. Selmi

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81619-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81628-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816289.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Selmi, Daniel P., author.

Title: Dawn at Mineral King Valley : the Sierra Club, the Disney company, and the rise of environmental law / Daniel P. Selmi.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021038211 | ISBN 9780226816197 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816289 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmental lawUnited StatesHistory. | Environmental protectionUnited StatesHistory. | Environmental policyUnited StatesHistory. | Actions and defensesUnited StatesHistory. | Nature conservationLaw and legislationSierra Nevada (Calif. and Nev.)History. | Mineral King Valley (Calif.) | Sierra Club. | Walt Disney Company. | Mineral King Valley (Calif.)

Classification: LCC KF3817.S45 2022 | DDC 344.7304/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038211

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Ann

The Sierra Club

• John Harper, club member
• Will Siri, President (19641966)
• Michael McCloskey, Conservation Director, later Executive Director
• Phil Berry, President (19691971)
• Leland (Lee) Selna, principal lawyer for the Mineral King litigation

Walt Disney Productions

• Walt Disney, President
• Robert (Bob) Hicks, head of Mineral King planning
• Roy Disney, Chair, Chief Executive Officer, and President
• Donn Tatum, President and Chairman of the Board
• E. Cardon Walker, Executive Vice-President and President

Mineral King Recreational Development Company

• Robert (Bob) Brandt, President
• Janet Leigh, actress

The Forest Service

• Wilfrid (Slim) Davis, Chief of Division of Recreation (Western Division)
• Lawrence Whitfield, Supervisor, Sequoia National Forest
• Charles Connaughton, Regional Forester
• Edward Cliff, Chief, Forest Service
• Peter (Pete) Wyckoff, Mineral King Staff Specialist

The Department of Agriculture

• Orville Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture
• Thomas (Tom) Hughes, Executive Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture
• Clifford Hardin, Secretary of Agriculture

The National Park Service

• George Hartzog, Director
• Frank Kowski, Superintendent, Sequoia National Park

The Department of the Interior

• Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior
• Stanley Cain, Assistant Secretary of the Interior

U.S. Department of Justice

• Irwin Griswold, Solicitor General

Elected Officials

• Harlan Hagen, Congressman
• Edmund G. Pat Brown, Governor of California
• John Krebs, Congressman
• Ronald Reagan, Governor of California
• Phil Burton, Congressman

As the clock approached 11 a.m. on November 17, 1971, in Washington, DC, lawyers and observers in the United States Supreme Court awaited the oral argument in the case of Sierra Club v. Morton. The press had extensively covered the case, and individuals seeking to watch the argument queued in a line stretching from inside the courtroom out to a street abutting the court building. At issue in the appeal was the fate of Mineral King, a spectacularly scenic valley nestled high in the Sierra Nevadas of California. The United States Forest Service, the principal defendant in the case, had awarded the right to build a large ski facility there to a company bearing a legendary name: Walt Disney. The plaintiff, the Sierra Club, was the countrys best-known conservation group, founded eighty years earlier by the famous apostle of wilderness, John Muir.

The Sierra Club had filed suit in the tumultuous year of 1969. The Vietnam War raged, and the country still reeled from the assassinations the previous year of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and from riots following Kings death. However, 1969 was also the year in which concern over environmental degradation grew so rapidly that, some opined, it now rivaled the Vietnam War as a political issue.

In January of that year, a blowout on a production platform off Santa Barbara, California, released oil that fouled ocean waters and splattered the coast.

An explosion of media attention addressed environmental issues. Time magazine named the environment as the issue of the year, terming it a national obsession, The Environmental Protection Agency was created to centralize environmental regulation in one federal agency, a landmark in efforts to address pollution. While the fervor would cool slightly by 1972, the environment would remain of great concern to the public.

The Supreme Court case on Mineral King exemplified one important response to this concern: lawsuits challenging actions that harmed the environment. When the Sierra Club had sued over Mineral King in 1969, environmental lawsuits were rare. But the suits soon multiplied, as environmentalists sought to stop projects and hold government officials accountable for environmentally damaging decisions.

The history of the fight over Mineral King typified the new environmental consciousness that led to such litigation. After endorsing a ski development in the valley in 1949, the Sierra Club reversed its position sixteen years later. Citing the projects massive size and inevitable damage to Mineral King Valley, the club sought to incorporate the valley into the adjacent Sequoia National Park. Even within the government, the ski development approved by the Forest Service for the valley was fiercely contested. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall refused to approve a road across Sequoia National Park needed to access the ski development; he capitulated only after officials in the White House intervened.

At first the Sierra Clubs lawsuit succeeded when a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction stopping the development. By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, however, the key issue had become one of overriding importance to the developing body of environmental law in the United States. That issue concerned a doctrine known as standing, an arcane legal term that boiled down to a fundamental question: What organizations would the law allow to challenge environmental violations?

To have standing and bring an environmental case, a plaintiff had to show the type of injury that the courts would recognize. In the Mineral King case, however, a lower court of appeals in 1970 had ruled that, despite the Sierra Clubs long-term involvement with the Sierra Nevadas, the club lacked standing to sue for the alleged environmental damage to the valley. If the Supreme Court upheld that ruling, lower courts would reject many lawsuits brought by the developing class of environmental lawyers, thus stifling the emerging use of litigation to prevent environmental damage.