(+++) WHO WINS?

Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was. By Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer. Rowman & Littlefield. $32.

     Speaking of the 408-acre Mineral King valley that is now part of Sequoia National Park in California, Walt Disney said in 1965, the year before his death, “I thought it was one of the most beautiful spots I had ever seen, and we want to keep it that way.” But Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer, while allowing this quotation to creep into the end of Disneyland on the Mountain, are determined to make Walt Disney the bad guy in a story celebrating a form of well-meaning obstructionist environmentalism that is now becoming a genuine hindrance to many worthwhile projects, such as wind farms and other attempts to mitigate human-caused environmental degradation.

     Where Glasgow and Mayer part ways with Disney is in his hope to have Mineral King “seen by more people [and be] a fresh canvas on which to paint yet another dream” – in addition to the dream of Walt Disney World that was in progress late in Disney’s life and was to open in 1971.

     Disney was always a dreamer, and by all accounts a responsible environmental steward with a genuine concern for preservation of nature – within the context of making it available to more people. His company was granted, after a competition, the right to develop a resort property at Mineral King – the reasons for the plan and the competition are explained early in Disneyland on the Mountain. Disney eventually got permission from the overseer of the U.S. Forest Service, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, to proceed with the project. “I find that Disney offers the best facilities for the vacationing public and the possibility of the largest monetary return to the taxpayers for the use of public lands,” Freeman decided in awarding Disney a three-year planning permit.

     But note the reference to money and taxpayers. The words are anathema to many self-declared environmentalists, and even though the “environmental movement” was in its infancy in the 1960s, it is clear that Glasgow and Mayer share its abhorrence for profit-making enterprises, even if profits flow back to the taxpaying public. Disneyland on the Mountain details how, after the high-water mark of Freeman’s pro-Disney declaration, the entire ski-resort project conceived by Walt Disney began to come apart as special-interest groups (another term in its infancy in the 1960s) coalesced around the idea of leaving Mineral King exactly as it was – meaning that it would be accessible to the public, yes, but only to the very tiny slice of the public with the financial means, personal inclination and plenty of time to learn about it and come to the isolated and rugged area.

     Sequoia National Park, to which Mineral King was annexed in 1978, does get a million visitors a year, but it is fair to assume that the reason most people visit is the park’s famed sequoia trees, not the quiet and beauty of Mineral King. Walt Disney World gets 58 million visitors annually and Disneyland gets 17 million – if numbers matter. But the point underlying Disneyland on the Mountain is that numbers do not, or should not, matter, and that the retention of the pristine ought to be the primary goal in issues such as that involving Mineral King.

     This is a perfectly reasonable proposition, but it was not handled with reasonableness by those opposed to the notion of a Disney ski resort at Mineral King. The project was essentially “pecked to death by ducks” (no insult meant to Donald), as leave-it-alone advocates positioned themselves as defenders of the wilderness and pecked away at Disney’s plans bit by bit. The opponents were very much elitists – for example, pediatrician Richard Koch and his wife, activist Jean Koch, whose numerous letters against the Mineral King project proved influential in its eventual abandonment, “were one of just sixty-seven families who had permits to own and maintain summer houses on national forest land in Mineral King.” The arguments that the area should remain for “everyone” (meaning the very few people who would ever visit the area, and the even fewer with permits to have houses there) won out over Walt Disney’s expressed desire to make Mineral King accessible to more people (and, scarcely incidentally, to bring in more filthy lucre to the would-be resort’s developer).

     There are difficult balancing acts where environmental and commercial interests are concerned, and collisions are inevitable. But these matters are rarely ones of good-vs.-evil, no matter how often they are portrayed that way in popular media and by advocates on one side or the other. Walt Disney had considerable environmental bona fides, and there is no reason to believe the Mineral King project would have been disrespectful to or unaware of its impact. But there would certainly have been impact, and so the argument about the project comes down to one of whether presumably careful development or a complete hands-off approach is better. The Mineral King matter was settled more than half a century ago, but arguments along the same lines persist today and have become even more urgent as the push is on to develop alternatives to fossil fuels – which means setups such as enormous solar arrays that cover vast acreages and require buildout of transmission lines that will inevitably cause disfigurement and many forms of natural displacement, and wind farms that will never attain perfection in protecting birds and other wildlife that will inevitably come in contact with them. Disneyland on the Mountain ultimately makes these issues overly simplistic – and Walt Disney is poorly cast as an opponent of environmentalism, which he simply viewed differently from the way the leave-it-aloners did. The legacy of the non-building of the Mineral King resort remains today, with non-simplistic answers to environmental issues as difficult to find in the 21^st century as they were in the middle of the 20^th.