Occasionally a book surprises and delights with the insights into a story that readers thought they knew. Dawn at Mineral King Valley is such a work. For those of us following the story back in the 1960s and ‘70s, it seemed straightforward – the Disney Company proposed a ski resort in Mineral King Valley that jutted into Sequoia National Park, the Sierra Club opposed it all the way to the Supreme Court, the ski resort was not built, and the valley was then incorporated into the national park.

The details of the struggle over Mineral King, which lasted from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, were difficult to follow; the world of environmentalism was busy with many issues and developments, and the Mineral King issue was part of the noise of the time. Legal expert Daniel Selmi tells the Mineral King story in clear prose and brilliant detail.

Misapprehensions about the story are many, foremost among them that Disney was the culprit, that the Sierra Club won the battle, and that the most significant outcomes were that Mineral King Valley became part of the national park and that Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas issued a landmark dissent over the issue of standing when the case came before the court.

As Selmi points out, Disney was not at fault for proposing a ski resort in Mineral King Valley because it saw a business opportunity extended by the U.S. Forest Service, which desired a ski area there. The culprit was the Forest Service. The Sierra Club did not win the battle – it lost badly in various courts but raised the profile of the issue at a time when environmentalism was emerging, energizing opposition to the project which ultimately led to its demise.

And while adding the valley to the park and Justice Douglas’ famous dissent were significant, the most important outcome was, according to Selmi, resolution of the issue of whether and how plaintiffs seeking to prevent environmental injury could use litigation to pursue environmental protection. Until this point, the tools available to challenge the discretion of federal agencies were limited. Selmi writes that, “Another effect of the increased emphasis on legal constraints would be a change in the discretion available to agencies in their decision-making.” This was a most historic outcome and would lead to many consequences.

Selmi’s organization and writing in Dawn at Mineral King Valley result in a very clear telling of a very complex story. In the first section of five chapters, titled “A Ski Development at Mineral King,” Selmi recounts the history of the valley and the ski development idea from creation of the national park in 1890 to the Disney Company submitting its master plan for its development and the Forest Service approving it in 1968.

The Forest Service twice issued a prospectus for a “Resort and Ski Area in Mineral King,” in 1949 and 1965. Disney saw the potential prior to the second prospectus and started buying up land in the valley in anticipation of the opportunity. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club in 1947 took the position that the club “cannot as a matter of principle oppose the development of Mineral King or any other non-wilderness area.” Earlier, in 1926, the club had dismissed the valley as “not of national park character” because of existing mining claims and private land holdings there.

By 1965 the Sierra Club was becoming more focused on environmental issues broadly, and passed a resolution opposing recreational development in Mineral King. The battle was on.

Developing the Mineral King Valley would require a road upgrade, part of it through Sequoia National Park, and resort expansion over time as envisioned by the Disney Company to a total of 1.2 to 1.5 million visitor days in the year 2000. It would require transmission lines through the park and 14 ski lifts, some requiring anchors across the park boundary.

The Forest Service had placed no upper limit on the development and was exercising limited oversight. The “dual” permits it was authorized to issue were a “term permit” for a maximum of 80 acres for 30 years, and annual permits for development beyond that, which it had issued to various ski areas across the country.

This seemed, to ski area opponents, a dubious workaround of intended limits on development in places like Mineral King. The valley was a designated wildlife refuge, but Disney contended its development would have no impact on that. Selmi describes all the issues the Sierra Club raised and the politics of them, which involved the National Park Service, Forest Service, and players at the top of the departments of Interior and Agriculture.

The Park Service was not keen on the idea of a development that would require a road through Sequoia National Park, “instinctively questioning the necessity for a road through a national park whose purpose was serving lands outside the park.” The dispute between the Sierra Club, the Forest Service, and Disney, with Disney mostly staying on the sidelines in the political fights, came into the open nationally when the Park Service held a hearing on its proposed wilderness designation for Sequoia National Park.

Selmi writes that “the hearing indirectly aided the Sierra Club’s position that Mineral King belonged in Sequoia National Park. The wilderness hearing was about Sequoia National Park, and the club’s testimony linked Mineral King to the park.” This caught the media’s attention, and Mineral King became a national issue.

Selmi describes in detail the state and federal politics involved in all of this, including disagreements between Interior Secretary Stuart Udall, who opposed the ski area proposal, and Agriculture’s Orville Freeman, who supported it.

“On June 5, 1969, the Sierra Club filed suit in federal court challenging the Forest Service’s approval of the Mineral King development and the Park Service’s approval of the road.”

Throughout the book, Selmi draws vignettes of the main players in the story. Leading the Sierra Club’s Mineral King campaign was Mike McCloskey, first as conservation director and then as executive director. While an attorney, he did not serve as such, but oversaw strategy and decision-making. Leland Selna was the principal Sierra Club lawyer for the Mineral King litigation.

At the Forest Service, Wilfrid (“Slim”) Davis, chief of the Division of Recreation (Western Division), an avid skier, was strongly for a ski area in Mineral King, and pulled strings in his agency to see that the project was proposed and that Disney would win the permit. At the Disney Company, Robert Hicks was the able head of Mineral King planning throughout, assisted by other Disney executives. At the beginning of the book Selmi lists 29 “Principal Participants” in the long Mineral King saga, a list of powerful people in politics, business, government, and environmental conservation.

Part two of the book is “The New World of the Courts,” and is where Selmi’s legal expertise comes into play. One might suspect treatment of the court proceedings in federal district court where an injunction halting issuance of a permit was approved, to an appeal in the 9th Circuit Court, which rejected the Sierra Club’s standing to sue, to the United States Supreme Court where the core issue was standing, to be dry and tough going for readers not schooled in law, but Selmi’s superb writing is explanatory and compelling, free of legal jargon.

His explanations of the issues and the decisions are uncomplicated and readable. With the rise of environmentalism, activists were increasingly challenging the discretion of the Forest Service in court, and the agency wanted a ruling on standing that would prevent such challenges. In the 9th Circuit and at the Supreme Court the foremost issue was standing – did the Sierra Club have standing to sue in the Mineral King case. Selmi writes, “the parties' briefs framed the case as a clash between traditional, settled doctrines of standing and agency discretion, and new legal approaches that could address the growing concern over environmental degradation.”

Selmi does a fine job of putting the Mineral King case in the context of environmental politics, the evolution of legal doctrine and practice, and public opinion on the environment and the measures necessary to protect it.

At the Supreme Court, the prime issue was standing, and Selmi recounts the arguments made before the court by United States Solicitor General Erwin Griswold against standing for the Sierra Club, which was suing as an organization with interest in Mineral King and not as individuals harmed by proposed actions there.

Selmi writes, “the statute that the Sierra Club relied upon was section 10 of the Administrative Procedure Act, which authorized judicial review if a person could claim that they were ‘suffering legal wrong because of agency action, or adversely affected or aggrieved by agency action.’” The club disavowed the “use” theory in which an individual use might be affected or aggrieved, staking its case on the “interest theory,” in which an organization holding environmental interests represented a group of aggrieved parties. The Supreme Court ruled against the club, asserting that “use” would be the test for standing. Selmi quotes Justice Potter Stewart’s footnote to the ruling:

[T]he Wilderness Society and others . . . asserted that the Sierra Club has conducted regular camping trips into the Mineral King area, and that various members of the Club have used and continue to use the area for recreational purposes. These allegations were not contained in the pleadings, nor were they brought to the attention of the Court of Appeals. Moreover, the Sierra Club in its reply brief specifically declines to rely on its individualized interests, as a basis for standing. . . . Our decision does not, of course, bar the Sierra Club from seeking in the District Court to amend its complaint by a motion under Rule 15, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

The club had lost again, but the case was remanded back to a lower court where the club could  appeal and make the case that “users” in its ranks had been wronged. The upshot of this was that the court established a way for environmental interests to use the courts in their efforts to challenge actions they deemed harmful to the environment, and that was a most significant outcome.

The Sierra Club repeatedly lost legal battles, but ultimately won the war. The third section of Dawn at Mineral King Valley, titled “The Fate of Mineral King,” describes the resolution of the long battle over development of the valley.

While the legal wrangling was proceeding, Congress had passed the National Environmental Protection Act and the Forest Service was required to prepare an environmental impact statement before giving any final approval to the Disney development proposal.

Selmi writes that the impact statement would affect the Mineral King development in three ways. “First, it would take some time to prepare the document. Second, the EIS would be subject to judicial review, so the agency [Forest Service] could not cut corners in the manner suggested by Slim Davis [Chief of Division of Recreation, (Western Division)]. Third, for the first time, the environmental effects of the Mineral King development would be subject to comprehensive analysis.”

The Forest Service asserted that it would do its EIS “with full public involvement.” Before this, the Forest Service refused to hold any public hearings on the Mineral King development proposal.

The Disney Company, meanwhile, observing the legal battles from the sidelines, continued to hope it could develop the valley and was modifying its proposal, suggesting alternative transportation plans that would not affect the national park and scaling down the size and capacity of its development.  As Disney’s aspirations were reduced and the Forest Service took on a more regulatory role, the Sierra Club was forced to reevaluate its position, which had been that the Disney proposal was too big and a small ski development might be okay.

The club board came out against any ski development and took the position that Mineral King should be incorporated into Sequoia National Park. In 1976 the Forest Service announced it had completed its EIS and could issue the permit to Disney, but Selmi observes that, “(P)olitical support for the project was collapsing.”

The local California congressman announced he would introduce legislation to place the valley in the national park, and introduced his bill in 1977. Additionally, a National Park Service study recommended that the best way to protect Mineral King was to add it to the park. The Sierra Club decided it was time to have its case dismissed so it would not interfere with the rising momentum to put the valley in the park, and it was dismissed.

Selmi observes that the judge’s order to dismiss “ended the monumental legal battle, begun in 1969, that had resulted in a groundbreaking Supreme Court case on standing. While the Mineral King case sputtered to a close and would never be refiled, it had changed the course of legal history and of Mineral King’s fate.”

In 1978, the Carter administration supported adding Mineral King to Sequoia National Park. California congressman Phil Burton had introduced a bill to place Mineral King in the park ten years earlier. Master legislative tactician that he was, he included the measure in the omnibus National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978, and on November 10, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation and in Selmi’s words, “The long battle had ended.”

Going into the battle, the Sierra Club had aimed to save Mineral King Valley from what it saw as egregiously irresponsible management of a beautiful part of the Sierras by the Forest Service. It did so “at a time when support for the project seemed overwhelming. The club had shown how, against long odds, it could alter public opinion and expose flaws in the Forest Service’s processes.” It had not aspired to enable landmark legal history, but that is what was achieved. Selmi summarizes that achievement:

The Supreme Court decision was a legal landmark that marks an infliction point in the development of environmental law. It “locked citizen standing into American jurisprudence and the daily operation of American environmental law,” thereby signaling the emergence of lawsuits as an important means of raising environmental issues and challenging agency decisions. Surveys of environmental practitioners and academic experts, carried out thirty and forty years later, ranked the case as one of the most important environmental decisions ever handed down.

The Disney part of this story has not been featured in this review, but Selmi describes the company’s role in considerable detail and reveals how it had good intentions but an unrealistic sense of what it could accomplish at Mineral King. It simply could not, at the scale of its project, protect the environment as it claimed, and the Forest Service did it no favors in the way it handled the issue. Selmi writes of Disney:

As for Disney, its work on the project was remarkable. Bob Hicks was an exceptionally able manager, and the Disney project is a tribute to his skills and to the Disney organization generally. Moreover, Disney often defended its project on the ground that it had merely responded to the Forest Service’s prospectus, and this claim was largely accurate. The Forest Service was the principal instigator of the project.

 The Mineral King saga was much more important than many of us who celebrated the saving of the valley understood back in 1978. We could not see how the context in which the battle over the valley changed over the long series of court decisions, nor the long-term significance of the outcome. With over 40 years of history to plumb, and with his expert perspective, Selmi can describe and explain the significance of this fascinating point in American legal history.

Dawn at Mineral King Valley is a marvelous book. Daniel Selmi’s voice is not only that of an authoritative legal scholar, but of an articulate, and forceful, storyteller. The saga of Mineral King as he tells it is an absorbing read and is a major contribution to environmental history in the United States.