Literary Resources

Review of Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was by Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law by Daniel P. Selmi (The University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion by M. Margaret McKeown (Potomac Books, 2022)

Books

Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was

Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer

Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

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, 2022

Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion

M. Margaret McKeown

Potomac Books, 2022

Willy Schaeffler was a Bavarian-born skier who began teaching American soldiers how to ski and rock climb shortly after World War II ended. He went on to become a legendary ski instructor for both the University of Denver ski team and for the U.S. ski team, and he played a key role in designing the ski runs for two Winter Olympics—in Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe) in 1960 and in my hometown of Lake Placid in 1980. In between Squaw Valley and Lake Placid, Schaeffler worked closely with Walt Disney on plans to develop a ski resort at Mineral King, a bucolic mountain valley in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

The Mineral King ski resort became embroiled in litigation that led to one of the most famous environmental law cases, Sierra Club v. Morton (1972), in which the Supreme Court determined that the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge the Forest Service’s approval. The three books reviewed here were published as that case turned a half century old, and the authors’ different approaches allow the reader to triangulate the full story behind the resort, the case, and all the players. That story includes Walt Disney’s Herculean efforts to build a winter wonderland not far from his first famous resort in Anaheim, California, as well as a drawn-out court battle that eventually reached the Supreme Court and inspired Justice William O. Douglas’s dissent, in which he queried whether trees should have standing. The story of Mineral King also captures fascinating debates within both the U.S. government—namely between the National Park Service and the Forest Service—and within the Sierra Club, which initially supported the resort but later opposed it. Ultimately, the story reflects the variety of ways in which people view the relationship between humans and nature.

As Schaeffler’s experience suggests, the American ski industry boomed following World War II, with veterans of the 10th Mountain Division, an elite group of ski troops, leading the way. Numerous ski areas opened on Forest Service land, in part because the agency managed land for “multiple use.” Mineral King was located in Sequoia National Forest, and in 1949, the Forest Service issued a prospectus for development of a ski area. The Forest Service received only one bid, and it was voided. Nevertheless, interest waxed by 1965, when it issued a second prospectus. This time, bids came in from multiple parties, including Disney and wealthy Angeleno Robert Brandt. Disney won and began work on a master plan for the area.

The Mineral King area was surrounded on three sides by Sequoia National Park, and critically, the only road to the area bisected the Park. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, who oversaw the National Park Service, rejected any attempt to expand the use of the road. Following an interagency dispute, Udall eventually relented, and the Forest Service approved the Disney plan in 1969. The Sierra Club lawsuit was filed that same year. While the group persuaded a District Court in California to preliminarily enjoin the ski resort, the Ninth Circuit reversed in 1970, and the Supreme Court affirmed two years later. Undeterred and following the suggestion of a footnote in the majority opinion, the Sierra Club amended its complaint. The rejuvenated case languished and in 1978, Congress added Mineral King to Sequoia National Park, thus closing the door on a Disneyland in the mountains.

Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer’s Disneyland on the Mountain is a crisply written narrative of the Mineral King saga. It sheds light on the variety of viewpoints and in doing so demonstrates that Mineral King was not only contested terrain, but also a reflection of the contours for the larger discussion in America about what nature meant and how, where, and when it should be experienced.

Walt Disney said that Mineral King “was one of the most beautiful spots I had ever seen, and we want to keep it that way.” But in Disney’s mind, the area should not be empty wilderness. Rather, he envisioned something more akin to Zermatt, Switzerland, which he had visited several times. As Glasgow and Mayer note, that “quaint village” was a “magnet for skiers and tourists,” but not “the type of tourist trap that Walt hated.” After Disney passed away in 1966, the company maintained the perspective that the area should be open. A Disney representative posed this question: “Shall this area remain totally inaccessible in winter and available only to a select few in summer, or shall it be made available for the pleasure, benefit and enjoyment of everyone?”

If this question had been posed to the Sierra Club in 1949, the organization would have chosen the latter. This position stemmed from an effort by the organization to stop the development of another California ski resort and a concomitant concern that opposing Mineral King would leave “skiers—many of whom were Sierra Club members—out in the cold.” This language is emblematic of Glasgow and Mayer’s breezy prose, which is deftly combined with strong chapter conclusions. To counterbalance the Sierra Club’s resistance at the other resort, the Club did not oppose the development of Mineral King or any other “non-wilderness area.” Here, the “non-wilderness” label was based on the area’s brief stint as a mining community in the nineteenth century. The Sierra Club changed course two decades later. Buoyed by a slew of young activists, the organization now opposed a commercial ski area in what they called “an informal place in the midst of mountains and a jumping-off place for the wilderness about it.”

Some of the people living in Mineral King valley also opposed the resort plans. Jean Koch echoed the Sierra Club when she wrote to the California governor: “Once the damage is done, it cannot be corrected.” But Koch also alluded to distinctive features, including the “fragile ruins of log cabins and other relics of the romantic mining history.” This divergence from the Sierra Club provides a third perspective on the human-nature connection, one in which the extraction of natural resources has ended but the evidence that remains on the landscape is seen as a valuable resource in and of itself.

One group that stood to gain from a new resort was the skiing community. As the litigation moved through the courts, the Far West Ski Association became involved. Glasgow and Mayer discuss how the organization started a series of “ski-ins” in Mineral King that aimed to provide a glimpse of what skiing would be like if Disney could build its resort. These events contrasted with the “hike-ins” that environmentalists had held and promoted with posters showing Mickey Mouse hovering over the valley, wielding an ax and a sinister look. The Far West Ski president said that “most people have this idea this is wilderness.” He acknowledged that Mineral King was “a beautiful area,” but added that “it has been mined and logged and people have built cabins and summer homes here for a century.”

While Glasgow and Mayer effectively capture multiple perspectives, the throughline for their book is Walt Disney and his company. Disneyland on the Mountain begins with a press conference that Walt held in September 1966, shortly after he won the bidding against Brandt. Soon, the reader is swept up in a story about Walt’s love of skiing and the incorporation of nature into his work. For example, the authors detail a series of movies called Disney’s True-Life Adventures, which consisted of thirteen films that won eight Academy Awards. These movies took viewers to Africa, South America, and the Arctic and showed a multitude of animals. The authors’ discussion about Disney’s development of animatronics seemed a bit out of place, but Glasgow and Mayer have woven a compelling business history of Disney against the backdrop of Mineral King. And the final chapter includes a story about Disney’s legacy in the skiing world, even if it is not at Mineral King. In the 1980s, the Colorado ski resort of Vail asked Disney for help boosting the resort’s image. Disney assented and made Goofy—“Walt’s beloved buck-toothed character who yodeled down mountain slopes in The Art of Skiing”—Vail’s ski ambassador.

In Dawn at Mineral King Valley, Daniel Selmi focuses primarily on the Sierra Club’s lawsuit, which he argues “changed the course of legal history.” The book is a master class in bringing litigation to life. The brunt of this work occurs in the middle third of the book, but I also appreciated Selmi’s careful attention to details about geography and jurisdiction early in the book. He ably describes how Congress established and then expanded Sequoia National Park in 1890, created the Sierra Forest Preserve three years later, carved out part of that preserve to establish Sequoia National Forest, and again expanded the Park but left Mineral King out because of the mining claims and private land holdings. Selmi writes that these “efforts resulted in a peculiar and consequential geographic arrangement.” And he juxtaposes that arrangement with a vivid description of the drive up to Mineral King from the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Selmi’s analysis shifts to the legal landscape in Part II. He begins by outlining the federal laws relevant to the Forest Service and National Park Service when the Sierra Club filed its complaint in July 1969. These statutes, which did not yet include the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), were “aged and patchwork in nature.” One example was the Forest Service’s legal authority to permit a ski resort. Under that law, the agency permitted Mineral King for a term of thirty years, but the permit was limited to eighty acres, which was not sufficient for a large ski resort. The Forest Service “circumvented” this issue through a combination of the term permit and annual permits that covered the surrounding areas. Selmi adeptly explains how the parties would approach this issue in litigation and how a decision against the government’s “dual permit” approach could have ripple effects for other ski resorts similarly situated on Forest Service land.

The permit issue was one of many that the District Court examined when the Sierra Club moved for a preliminary injunction. The court found both that the organization had standing to bring the case and that the Sierra Club was likely to succeed on the merits. The government had to decide whether to appeal and if so, which issues it would raise on appeal. Selmi nimbly navigates the behind-the-scenes process by which the government made the determination. Here, he relies on archival material to describe the viewpoints of the agencies, which advocated for an appeal on standing, and the Lands and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice, which supported appeal on standing and the substantive issues. The Office of the Solicitor General, which makes the final decision, was initially inclined to authorize an appeal only with respect to standing, but following a vituperative letter from a Disney executive, the decision was made to appeal the substantive issues as well.

Ultimately, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the government on standing and the likelihood of success on the merits. But standing would be the focus when the case reached its final stop: the Supreme Court. In a 4–3 decision (two justices resigned shortly before the argument), the Supreme Court agreed that the Sierra Club lacked standing. As Selmi shows, this outcome turned in large part on the way that the Sierra Club attorneys had advanced standing; they focused on the interest of the organization rather than injury to individual members. When other environmental organizations filed an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club, they presented an alternative approach, arguing that the Club’s individual members hiked and camped in Mineral King valley, and thus would be harmed by the Disney resort. The problem was that the record “contained no evidence of actual use of the area by Sierra Club chapters or its members.”

Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the majority, picked up on this lack of evidence. But in a footnote, Stewart indicated that the decision did not prohibit the Sierra Club from seeking to amend its complaint in the District Court. The Sierra Club may have lost the first battle over Mineral King, but Selmi contends that without the lawsuit, “the fate of Mineral King almost certainly would have been different.” And Selmi remarks that Sierra Club v. Morton “opened the gateway to modern environmental litigation.”

Sierra Club v. Morton is even more fascinating because of Justice Douglas’s dissent. That dissent plays a central role in Douglas’s environmental legacy, which is the subject of M. Margaret McKeown’s engaging Citizen Justice. In her chapter on the case, McKeown describes how Douglas’s dissent relied on the work of Christopher Stone, who penned an article entitled “Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Citing Stone, Douglas wrote: “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” The case, he said, should have been captioned Mineral King v. Morton.

McKeown also provides some intriguing backstory on Stone’s article. Based on an interview with Stone and correspondence with one of Douglas’s law clerks, she learned that Stone, a law professor, spoke “beyond his notes” one day in his property class and “floated the idea that a river could have its own persona and have standing.” His extemporaneous thought experiment led to the article, which he was working on as the Supreme Court prepared for argument in Sierra Club v. Morton. An early draft was mailed to Douglas’s chambers the same day as the argument, but Douglas started writing his dissent later that day, which meant it could not have arrived in time to inform his initial thoughts. “But, as luck would have it,” one of Douglas’s clerks was a protégé of Stone’s and, in correspondence with McKeown, the clerk admitted that he was the “culprit” who told Douglas about the article before the argument.

When Douglas invoked the rights of nature in his dissent, he included several examples of injuries to nature. One of them—invasion by roads—runs through Douglas’s career, both inside and outside the courtroom. The dispute over Mineral King involved the potential expansion of a road that cut through Sequoia National Park, but Douglas also advocated against road building as a public citizen. When the National Park Service proposed building a highway on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that ran from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, D.C., the Washington Post voiced its support. Douglas, who lived within walking distance of the canal, famously challenged the editorial board of the paper to hike the length of the canal with him. After the hike, the board changed its position. Douglas made a similarly successful effort to stop the expansion of Highway 101 into a stretch of primitive coastline in Olympic National Park. McKeown aptly notes that for Douglas, “a road was like a dagger cutting through the heart of wilderness.”

Douglas was a prolific writer, and one of his books was entitled A Wilderness Bill of Rights. In it, he wrote that “decisions concerning wilderness should be treated with high respect for administrative due process,” and he called for public hearings and fair decisions. McKeown points out that this stance was paradoxical because he “ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers, cajoling presidents” and others in the corridors of power “to intervene in pending administrative decisions and to stop logging, dams, and road construction.” She adds that “leveraging the prestige of the judicial office to lobby for special environmental interests crossed a line that was highly questionable then and would not be permissible today.” Throughout the book, McKeown expertly blends the nitty-gritty details about the life of an iconic Supreme Court justice with the guiding principles that shaped the conservation movement in the twentieth century.

The second quarter of the twenty-first century will present its own disputes about the relationship between humans and nature. As we navigate them, these three books about Mineral King and those who played a part provide valuable takeaways.