Everyone should say 'no!' to proposed Liberty Quarry

What if John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt had not stood up to protect Yosemite Valley? What if someone had said, “Hey, look at Half Dome! That’s a great source of granite for you!”

I have loved and painted these hills since I was a boy. The representatives of the Granite Construction Company have said about their misleadingly named Liberty Quarry project: “You won’t see it. You won’t hear it. You won’t smell it. You won’t feel it. You won’t even know it’s there.” I don’t believe it for a second. This will be one of the largest open pit gravel mining operations in the United States.

I grew up in El Monte, CA, which has a gravel mining quarry to the north of it. It makes you want to live as far away from it as possible. If you want a preview of what is coming, take a drive up to Corona and try to take a breath of fresh air or see a patch of blue sky. It’s like saying, “A little bit of silicosis or cancer won’t hurt you. You’ll hardly notice it.”

After I visited the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve and saw exactly where the quarry would be located, I felt I needed to do something to call people’s attention to this issue. Therefore, as a local artist who loves this region and wants to see its pristine nature kept intact, I decided to create a painting of this beautiful river [which will be auctioned off to the highest bidder in the course of a Political Action Committee event scheduled for early this fall].

Everyone should say “no!” to the proposed Liberty Quarry!

Jack Ragland

Rainbow Valley