Environmental Legend Criticizes Yosemite's Bus Plans by Mark Grossi The Fresno Bee - May 24, 2000 Environmental icon David Brower, who last week criticized the Sierra Club and resigned from the board of directors, fired another broadside this week at diesel buses in Yosemite National Park. Brower wrote a stinging letter to the Yosemite Area Regional Transportation System, or YARTS, saying the use of diesel buses is "an affront to the grandeur of the nation's premier national park and a threat to public health." The transportation system last week started a two-year demonstration project to bus people from gateway communities into Yosemite Valley. Leased diesel buses are used in the project. "The California Air Resources Board already classifies diesel exhaust as a carcinogen," said Brower, 87, who last Thursday resigned from the Sierra Club board for the third time in 14 years. "I urge you to put the brakes on this harmful project." But there are no plans to stop or delay the project, officials said. Even without YARTS, many diesel tour buses enter Yosemite every day, said Jesse Brown, executive director of the regional busing system. The demonstration project's buses are a very small percentage of the total diesel traffic. The projectÕs diesel buses are not as clean as compressed natural gas, Brown said, but the 1997-model buses are among the cleanest-burning diesels available. He added that even though compressed-natural-gas buses have proved powerful enough to perform in the mountains, they are not practical for this project. "This is a demonstration project," Brown said. "Nobody has the money to buy compressed-natural-gas buses for a short project. You need a $1 million to $1.6 million fueling station and a decent fleet size to justify that kind of expenditure." But money has not been the core issue for Brower, a Berkeley resident, who has a lifelong passion for Yosemite and other national parks. Since 1933, when he began building the Sierra Club into a dynamic national force, the environment has been at the top of his agenda. Decades ago when his Sierra Club rifts began, he founded the League of Conser-vation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute to pursue his interests. After last week's departure from the Sierra Club, Brower this week suggested the club should have opposed the Yosemite busing. Brower her long supported rail for mass transit in the park. "When I first went to the park in 1918, there was a little railroad up there that worked fine," he said by telephone Tuesday. We're dying in the wastes of auto-mobiles and buses. I'm quietly furious at the National Park Service about diesel busing." In his letter, Brower alluded to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency order last week to reduce 90% of diesel emissions throughout the country by 2007. "At minimum," he wrote, "YARTS should postpone this dangerous project until the stringent regulations now proposed by EPA take effect in 2007."