THE UNITED (WATERSHED) STATES OF AMERICA
In a departure from
perhaps a more typical blog post here on Community Builders, today I throw on
the lenses of historical revisionism to ask a big “what if”. Here goes.
The story begins with
John Wesley Powell, the great one-armed adventurer and geologist. He was made
famous for his successful runs through the Colorado River in 1869 and 1872. But
perhaps his most important legacy rests in a lesser-known deed: Proposing in
1879 that as the Western states were brought into the union they be formed
around watersheds, rather than arbitrary political boundaries. This idea rested
on the observation that because of an arid climate, a statewide organization
decided by any other factor would lead to water conflict down the road.
Powerful forces, most prominently the rail companies, were proposing that
state’s boundaries be aligned in ways best believed to facilitate agriculture,
and thus best be enabled to capitalize off the lands given to them by the
Federal Government. But the West, Powell observed, was too dry and its soils
too poor to support agriculture at a scale common in the East.
Powell set out to
produce a map, shown below, depicting what these “watershed states” might look
like. (Take a look at any map of the union today, and you’ll know how
successful Powell was). The rail lobby, buoyed by Charles Dan Wilbur and his
theory that “rain follows the plough”, successfully swayed congressional
opinion to accept state’s boundaries in their contemporary form.
John Wesley Powell’s proposed map of the Western United States,
with boundaries according to watersheds.
It’s easy to look at
Powell’s 134-year-old idea and see amazing prescience. The potential for water
conflict in an arid climate was too important an issue to ignore. As Western
irrigators opened up more land for agriculture and development, and as cities
and towns grew in population, conflicts over water have indeed become more
pronounced. In arid places like the Colorado River basin, where multinational
agreements and accords with desert towns require minimum flows be served on a
yearly basis, the potential for conflict keeps rising.
Which gets me to my
“what if”: What if the Western states were formed around watershed as Powell
envisioned? What would that look like and could we speculate on what that might
mean for the functioning of modern communities? And since we’re going down that
road, let’s ask another what if: What if all of the American states
were based around principal watershed, from coast to coast – something even
Powell didn’t consider.
Armed with an
elementary understanding of GIS and various shapefiles, I set out to create
such a map. Some notes on the map itself: It doesn’t look like Powell’s,
exactly. Since I decided to take a look at the whole of a country rather than
just the arid parts, which includes U.S. possessions on the east coast,
boundaries will differ. On top of that, I had access to data that Powell did
not; namely Hydrologic Unit Code – HUC – shapefiles, which depict
watersheds from their largest catchment down to very small, creek-level, areas.
My priorities for creating this map were to: end up with 50 states; keep larger
watersheds intact; try to locate watershed states in roughly the same geography
as present-day states; maintain national borders; and try to keep state
capitals in each state. Here’s what I came up with:
Sure looks different. Besides the obvious changes in land mass
and state populations, what else might be transformed if the states were
composed this way? Donald Worster, author of the must read “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s” and Powell biographer, noted in a 2003 interview on NPR that “We would not have, if Powell’s ideas had
carried through, any of our huge federal water projects. And we certainly would
not have had anything like the massive urban growth that’s taken place in the
West.” This is because Powell wanted to organize new Western communities based
on the system used by Mormon settlers in Utah, who effectively used irrigation
to divert mountain streams, lakes and rivers to their fields. If new Western
communities were organized around water and watersheds and used this form of
irrigation agriculture, Powell believed, it would force people to use water
efficiently, lest overuse or pollution compromise the source. Powell also
believed that such an organization would enable communities to be better
prepared to stave off attempts by others to seize their water.
“Any city — Los
Angeles, for example — would have had to deal with these local watershed groups
and meet their terms,” Worster said. “For Powell, the water would not be taken
out of the watershed or out of the basin and transferred across mountains …
hundreds of miles away to allow urban growth to take place. So L.A., if it
existed at all, would have been a much, much smaller entity. Salt Lake City
would be smaller. Phoenix would probably not even exist.”
Maybe. Outside the
community organizing aspects of Powell’s vision, I think there are some effects
we’d see as a nation if only the state delineation idea had survived:
·
Transportation
networks could be made more efficient in some places. Low spots in watersheds
tend to form the backbone of our transportation systems – roads tend to follow
rivers, not ridges. In their present day configuration, state transportation
departments sometimes have to maintain roads that they access through adjoining
states, or form maintenance agreements with other states to maintain their
roads for them. Alta, Wyoming is a good example of this: Its in the Western
Teton foothills in Wyoming, but its primary access is via “Ski Hill Road”
heading east out of Driggs, Idaho. Locals refer to this situation as “Alta,
Wydaho” because it is landlocked from the rest of Wyoming. In the watershed
states, that situation no longer exists.
·
The Electoral College
would be completely changed. States losing and gaining house members would
shift the balance of political power substantially.
·
Land and wildlife
management could be streamlined. Because many of these watersheds encompass
unique ecosystems, climates and geographies, a watershed states approach could
result in more efficient state land management departments better equipped to
deal with their particular regional needs.
·
If states were
organized around watershed and the idea that water should be used efficiently,
then that conservation ethic could also have taken root in the way places were
built. Recognizing that it is both fiscally unwise and squandering of
agricultural/open space, towns may have grown up with a more compact, mixed use
form because of their performance relative to those two benchmarks.
These are a few ideas
I have. What do you think?
Had Powell’s vision
for the Western states been realized, its tough to say whether the water
conflicts this growing nation stands to face would be ameliorated. Human nature
is to grow, expand and thrive. We are an inventive and exploratory species,
able to create new technologies, new systems and solutions, and become ever
more efficient along the way. So much so that it just seems unlikely that
population growth and water conflict could be avoided the way Powell
envisioned. So while modern day Phoenix would “probably not even exist”, as
Worster says, I’d wager that a different version of it would have grown
elsewhere.
Moreover, at this
stage in our national historic narrative, we are in no position to adjust state
boundaries this radically – and while it’s intriguing to write about, it’s not
an idea I’m boosting. But perhaps there is the chance that if John Wesley
Powell had had his way, communities would have grown up with a different water
ethic, one that considered longer term into the future than the next cycle of
the plow.
[*11/07/13 UPDATE: I'm working on a series of products that
explore this concept further. My first step was to embed the states in Google
Earth. You can check that out HERE]
[*11/21/13 UPDATE: I've received a number of requests from a
number of different organizations and individuals asking that I perform a
similar analysis at multiple scales: What would Europe look like under a
'watershed states" approach? Asia? What about American Counties?
What do we know about the value - we're talking dollars here - of American
watersheds?
These ideas are great,
and one's I'm very interested in pursuing (contingent the funding to do so).
But there is one idea that I can respond to right now, which is
"What would these 'states' look like without adhering to national
borders?" In other words, what if I removed one of my "filters"
- maintain national borders? This is something I've already done, as a relic of
the creation of the original map. So how would THAT look? (hi-res version on
our Flickr account, HERE)
