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John Wesley Powell is most famous for his early exploration of the Grand Canyon. But in the western water policy community, he is perhaps equally famous for his ideas of “watershed governance.” With drought and Texas litigation looming on the Rio Grande valley this yeare, I took a morning off from the breaking news to write this about Powell’s 19th century scheme in this morning’s paper:
Powell’s idea, roundly ignored in his day and clearly impossible to implement now, was to build governance in what was to become the western United States around watershed boundaries rather than the arbitrary survey-straight state lines that had been drawn as Manifest Destiny spread across the continent.
Under the best of conditions, with the best of intentions, sharing scarce water among members of a community is a hard problem. But when we slice up the landscape with artificial boundaries, especially the borders between states and nations, the problem can at times seem intractable.
Thus we end up with the almost comical series of memorandums exchanged last week among representatives of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas regarding the proper way to calculate which state is entitled to how much water from the Rio Grande.
I say “almost comical” because the accounting argument over whose water it was that was evaporating from Elephant Butte Reservoir in the summer of 2011 seems surreal until you realize that there are now at least three separate lawsuits now making their way through state and federal court attempting to sort out the complexities of how to share the Rio Grande’s water.
Powell famously committed a rough draft of his watershed boundary governance scheme to paper. He’s a cropped excerpt of the map, showing how the Rio Grande Valley stretching from the San Luis Valley in Colorado through New Mexico and all the way down to Fort Quitman in Texas might have been governed as a single “state”:
John Wesley Powell’s watersheds
Some great books on Powell and his work that I drew on for my piece:
- Seeing Things Whole, Bill deBuys’ great edited and annotated volume of Powell’s writing
- A River Running West, Donald Worster’s biography of Powell
- Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner’s biography of Powell (and one of my all time favorite books, water or otherwise)
Frank Jacobs author of the great Strange Maps web project, also did a nice writeup of Powell’s map and the ideas behind it.
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at jfleck@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3916
