Getting Hosed pt 3: You Can’t Change the Climate “with Dance, Libation or Prayer.”

John Wesley Powell, 1834-1902

John Wesley Powell Was Right 130 Years Ago.

‘For there is not sufficient water to supply the land.’

by John Earl, July 3, 2023; cross-posted from SoCal Water Wars (previously Surf City Voice)

The California gold rush triggered the development of a water management system that favored expansion and economic concerns over reasonable use and environmental justice.

Some prominent critics, like Max Gomberg, a former conservation manager under Gov. Gavin Newsom, argue that the state’s water policies today are still largely influenced by that system, despite official claims to the opposite.

But some American pioneers also challenged the dominant water narratives of their times, such as John Wesley Powell.

John Wesley Powell’s farewell dinner at United States Geological Survey. 
(Powell at head of table, right front)

Powell was a geologist and a one-armed explorer of the American West. He gained fame as the first person to travel and photograph the length of the Colorado River for the U.S. government in 1869.

Although Powell believed in Manifest Destiny and was racist and patronizing toward Native Americans, he was also a visionary and a radical thinker, some of whose ideas about water management are still relevant and innovative.

If nothing else, his legacy as a whole, especially regarding water management, shows how much and how little we have learned since he died in 1902.

Powell’s water management system

Powell proposed an ecological (for the most part) 1 and equitable approach (except for Native Americans) to developing the West, using natural features like rivers and hills as guides, instead of the checkered squares that we see from the sky today.

According to Powell, a family should only farm 80 acres of land as part of a co-op with other farmers. He also proposed a limit of 2,560 acres of land for grazing per family.

He argued that speculators would take advantage of inexperienced small farmers and gain control over limited water supplies, leading to monopoly ownership in the West.

“Within the arid region, only a small portion of the country is irrigable. … The question … is to devise some practical means by which water rights may be distributed among individual farmers and water monopolies prevented…”

JJohn Wesley Powell — Report on the Lands of The Arid Region of the United States, 1879

The Homestead Act

The “cultivators of the earth” lionized by Thomas Jefferson were encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, which offered 160-acre land plots to small farmers for almost free—more land than Powell believed was practical.

The program failed due to corruption and inefficiency. Speculators and railroad tycoons exploited the land, confirming Wesley’s concerns.

Marc Reisner summed it up in his classic book, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water::

Speculation. Water monopoly. Land monopoly. Corruption. Catastrophe.

The U.S. government paid Powell thousands of dollars to map the water resources of four arid states: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Montana. He told the Senate in 1890 that those states did not have enough water to support the garden of farms and ranches fantasized about by speculators and the public.

It would be almost a criminal act to go on as we are doing now, and allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they cannot maintain themselves.

Powell repeated his warning at an irrigation conference held in 1893:

I wish to make clear to you, there is not sufficient water to irrigate all these lands; there is not sufficient water to irrigate all the lands which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated… I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict —f or there is not sufficient water to supply the land.

Powell’s conservationist ideas for water and land management met fierce opposition from influential congressmen, farmers, and land speculators.

He quit his position as the director of the United States Geological Survey, the federal agency he had proposed to Congress, after his budget was slashed.

But he had accurately predicted the irrigation and development limitations of the arid states he surveyed, and his findings were also applicable to Arizona, Central California, and Southern California.

The Reclamation Act

Disasters caused by bad climate and poor water-management in the west spurred eastern speculators to invest in the irrigation of the Colorado River basin and California’s central valley, assisted by government programs that had mostly failed by the 1890s.

The Reclamation Act of 1902, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt, created the modern water-welfare state. It was a grudging admission that Powell had a point: irrigation was essential for any agriculture in the arid West.

The Reclamation Act basically updated the Homestead Act, reflecting the idea that with federal assistance the arid lands in the West could be “reclaimed” for civilization.

Roosevelt saw modern irrigation as a public project that could transform the dry western lands into fertile agricultural zones. He thought that building large networks of canals and reservoirs was “impractical to private enterprise.”

In his congressional address of 1902, Roosevelt praised the Act, stating, “The sound and steady development of the West depends upon the building up of homes therein.”

The Act supported construction of large infrastructure projects in 16 states, including the four-corners states, plus Nevada and California, and it provided low-interest financing for the purchase of cheap federally-owned farmland…

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