Danniel Kemmis on a new vision for water in the west:

From: This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West, Island Press, Washington: 2001.

"If the West now occupies a uniquely promising historical moment, it can realize that promise only by thinking broadly and expansively about western issues and institutions - by thinking and eventually acting at the scale of these broad and expansive western landscapes.  To its credit, the region has managed to keep alive the memory of one man who did just that."

"In 1878, Major John Wesley Powell published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, in which he set forth a remarkably broad and complex set of interlocking recommendations about public policy for the interior West.  Focusing on aridity as the defining characteristic of the region, Powell proposed that a series of policies be shaped to fit the reality of western landscapes.  The 1862 Homestead Act, for example, worked fine on well-watered landscapes, where the 160 acres the act allotted per homestead was actually enough in most instances to support a family.  But Powell knew that in the West, 160 acres was either too much or, most often, far too little.  Powell argued that land that could not be irrigated could be made productive only in much larger tracts, and he recommended that the acreage limit be raised to 2,560 acres - four full sections - on those forbidding landscapes.  Conversely, he recommended that on irrigable land, the allotment be reduced to 80 acres.  He proposed that on parcels of both sizes, the straight-line, square-cornered grid system so familiar on eastern landscapes be replaced by surveys based on topography, letting farms be as irregular in shapes as they had to be in order to give everyone access to water.  Moreover, he maintained that on both arid and irrigated lands, these individual homesteads would be much more likely to prosper if they joined together within their watersheds to form grazing and irrigation cooperatives."  Pages 177-178

"In June 1998, a report that High Country News called "perhaps the most far-sighted federal study of Western water since John Wesley Powell's visionary Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, was released.  The report was titled Water in the West: The Challenge for the Next Century.  The report made sweeping recommendations for structural change that are indeed reminiscent of John Wesley Powell's recommendations, "We proposed a change in the function and approach of the federal resources agencies to a "nested" governance structure that reflects the hydrologic, social, legal, and political realities of the watershed."  Pages 208-209.

Excerpted from This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the Westby Daniel Kemmis. Copyright (c) 2001 by Daniel Kemmis. Posted to this website by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C., and Covelo, California. All rights are reserved.

Link to Island Press website for information about this book