Watershed Democracy
Recovering the Lost Vision of John Wesley Powell
Donald Worster
“The watershed is the natural home of democracy.”
In the American environmental movement, two figures stand like gods, gathering followers and handing down sacred texts: John Muir, the lanky, bearded rambler of the West and prophet of the wild, who founded the Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, the well-groomed patrician advocate of wisely using the nation’s natural resources, who founded the U.S. Forest Service.
The problem with this picture is that neither man’s shadow covers the wide middle ground where most of us live. Less than 10 percent of the country is protected by national parks, wildlife refuges, or wilderness areas. Only a third of the country is owned by the federal government and directly managed—however well or badly—by government agencies. Who then is there for the inhabited United States, telling us how to live successfully within our locality or region, pointing toward an enduring partnership between humans and the rest of nature?
I have no new saint to promote, but I do want to suggest that a 19th century contemporary of Muir’s and Pinchot’s deserves better notice today. John Wesley Powell introduced precisely that environmental ideal that we have long needed but have never really achieved for the nation’s inhabited landscape: watershed democracy.
Revised and updated for our day, watershed democracy can comprehensively and practically incorporate Alice Hamilton’s quest for environmental justice, Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and Rachel Carson’s plea for eco-logical health. It can link soil and water conservation to a more ambitious, integrated program of environmental restoration. It can provide a common cause for biocentrics, who argue that we should put the natural world at the centre of our moral concern, and anthropocentrics, who want to keep humans at that centre. Finally, watershed democracy can engage the rural landowner while acknowledging that we are now an overwhelmingly urban people. It is an environmental vision that city as well as country people can find meaningful.
Who was this prophet of the watershed? Powell, who died in 1902, a century ago, was born in 1834, the product of evangelical Methodists who emigrated from England, and of the wide prairie farmlands and stately rivers of the Middle West, growing up in Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois. Although as a young man he walked behind a plow and threshed wheat, he chose not to make farming his life work. After losing part of an arm in the Civil War, he headed west toward canyon lands and mountains, seeking to make a name for himself in science and discovery.
In 1869 Powell led 10 men in four wooden boats on the first scientific expedition down the unexplored Colorado River passage through Glen, Marble, and Grand canyons. It was a bone wearying and tension filled three month voyage, near the end of which Powell lost three men to mutiny. What he won, after so much brutal effort, was national fame, so that ever after the Colorado would belong to him as much as the Missouri and Columbia would belong to Lewis and Clark.
Posterity, however, has not remembered well the post 1869 Powell, the man who came back again and again to understand the fuller nature of the West. He was determined to know what potential the new country had for America, particularly for its rural people hungry for a secure place on the land.
Looking at the West through agrarian eyes, Powell saw a more formidable challenge than many of his contemporaries wanted to admit. It would be difficult, he realised, to extend beyond the 100th meridian America’s traditional dreams of democratic society, private property, and self-reliant and prosperous producers. Past that line, the water gets more and more scarce, until in places it vanishes from the earth’s surface. Farmers in the East faced the growing power of railroads, grain dealers and other middlemen who were beginning to take most of the wealth out of their hands. Farmers in the West would have to confront the added threat of scarce rainfall.
[Right: University of Kansas. Powell sought to educate Americans to think in watershed terms with appealing, informative maps of the natural topography. With contour lines they showed the shape and elevation of place, its natural divisions, and its articulation with other places, and with colors the place’s ecological zones and coordinated uses.]
The greatest danger was the ease of monopolising such a scarce necessity. In 1890 Powell told the North Dakota constitutional convention, “Fix it in your constitution that no corporation—no body of men—no capital can get possession and right to your waters. Hold the waters in the hands of the people.”
He was aware that putting a few words into a state constitution would not offer sufficient protection. Every state must also empower its residents with knowledge and authority to govern the use of land and water. Democracy, as Powell understood it, requires more than half-attended, half-ignored rituals of political campaigns and elections. It must be built on a secure environmental foundation. All land and water must be put under the control of all the people, who then must want to safeguard that shared heritage. Because in his day most Americans were agriculturists, he argued that land and water must be put securely into the collective hands of small farmers.
At the core of Powell’s thinking was a revolutionary perception of the landscape. He saw America as a series of watersheds more vital and significant than any artificially constructed political unit. Pointing out that nature follows its own demanding logic, he warned that the very shape of a human community, the shape of its rights and rules, must be tailored to that logic. Communities must be adapted to the watershed around them.
By watershed I mean the land area that drains to a single body of water—a river, marsh, or estuary. Sometimes called a catchment basin, a watershed may be as large as the Mississippi River’s, which drains some 40 percent of the country, or as small as an upland rivulet draining a few hundred acres. Powell studied watersheds on all those scales, founding a new science of dynamic topography and promoting a new way of conceptualising that abstraction we call the American land.
In 1890 he began laying out his vision of a watershed democracy in speeches before state constitutional conventions, in the Century magazine, and in congressional testimony. He recommended that the West be settled not acre by acre, but watershed by watershed. Settlers should enter a watershed only after it had been carefully surveyed and described on a scientific map, and then they should hold that unity of land and water in common. They should make rules for each kind of ecosystem within their watershed: the high mountain slopes covered by forests, the mid-level grasslands and the rich alluvial bottomlands. Powell advocated setting aside the first of those types, the mountain forests, as common property, with local supervision to control fires and lumbering. On the middle terrain he suggested the grazing of livestock under rules that would prevent over-stocking and erosion. The bottomlands were where the people’s homes and fields should cluster, farms and communities down where the creeks and rivers ran, where people could irrigate crops.
Respecting the watershed requires first being able to see it, which has not proved easy to do. We readily see a forest or rocky cliff, or a river running through meadows or hills. But seeing the entire watershed takes training— takes the aid of modern science. For Powell, who became director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1881, educating Americans to think in watershed terms depended on making appealing, informative maps of the natural topography, showing with contour lines the shape and elevation of place, its natural divisions, its articulation with other places, and with colours the place’s ecological zones and coordinated uses.
Undoubtedly Powell’s vision owed much to the example of Mormon Utah, whose settlement patterns he observed closely during the 1870s. He drew on that particularly in writing his famous 1878 Report on the Arid Lands of the West. But there was another influence that was at least as important as the Mormon example: the philosophy of democratic agrarianism, or populism.
Populism, like its predecessors the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance movements, was criticised for standing against progress, for bigotry toward the cities, for cranky, ignorant self-righteousness. More recently, historians have revealed Populism as more forward-thinking, creative and progressive.
Overcoming their deference to the seats of power and privilege, the Populists set out to stop the drift of the country toward corporate control and centralized ownership. Their most important instruments of resistance were producer and consumer cooperatives, self-organized and self-managed at the grass-roots level. Then they pushed on into politics, calling for democratic ownership of the means of production. The platform drawn up in 1892, the year they nominated their first candidate for the presidency, demanded a graduated income tax and said that “the land, including all the natural sources of wealth, is the heritage of all the people, and should not be monopolized for speculative purposes.”
The Populist movement roared through the late 1880s and early 1890s, when Powell was developing his vision of watershed democracy. Earlier, as a young man, one of his key influences was brother-in-law John Davis, a farmer, newspaperman, and brilliant critic of corporate power, twice elected to Congress on the Populist ticket. In working to prevent the arid West from becoming, in effect, the property of an economic elite, Powell was in league with Davis and the rest of the Populists, all of whom were intent on getting railroads, banks and marketing under the control of farmers or their elected representatives.
So far as I can discover, Powell was never active in the Populist movement, and it seems unlikely that this lifelong Republican would have voted for a Populist presidential candidate such as William Jennings Bryan. There was in Powell, it must be said, a contradictoriness. He was inclined to celebrate the advance of industry and the rise of scientific expertise, and even to see the trend toward corporate power as preparing the way for a more collectivised future. But when he came to think about Western land and water, and about the best way to inhabit the watershed and govern its use and development, Powell thought like a Populist.
In 1896 the party was defeated in national elections. After that it faded away, leaving behind a name that has often been resurrected only to be misunderstood. Real, genuine populism is no longer a force in the West or the South or any other part of the country.
So also was Powell overwhelmed and defeated, until like the Populists he faded from memory. North Dakota ignored him completely in drawing up its constitution. So did Montana, Idaho, Nevada and every other Western state. And so did Congress, which went on as it had always done, parceling out land with no water rights attached, disregarding the lay of the land in its land disposal policies, and stubbornly insisting on old ideas of private property and straight fences. Powell eventually retired from government and, disillusioned by his failure to put the West on a revolutionary ecological and political course, went home and shut up.
I have been recalling ideas and movements that rose and fell more than a hundred years ago. You may be thinking that the past is irretrievably gone. Since Powell’s time the West, indeed the whole of the United States, has changed dramatically. When he saw it, the West was scarcely populated, and the total size of the United States was less than 100 million. Today many watersheds on the Western side of the continent are brimming with people, while the nation as a whole has swollen to nearly 300 million.
When we look at that heavily populated United States of today, we must admit that the patterns of land and water use, and of ownership, have become less, not more, democratic. In most Western states, whoever go there first and claimed the water still, in a sense, controls its destiny by passing the claims to heirs or selling them to corporations. In some places those rights of possession have passed to metropolises, which can take water completely out of its watershed, across valleys and over mountains, and sell it as an abstracted commodity to thirsty consumers. Seldom do we see any strong local or community ownership or management.
True, there are irrigation districts where, at least nominally, farmers hold water in common, though not the whole watershed, and where they make collective decisions about its use. In practice, however, many of those farmers have become wealthy businessmen, not a few of them absentees, and the districts have become powerful water-controlling corporations. Such powers commonly lock out of their boardrooms most of the residents who live within the watershed. Also, over the past hundred years state and federal bureaucracies have acquired much power over water by means of the dams, reservoirs and levees they have built. Chains of command go from riverbank to regional office to headquarters, and it is in that headquarters, often shielded from public view, where professionals and technicians make important decisions.
With water, we have at best the shadow of democracy. We do not have Powell’s watershed democracy shaped to the contours of the land, with full and effective community participation. The water that flows past America’s millions is not, in any meaningful sense, their water. It seems to belong to somebody else. It is managed by forces and powers beyond them. It is disconnected from most of the decisions made on the land. Where do we actually vote on water or the watershed? Who do we hold responsible for what happens to the environment in which we live our daily lives? How do we learn to behave responsibly when our connections to the land have become so weak and remote?
Changes toward more concentrated power and control, toward metropolitan and industrial growth, are responsible, I believe, for much of the degradation of the American environment. Polluted streams, overdrawn and depleted resources, flood-plain mismanagement, a plague of eroding soils, and a severe loss of wildlife habitat - all this we see around us today, and all this despite a hundred years of environmental legislation.
In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.” Every river, it promised, would soon be safe for fishing and swimming. Despite making some significant progress, only about half of our rivers meet the 1972 goal. Powell’s old agency, the Geological Survey, reports that between 900,000 and 2 million people become ill each year by ingesting protozoan, bacterial and viral pathogens in incompletely treated water. Then there is that ghastly brew of petrochemicals, nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and endocrine disrupters suspended in our waterways, more of them in fact than there were in Rachel Carson’s day.
The damage done to the other-than-human world may be even more severe than that done to our own health. According to the Pacific Rivers Council, in their recent book, Entering the Watershed:
From one-third to three-fourths of aquatic species nationwide are rare to extinct, and aquatic species are disappearing at a faster rate than terrestrial species. An estimated 70-90 percent of natural riparian vegetation, vital to maintaining the integrity of riverine-riparian ecosystems and biodiversity, has already been lost or is degraded due to human activities nationwide.
When we move away from riverbanks and in-stream water quality to survey the entire watershed, we find increasing loss of agricultural lands and wildlife habitat to urban sprawl. We find more soil erosion occurring than ever before in our history. According to the Global Change Research Information Office, the nation’s soil is eroding at about 17 times the rate at which it forms. Net loss occurs on 90 percent of our cropland. The Natural Resource Conservation Service says 108 million acres have excessive erosion, losing 1.3 billion tons of topsoil each year.
These facts argue that we need a better way than we have found to address the intertwined problems of water quality, public health, habitat diversity and soil protection. Our persistent environmental problems are often local, and they defy the attention and the competence of the individual landowner and the badly fragmented bureaucracy. City and county planning commissions are of little help, for they narrowly focus on subdivision platting, traffic flow, and sewage disposal. The Department of Agriculture’s conservation districts, dating back to the 1930s, are limited to farm owners; they lack a comprehensive foundation in both the human community and the natural watershed.
Because of this continuing impasse on significant environmental improvement, a movement is stirring across the United States to embrace the idea of the watershed. Many state natural resource agencies have come to see that the watershed is the best management unit. At the same time thousands of non-governmental watershed associations have formed, seeking to educate themselves about their environment, to promote a more integrated approach to conservation, to lobby for better land and water regulation, and to restore watershed health. The Environmental Protection Agency says nearly 3,000 such organisations now exist nationwide. In June 2001, nearly 500 of their representatives gathered in Arlington, Virginia, for the first National Watershed Forum.
So far these groups seem to be little more than clusters of devoted activists who can claim no political authority, do not represent the whole electorate, and tend to focus only on quality of the water, not of the land. Only in the state of Nebraska do we see anything like Powell’s vision being realised. Since 1972 Nebraska has been developing a genuine and far-reaching watershed-based system of governance, dividing the state into 23 natural resource districts with fairly broad powers over all resources. What is needed is a new set of public institutions, matching and surpassing those of Nebraska, all across the nation, new institutions charged with protecting the beauty, integrity and long-term productivity of watersheds.
We might begin by going back to Powell’s idea of designing the best possible watershed maps for the people—lovely, attractive, informative maps. Such maps should hang in every school building, civic meeting place, and assembly hall. Topographic intelligence must be followed by new arrangements of power. There is a danger in the watershed concept that it could become the exclusive province of technical experts, undermining democratic participation. To prevent that we need to establish for every watershed in America a governing board answerable to the citizenry, backed with adequate revenue, and responsible for setting up comprehensive environmental standards. Our democratic traditions tell us that each resident of each watershed should have a voice in setting those standards.
I have no elaborate blueprint to offer for achieving that new environmental ideal. One should emerge from the citizens themselves. It is they who must decide how such watershed governance would fit in with or relate to existing structures of government. I sense that Americans are groping toward a new environmental politics that is broader than agrarianism, broader than environmental justice, broader than wilderness preservation and more sensitive to environmental realities than our current fragmented and out-of-date political system. They are groping toward a new structure of policy-making that, ideally, would give every citizen a better chance to be involved in vital decisions over land and water at the local and regional level. They are looking for a concept as bold as those that excited John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.
The watershed is that concept. It has taken us more than a hundred years to rediscover the vision that John Wesley Powell brought out of Utah and the canyons of the American West, and out of his Midwestern populist sympathies. The watershed, we can faintly hear him saying, is the place we inhabit on earth. It is the place we must learn to live within and where we learn to live with each other. The watershed is the natural home of democracy.
A version of this essay was presented at the 2001 Prairie Festival.
