Mark Twain is often credited with saying: "Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over." Regardless of who actually said it, the aphorism is a popular one in the American West. But if the suggestions of John Wesley Powell were listened to back in 1890, maybe the saying wouldn't ring so true.
In 1881, explorer, surveyor and geologist, John Wesley Powell was appointed the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey. It was in this role when, in 1890, Powell made this Map of the Arid Region of the United States, Showing Drainage Districts. Unlike the familiar rectilinear pattern and straight-lined states that now organizes the American West, Powell envisioned political districts shaped by watersheds, mostly because the arid climate and limited water supply made such an organization the most logical. (Click map to expand)
Because Powell was convinced, rightly, that only a relatively small portion of the American West was suitable for agriculture, especially as compared to the East, he favored irrigation based on small, locally controlled dams -- a system that, ironically, is the exact opposite of what we ended up with, massive water projects like the Utah reservoir that bears his name, Lake Powell.
Despite the fact that many western states had already been admitted to the Union, Powell argued that the watershed districts should become the fundamental units of government, either as states or as watershed commonwealths, reporting to Congress that the watershed districts were the only way to organize “a homogeneous body of people, a people having one common interest.”
Like the 1970s bioregionalism of Peter Berg, but without all the spiritual and new age dimensions, Powell's system favored governance based on ecological determinants and natural boundaries. And while Powell's predictions that organizing states along ecologically insignificant boundaries would doom future generations with a legacy of contentious water politics came true, several interstate water compacts have sprung up in recent years to address river management on a watershed or basin scale — but they've never had more than mixed success.