Rescaling water governance - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 79

4 Rescaling water governance

From federal-federal to
international watersheds

In the early 1880s, John Wesley Powell - a North American scientist, geographer,
and explorer - made a daring suggestion to define the Western U.S. states through
watershed boundaries, rather than Cartesian borders. Having spent decades
exploring and documenting the physical and cultural geography of the American
West, he came to understand the intricate link between water and human organ-
ization. Notably, his respect for, and knowledge of, Indigenous communities and
cultures influenced his interpretation of human-environment relationships in a way
that was far more nuanced than many of his contemporaries. Powell's dedication
to both hydrogeology and ethnology is present throughout his work, particularly
in relation to advocating for a “watershed approach” to governance. As Powell
described, a watershed is “that area of land, a bounded hydrologic system, within
which all living things are inextricably linked by their common water course and
where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become part of a
community”.
Powell's vision of aligning political boundaries with watershed basins, as shown
in Figure 4.1, aimed to minimize conflict related to “out of basin demands”. The
watershed approach was, in essence, a call to live within one's hydrologic means,
both spatially and temporally. That is, not to take from your neighbor's basin or
from future generations. The rationale that Powell outlined in the 1880s for a
watershed framework - and, ultimately, the consequences of not doing so - is
hauntingly prophetic, particularly in relation to out-of-basin withdrawals.
Of course, reading today's political maps we know that Powell's watershed
approach was not adopted. In the end, the delineation of U.S. state borders was
decided by political elites and big business interests such as railroad magnates, whose
interest in having “straight rail lines” was incommensurate with watershed borders.
Although Powell's vision did not come to fruition, the desire to rethink a
watershed approach to governance is still alive in many people's imaginations and
is actively being constructed by environmental organizations, and tribal, state,
provincial and even federal agencies. A key issue with this restructuring, however,
is aligning political management structures with hydrologic basin borders. These
difficulties are compounded when the watershed spans international boundaries -
adding a level of political complexity when federal governments are required for
negotiations.