WATER FROM THE NORTH NATURE, FRESHWATER, AND THE NORTH AMERICAN WATER AND POWER ALLIANCE By Andrew W. Reeves A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of Geography University o f Toronto © Copyright by Andrew W. Reeves 2009 WATER FROM THE NORTH: NATURE, FRESHWATER, AND THE NORTH AMERICAN WATER AND POWER ALLIANCE Master of Arts Andrew W. Reeves, 2009 Department of Geography University of Toronto Thesis Abstract The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large‐scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet‐ age” type thinking. It proposed to re‐engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal. Keywords: freshwater; nature; resources; North America; high modernism; the “West.” ii Thesis Contents Thesis Abstract – pg. ii Thesis Contents – pg. iii List of Tables and Figures (Organized by Chapter) – pg. iv List of Abbreviations – pg. v Introduction ­ pg. 1 Chapter One ­ Theorizing NAWAPA – pg. 16 Section 1.1 ‐ Nature, ‘nature,’ nature(s) – pg. 17 Section 1.2 ‐ Motivations Behind Domination – pg. 21 Section 1.3 ‐ Capitalist Nature and Value – pg. 26 Section 1.4 ‐ Science and Technology in the Transformation of Nature – pg. 31 Chapter Two ­ Water in the American and Canadian Wests – pg. 36 Section 2.1 ‐ Frontier Thesis and Metropolitanism – pg. 38 Section 2.2 ‐ Early Water Development: Riparianism and Prior Appropriation – pg. 42 Section 2.3 ‐ Water as Resource in the American West – pg. 46 Section 2.4 ‐ Humans as Managers of Nature – pg. 49 Section 2.5 ‐ Failure and Rebirth: Elwood Mead, the Bureau, and the East/West divide – pg. 51 Section 2.6 ‐ Setting the Stage for NAWAPA: The Columbia River Treaty – pg. 56 Chapter Three ­ The State and Social Conceptions of Nature – pg. 63 Section 3.1 ‐ Problems with Unchecked Development, Growth, and Northern Lifestyles – pg. 65 Section 3.2 ‐ High Modernism and the Conservation Movement – pg. 72 Section 3.3 ‐ Canadian High Modernism – Diefenbaker’s Northern Vision – pg. 77 Section 3.4 ‐ NAWAPA and the Socio‐cultural Conceptualization of ‘nature’ – pg. 81 Chapter Four ­ NAWAPA: A Grandiose and Failed Proposal – pg. 90 Section 4.1 ‐ Parsons’ NAWAPA Plan – pg. 92 Section 4.2 ‐ Science and Technology in the Rise and Fall of NAWAPA – pg. 95 Section 4.3 ‐ Implications of NAWAPA for the Canadian nation‐state – pg. 101 Section 4.4 ‐ W ater as Resource II: The Context of Canadian Export – pg. 111 Conclusion – pg. 119 Bibliography – pg. 129 iii List of Tables and Figures (Organized by Chapter) Table 4.1 – NAWAPA: Benefits by Country – pg. 111 Figure 2.1 – River Discharge in Canada – pg. 52 Figure 2.2 – Columbia River Plan – pg. 57 Figure 3.1 – Breakdown of 1960 Water Withdrawal in the United States – pg. 71 Figure 3.2 – Total U.S. Withdrawal by State ‐ Irrigation ‐ 2000 – pg. 72 Figure 4.1 – North American Water and Power Alliance – pg. 94 iv List of Abbreviations CeNAWP – Central North American Water and Power Alliance CWRA – Canadian Water Resources Association EMR – Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Resources GRAND Canal – Great Replenishment and Northern Lakes Development Canal IJC – International Joint Commission MP – Member of Parliament MTS – Ministry of Mines and Technical Surveys NAFTA – North American Free Trade Agreement NANR – Ministry of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization NAWAPA – North American Water and Power Alliance NWC – National Water Commission (United States) POWI – Program on Water Issues, Munk Centre at the University of Toronto UBC – University of British Columbia USGS – United States Geological Survey USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics WWD – United States Special Subcommittee on Western Water Development v - 1 - Introduction "Don't spoil the party, but here's the truth: We have squandered our planet's resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn't going to be one. So there goes the Junior Prom, but that's not the half of it." – Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country In September 1964, the Ralph M. Parsons Company, an engineering and planning firm from Los Angeles, published a pamphlet entitled “North American Water and Power Alliance” (NAWAPA). It was a proposal for the largest continental engineering project ever envisioned in North America. In response to a perceived shortage of freshwater in the American Southwest, the plan called for 100,000,000 kilowatts of power to be produced annually that would have generated over four billion dollars each year from the sale of hydropower. It would have cost one hundred billion dollars to complete based on 1964 pricing, rising to over two hundred billion by estimates from the early 1970s. The projected timeline was an estimated thirty years to secure the 250 million acre‐feet of irrigation water that would be divided (based on perceived shortages) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. NAWAPA also called for all major river systems across the Canadian and American West to be canalled with the ultimate goal of generating shipping revenue from a trans‐Canada canal linking Lake Superior with the Pacific Ocean. Yet the most contentious aspect of the proposal was the construction of a 500 mile long storage dam in the Rocky Mountain Trench in British Columbia that would flood vast stretches of the mountainous B.C. interior. 1 For a plan of such magnitude to receive political, scientific, and scholarly attention indicates the extent of American perceptions of water scarcity by the 1960s. NAWAPA surfaced after a half‐century of increasingly grandiose water engineering plans formalized by the Bureau of Reclamation or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It was portrayed as the next logical step in water development in America, designed to increase the magnitude of water projects while making them more inclusive of water originating outside the political boundary of the United States. 1 Ralph M. Parsons Co. NAWAPA: North American Water and Power Alliance. Brochure No. 606‐ 2934‐19. Los Angeles, 1964. - 2 - Water originating in Canadian territory was conveniently relabelled “continental water” by those in the United States concerned with water’s over‐ consumption in the Southwest, and they set their minds to acquiring it. There was no alternative to Canadian participation in the plan: with such sizable portions of the necessary water emanating from within Canadian political boundaries, Canada became the irreplaceable cornerstone to the Alliance.2 It also generated intense debate as to the future of freshwater resources in Canada that spawned larger questions of the nation’s development. “Water is so important in life,” argued B.C. MP H.W. Herridge in 1964, “that its conservation and distribution must override the geographical boundaries of private property…[and] the political boundaries of federal and provincial jurisdictions.”3 Herridge was wise to omit the importance of water’s distribution flowing seamlessly across national borders given the demand for Canadian water south of the 49th parallel. Responses to the plan were extremely varied. In The Coming Water Famine, Democratic Congressman Jim Wright of Texas argued in 1966 that “the orderly transportation of water on a growing scale from areas where its overabundance is both a waste and a curse, to areas where it is desperately needed” was the “obvious” and “logical” next step in North American water development.4 NAWAPA’s failure to be dismissed as lunacy implied to James Laxer not only the American thirst for cheap water but the “imperial grandeur” of the scheme itself, which accounted for the “terrifying seriousness” with which the proposal was considered.5 Yet as quickly as the plan appeared in the public consciousness after 1964, by 1973 NAWAPA would be all but forgotten as a serious solution to any real or imagined water “crisis” in North America. The decade in which large‐scale water diversion seemed the logical solution to North America’s water scarcity and pollution problems ended with water being replaced by oil as the resource whose safeguarding was deemed 2 Marc Reisner. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Viking Press , 1986, 14. 3 Herbert W. Herridge. “Criminal Code.” In Canada. Parliament. Debates. 26th Parliament. 2nd Session. Vol. X (December 11, 1964). Ottawa, 1964, 11066. 4 Jim Wright. The Coming Water Famine, Coward‐McCann Inc., 1963, 217. 5 James Laxer. The Energy Poker Game: The Politics of the Continental Resource Deal, New Press, 1970, 36. - 3 - necessary to both future development and national security. Critically, NAWAPA came to be seen in retrospect as “a bridge too far” in the commodification and re‐ engineering of nature in the 1960s, despite the preceding century and a half of large‐scale capitalist interventions. Somehow, after irrigation and damming projects had grown in size and scope over the course of the twentieth century, the Alliance was simply more than many North Americans were willing to accept. NAWAPA did find sporadic and often disjointed praise in North America: the Alliance was unsurprisingly welcomed in the United States moreso than in Canada, and nowhere more than in the arid Southwest. Champions of NAWAPA such as Democratic Senator Frank E.