Ryan Zinke's Watershed Plan Is 140 Years Too Late

The interior secretary's idea to organize public land by watershed was a great idea when it was first voiced a century and a half ago. But it won't work today.

Jake Bullinger

...The latest object of the interior secretary’s affection is John Wesley Powell. A Civil War veteran who lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell is best known as a geologist and geographer who led expeditions in the American Southwest, including the first documented float down Grand Canyon. Those travels inspired Powell, in an 1878 report, to recommend the West be settled in a fashion that would organize the desiccated territory by watershed. Doing so, he argued, would make for a more collaborative and ecologically sound way of managing resources, especially in a region where the most precious resource is water. “Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come,” Powell once wrote, “and the climate is not changed with dance, libation, or prayer.” One hundred forty years later, the secretary of America’s most sprawling bureaucracy has decided Powell was on to something. Zinke recently unveiled an intention to reorganize the Interior Department’s 70,000 employees and 12 agencies into 13 zones dictated not by state lines but by watershed and basin... Consistent with his desire to remake Interior in the image of the military, Zinke’s idea is a mishmash of Powell’s ideas and the “joint management agency” concept utilized by the armed forces. Zinke is pitching the reorganization as a way to streamline the Interior Department’s myriad agencies by aligning their missions and goals by geography...more