The Great Challenge Australia Met

A limited supply of water can easily be monopolized

, and a monopoly over such a vital necessity put the common people at risk. How to keep that limited supply in the hands of as many as possible, how to make sure that the principles and values of democracy survive in a land of environmental limits, was the great challenge that must be met. "If in the eagerness for present development," Powell warned, a land and water system shall grow up in which the practical control of MBT Shoes On Sale agriculture shall fall into the hands of water companies, evils will result that generations may not be able to correct, and the very men who are now lauded as benefactors to the country will be denounced as oppressors of the people.

A real democracy requires more than political campaigns and elections, more than a set of rituals or even the right ideas or philosophy. It needs a secure material foundation. It needs enough land and resources to go around, and these must be distributed as widely and fairly as possible. That had not seemed like a problem in the eastern states, where abundant soil and water were easily found. But what would be the fate of democracy when the nation moved farther west, when it arrived in a less generous land how could it sustain democracy when there were more people pressing on less water, soil, or forest Powell's ultimate plan for the region was to create a new political system based on the watershed, that is, on the waterways that flow through the countryside and the land that supplies that water. Those watersheds should become the definition of, the foundation for, local and regional government. Within each watershed there should be a polity of citizens armed with knowledge to develop the watershed for the common good and to make rules governing its use. The first step toward that goal, Powell believed, was to observe and respect the patterns that water makes as MBT Lami it flows across the landscape. In nature, water does not flow in straight or rigid lines but cuts a far more complicated pattern a mosaic of thousands of interlacing rivers and streams, each one different from all the others. Yet each watershed is a unified whole in which everything, from one divide to the other, is bound together by commonalities of geology, rainfall, evaporation, soil absorption, runoff, and drainage. Vegetation is part of that unity, likewise the fauna, and likewise the people who live there.

Powell recommended that the government begin surveying and dividing the West, not acre by acre, but watershed by watershed, and require that each community plan how it would use all the resources with its boundaries. Where there were forests on the upper slopes, settlers should draw up rules for their protection and use. At mid elevations, settlers should set up community pastures with rules for grazing livestock and protecting soils from erosion. Only the arable bottomlands, down where the creeks and rivers run, down where people could irrigate a patchwork of crops, should be divided into private estates, and even there the water should be communally owned and conserved.

by: Porter Green

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