The last time that governing, industrial and epistemic institutions in North America perceived and attempted to realize a new geographic system for the continent was the 1960s. The most ambitious infrastructural plan of that age was called NAWAPA: the North American Water and Power Alliance. The project, a creation of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was titanic in scope. The idea was to dam up multiple major rivers in the Canadian Rockies, producing a 500-mile-long reservoir along the Rocky Mountain Trench. Canada has 20% of the world’s fresh water, some of which, in the grand NAWAPA scheme, would be held in this vast new reservoir super-complex. From these montane reservoirs would extend a continentally scaled aqueduct system, flowing southward to irrigate the entirety of the American southwest. The aqueducts would feed arid metropoles like Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Phoenix, with plenty of water left over to replenish shrinking rivers and aquifers in the High Prairies and along the Pacific coast.
NAWAPA followed a high modernist, continentally-minded extension of the hydro-logic which, beginning in the 1930s, had initiated southern California’s modern pattern of urbanization. The intense, sprawling urban growth in southern California was enabled by the infrastructural diversion of the Colorado River, away from its natural outlet in Mexico and towards the Los Angeles basin. NAWAPA sought to do something just like this, but at a far vaster scale, its “Colorado River” equivalent being the freshwater watersheds in much of northwestern Canada.
The scheme was envisioned through the lens of the mid-20th century “Fordist” policy regime in the U.S: a political and economic complex which used powerful infrastructural interventions to coordinate middle class expansion with the interests of domestic big industry. The economic disintegration of American Fordism during the 1970s—due mainly to the rise of industrial rivals in first Japan and West Germany, and later in other East Asian countries—is part of the reason that the NAWAPA project was never realized. A state that is no longer thinking in terms of coordinating complex domestic industrial geographies will cease looking at continental space through the rubric of daring new infrastructural systems.
The defeat of NAWAPA is also sometimes attributed to the rise of environmentalism during the 1970s. But while environmentalists did indeed oppose the project, the character of their opposition was itself formed through the demise of Fordism. The timing of political environmentalism gave the movement, at least in its organized, activist form, a distinctly non-Fordist, or post-Fordist flavor. Thus political environmentalism, at least up until quite recently, has been largely uninterested in leveraging towards its own ends the energies of big industry and big infrastructure.
A state that is no longer thinking in terms of coordinating complex domestic industrial geographies will cease looking at continental space through the rubric of daring new infrastructural systems.
NAWAPA itself, with its proposed total inundation of Rocky Mountain Trench habitat, was never going to please environmentalists. But environmentalists, precisely because they never learned to think in Fordist terms, never put forward their own version of a “NAWAPA”—that is, their own vision of a continentally scaled geographic system. For example: why not a shipping canal (requiring less water and fewer reservoirs than an irrigation canal) to unite the Mississippi, St. Lawrence, Saskatchewan and Mackenzie River systems, so as to divert more freight flows away from trucks and rail? Such a scheme would follow the straightforward environmental logic that trucks and rail are both more carbon-inefficient and more disruptive of wildlife corridors than barge transport. But such “canal barge environmentalism” is alien to the way modern environmentalists think. Instead, the conceptual emphasis for environmentalists from the 1970s onward has been around physical and intellectual retreat from grand new infrastructural systems and geographic frontiers; and towards an implicit, though not necessarily thought-through, diversion of mass-productive energies away from the developed West and to other parts of the world.
Today, as California runs out of water, few celebrate or even remember the NAWAPA plan. A curious exception is the political cult around Lyndon LaRouche, a recurring fringe candidate for the U.S. presidency between 1976 and 2004 and a conspiracy theorist—for instance, LaRouche has asserted that Queen Elizabeth II controlled a global drug trafficking cartel. LaRouche presents himself as a high modernist, an infrastructural futurist, and a critic of contemporary environmentalism. NAWAPA, a rail bridge from Siberia to Alaska, a pan-American rail network—these are the kinds of super-projects the “LaRouchies” emphasize in their infrastructural literature. That such ideas have washed up on the shores of the LaRouchian fringe, as far away from the respectable core of American political life as possible, is an indicator of just how decisive the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist conceptualization of infrastructure systems has been.
The post-Fordist policy and intellectual regime’s pivot against most kinds of big, fixed infrastructural commitments—whether nuclear plants, aqueduct systems, or industrially-oriented transportation projects—has oftentimes justified itself through environmental rhetoric and reasoning, but in many ways this aversion has proven environmentally counterproductive. Today’s post-Fordist regime suffers from an inability to work out environmental solutions from the vantage point of a comprehensive geospatial plan aimed at guiding subsequent social energies. Consider the failure of modern environmentalists’ advocacy of inter-city high-speed passenger rail in the U.S. Part of the dilemma with passenger rail has been its advocates’ unwillingness to think in terms of economic geographical systems actually supportive of the spatial scale and practical rhythm of passenger rail transport, which needs a city every one hundred miles or so to be viable. Too many hundreds of miles in a row without a major city, and a train line simply won’t fetch enough passengers. Thus, passenger rail advocates’ primary manoeuver should be advocating a type of urban political economy supportive of a latticework of clustered small- and medium-sized cities, each roughly an hour’s train ride from the next (similar, then, to the spatial distribution of cities in western and central Europe).
The United States’ mid-century Fordist manufacturing-heavy urban political economy, which environmental politics helped dissolve, had in fact been supportive of just such an economic geography, at least in the eastern half of the U.S. If rail advocates want high-speed rail between New York and Chicago, then they need a reversal of the economic and demographic fortunes of the in-between, lower-tier cities—or, more precisely, of one such in-between city every hundred miles. Neo-Fordism, and a national industrial policy not unlike that found in most central European states, would be one strategy for implementing this urban geographic reversal. For instance: rather than feuding with Elon Musk on petty ideological grounds, a green neo-Fordist regime could offer him incentives to move his companies’ operations to, say, Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo—thus situating that economic activity along a more environmentally efficient, potentially rail-friendly corridor than his companies’ actual setting in the staggered-out cities of the American Southwest.
The 21st century climate discourse in general has evolved so as to be instinctively suspicious of, or outright combative against, this kind of geographic-systems thinking. Most strikingly, there has been a near-total unwillingness among the climate-centric environmentalists to perceive radically new spatial opportunities opened up by novel geophysical conditions. This avoidance has reigned even when the spatial opportunity entails environmental benefits which, if harnessed, could actually mitigate the ecological damage caused by two centuries of human industrialism. For example, the much-discussed melting of Arctic sea ice opens new shipping lanes, potentially shortening maritime distances between East Asia and the eastern half of North America by thousands of miles (it may help to look at a globe to see why this is so). This distance reduction could dramatically reduce the environmental burdens posed by interhemispheric trade, freeing up the longer-distance sea-lanes in the Pacific.
There has been a near-total unwillingness among the climate-centric environmentalists to perceive radically new spatial opportunities opened up by novel geophysical conditions
We can point to other ideas in the same spirit. What about opportunities which rising sea levels present for low-carbon-cost hydroelectricity generation? In principle, this would be a matter of installing tidal turbines along new seawalls. Another idea is the potential for regions facing depopulation to become new parklands and wildlife conservation corridors. If eastern California is going to start losing people due to heat and drought, why not triple the size of Yosemite? Inversely, we can point to parts of the world where climate projections anticipate increased rainfall rather than drought. This is projected for the desert-savanna belt extending from the African Sahel to southern Arabia. While in the short term increased precipitation can be destabilizing (entailing new flood risks or expanded locust ranges), long-term it introduces the likelihood of boosted bio-density along this zone, in turn opening up new opportunities for local agriculture as well as for wildlife conservation.
These are all things a more “opportunistic”, or green-utilitarian climate politics could be emphasizing: new transit systems at multiple scales ranging from the local to the continental and planetary, new parklands, new coastal energy basins, new possibilities for flora and fauna. But our present climate discourse tends to dismiss this entire way of thinking, automatically adopting a post-Fordist nervousness and timidity when faced with the prospect of new geographic systems and frontiers. It is environmentally costly to ignore these possibilities. Our regime of governmental, industrial, media and research institutions must mature past their nervous, underconfident posture. These are unfamiliar frontiers, and the question going forward is what we will do with them.
