The Lost Lessons of John Wesley Powell's Western Surveys

The current administration’s efforts to institutionalize climate-change denial have environmentalists fighting for sound science, but we often fail to assess our own tacit dismissal of nineteenth-century natural history and... [ view full abstract ]

The current administration’s efforts to institutionalize climate-change denial have environmentalists fighting for sound science, but we often fail to assess our own tacit dismissal of nineteenth-century natural history and science. This paper takes as an example of these lessons the work of John Wesley Powell, whose surveys eschewed Enlightenment attitudes about science and called for federal accountability in public land management. Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States offers an alternate history of Western settlement policy. Powell came to understand that rectilinear land apportionment would be inadequate in a region typified by aridity, and he argued for a system of surveying blending topographical observation with natural history—including geology and ethnography. By attending to Powell’s work, we might reexamine our current relationship to sustainable land use and recover strategies for communal organization.