AMERICA'S BIG MISTAKE: Watershed Democracy REJECTED!

As someone who works in the environmental field in the midwest, so many problems we face daily are because watersheds are split up between rural municipalities that can't agree on anything. It's such a divisive system. Yet as soon as they can agree to work together, there's so much change and hope for the future.

In the late 80's, I was an appliance salsman. Asked the front load washer machine rep why we could not sell their washers compared to top load? His responce rocked my world and affected me forever. He said, " Energy is to cheap here". "In Europe they have their front loaders down to a teaspoon of detergent, 2/3rds less water, no transmission, reversing electric motor, etc. Built to use the least amount of energy because energy is expensive there".

God damn it, I argued about the house orientation issue in an architecture class once and was scoffed at for suggesting we could do urban planning better just by designing for solar optimization. Nice to see it explained here.

Abundant cheap energy is what allowed us to build such inefficient societies. If as some say the age of abundance is coming to an end, these teachings are essential. Thanks for sharing!

As someone who lives in high desert I definitely experienced this firsthand. I had one house E/W facing--never again. You'd BURN trying to enter the door in the summer, and we might as well not have had windows because they always had to have thick shades blocking the sun. Next time I moved I refused to consider anything but N/S facing. The light is gentler, and the temperature is eons better.

Dang, the idea of Watershed Democracy seems really compelling to me! It seems to have lots of run-on effects. I suppose that the basic principle is working with mother nature rather than against her.

Perhaps it would have passed the US Senate if he had simply called it "Watershed Republic"?

8:30 This is the same reason why many Middle Eastern buildings have domes - half of the dome is always in the shade, so there's a hot side and a cold side, which creates air currents within the building that average out the temperature in each room. Pitched roofs are such a bad design for so many warmer climates.

Such an excellent video. Crime of intentional blindness these days... so much is now known, yet not a single thing about planning and construction has changed.

"But my railroads!" Cries in Robber Barron.

J. W. Powell is the the author of the book titled “The Exploration of the Colorado River and it’s Canyons” published in 1961 too. It’s an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work first published by Flood and Vincent in 1895 under the title of “Canyons of the Colorado”. Also it’s Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-2228

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who has thought of this as a solution to water-scarcity and gerrymandering.

Lesson I've gained is that living in harmony with the nature is the key to our survival

Wow - this is an alternate time line I wanna be in. Imagine America designed with this level of connection to nature. Your Amazing Andrew! 🌟

Arguably the mistake has its origins even earlier with the Treaty of 1818 that set the boundary between the US and what became Canada along the 49th parallel rather than along the Mississippi/Hudson Bay continental divide as it had nominally been before then. With an international border along a drainage divide, it would have strengthened the case for internal boundaries along watersheds. But with that nice straight northern border along a line of latitude, it becomes a lot easier for the straight line map drawers to continue doing so for state boundaries.

This is the video I've been looking for! Here in the NW, some of us speak of the Bioregion of Cascadia - the watershed and connected bioregion that arguably begins at the source tributaries of the Columbia River, through western BC, and down along western Washington, Oregon, and possibly northern colonial California. It's about prioritizing the ecosystem of the land and it's Indigenous population. One great example of how this might work is the active effort to return the salmon spawn in the Columbia back to where it was only 100 years, before dams - as far as Alberta. Doing so would be good for the river, and allow the tribes to live sustainably as their grandparents did before them. Of course, every other day someone thinks it's about secession for the sake of political upheaval (usually a "Western Idaho" type) and completely misses the point of using multi-lateral governance as a tool for sustainability and justice. This video will hopefully be a good primer for some of those folks.

I don't know if its been mentioned elsewhere, but a big undersold point of this argument is that humans tend to settle along waterways, so current states with a huge populations would naturally be divided up, as each watershed would take with it its portion of the population. As a quick example California has been in talks about dividing the state, and a quick look at google maps indicates that LA, SFC/Sac, and North Cali would all make for pretty compelling divisions.

The official postal abbreviation for Louisiana is LA not LS… interesting map thanks for making it. Great video, keep up the good work.

When I visited New Mexico I saw a number of old Spanish land grant properties. Each one has access to the local drainage, so they are long narrow strips of land from the top of the hill to the bottom.

I live in Douglas County Oregon and if you look on the Map you can see the county lines perfectly correspond with the Umpqua Watershed. Be curious to know if any other counties have draw lines like these in America (hope we're not the only ones). Big thanks to the settlers who proactively drew up these lines with that intention. But then again plenty of gridded properties throughout the county.