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Old Posted Mar 25, 2019, 1:48 AM
Hindentanic Hindentanic is offline
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I was always impressed by the 1960s scheme for the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a gigantic, continental reorganizing of the water system for North America.


(Diagram from Sewell, W.R., "Water Across the American Continent," Geographical Magazine, Vol. XLVI, No. 9 (1974) from ResearchGate)

Broadly, water from the rainy Pacific Northwest and the snowmelts of Alaska would be captured and channeled south to green the deserts and quench the growing thirst of California, the U.S. Southwest, Texas, and Mexico. The central trenches of the Rocky Mountains would be used to form the great water channels, which would be naturally contained between the mountains. A chain of nuclear power plants would be required to initially pump water up to the higher elevations of the central Rockies, but the new reservoirs and channels would then create numerous opportunities for massive hydroelectric stations downstream to power the create cities that would arise from the dramatically increased agricultural fertility of the Southwestern and Midwestern regions.

The greater water flows, new channels, and redirected rivers would create a vast new canal transportation system across western Canada and the U.S., allowing river transport from the Great Lakes to use the transcontinental canal to reach ports on the Pacific Coast. The new Northwest Passage would literally be from the St. Lawrence or the Erie Canal to Vancouver. A similar network would reach the Rio Grande and the Gulf of Mexico, paralleling for the West the Mississippi network of the Midwest. Actually, the Mississippi system would also reach the new Western Canadian canals reaching Vancouver. What the Grand Canal did for ancient China would be replicated for modern North America.

Oh, Brave New World...

Video Link


Video Link


Grandiose plans have grandiose costs, and so this idea largely died in the 1970s. However, the Soviet Union ruthlessly did it's own water resource mega-management version in Central Asia, which largely ended up killing the Aral Sea.

Last edited by Hindentanic; Jul 1, 2019 at 1:47 AM.
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