When Can California Join the Union?

WHEN CAN CALIFORNIA JOIN THE UNION?* Marion E. Marts University of Washington, Seattle Americans take pride in having one of the most socially and technically mobile societies in the world. We admire the long haul and the bulk cargo handler, the interstate expressway and centralized train control. We take pride in Big and Little Inches and other long distance pipelines, and in supertankers. Everywhere about us we note with approval the physical evidence of the linkage of major markets and distant sources of supply. We do not argue the establishment of a Common Market or an Inner Thirteen or Outer Seven or Thirty-Seven. We long ago chose the Common Market and wrote it into our Constitution, thereby choosing in favor of economies of area specialization and of large-scale production and consumption . Occasionally we may urge ourselves to Buy American, but never to Buy Nevadan. We consider it perfectly normal to be awakened by a Connecticut alarm clock; to eat a breakfast gathered from Florida, Iowa, and Kansas; and so forth. In the face of this geographic and economic sophistication, it is indeed curious that in dealing with water and hydropower resources, we revert to a medieval sectionalism of amazing tenacity. Rather than link supply with existing markets in the conventional economically rational manner, we expect new markets to arise close to the supply, and indeed develop our physical potentials only as we forecast a demand within the confines of our medieval duchy. No example of this sectionalism is more outlandish than the state of Maine's prohibition on exporting Maine hydropower outside the state. But we need not go to the far corner of the United States for outlandish examples of resource sectionalism. Nowhere is it more extreme than here in the Far West, where not cost but legal sanctions and anthropological rituals combine to keep water and hydropower from the places that need them. The last assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior to suggest that water go to California instead of the ocean was sent to Afghanistan to do penance. Lately he has been allowed to return, but only to California. The United States Supreme Court's Special Master of the Colorado River has been engaged for some years now in what seems to many people to be an effort to distribute a water shortage in the most economically inefficient way that is legally permissible. In recent years we have been treated to the spectacle of our usually sensible Canadian cousins seeking not just to ignore North America's greatest hydro-power stream, the Columbia, but actually to make the great river less great by turning it into the Fraser. In their favor we must admit they didn't try to argue that the proposal was sensible; they merely contended it was legal because the word "parties" * Presidential address at the annual banquet of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (San Francisco, April 7, 1961). was capitalized in a misguided artifact known as the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. This treaty was designed to protect the sectional interest against the Common Good, and its use against us by Canada was a welldeserved case of an errant chicken coming home to roost. For the Harmon Doctrine was a United States-inspired concept written into the Treaty to guarantee that the upstream state could have its own way. Apparently the then Secretary of State's knowledge of geography was such that he must have thought the United States was always the upstream state! More recently, in May of 1959, we have observed tbe amazing request of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs that the Bonneville Power Administration find out how much "surplus secondary" Pacific Northwest energy could be marketed economically in California. Not how much good solid year-around energy—ready kilowatts—could be delivered economically to California markets, but how much part-time, leftover stuff that no one else wants or will want in the future! Please, Mr. Bonneville, how many leftovers might you have for California after you have dined? But even this limited request represented a change in the political climate . Just a few years before, a plot by federal engineers to...