The Visionary John Wesley Powell Had a Plan for Developing the West, But Nobody Listened

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.................... from the Smithsonian ..............................

Powell’s foresight might have prevented the 1930s dust bowl and perhaps, today’s water scarcities

On January 17, 1890, John Wesley Powell strode into a Senate committee room in Washington, D.C., to testify. Powell had come to testify not as a hero or explorer, but as one of America’s foremost scientists, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and an architect of federal science. He had something deeply important to communicate about America’s future. The Senate Select Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation of Arid Lands was the gatekeeper of an issue pivotal to the development of the nation—through them the federal government could bring water to the western deserts and thus open great new lands to new generations of pioneers.

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