1940: Reclamation

Fundamentally the purpose of reclamation is to relieve population pressure. In the United States the pressure of people migrating from wasted lands in the South, from rocky hill-country in the Northeast, and from devastated acres in the Plains, has greatly stimulated reclamation projects in the decade which has just ended. In all but one major reclamation project in the Eastern Hemisphere, the more energetic but peaceful governments have reclaimed land from deserts, swamps, and even from the sea, to provide overcrowded and underfed populations with land and with food. Only in the Sudan has extensive irrigation been undertaken primarily as a commercial venture, the benefits of which do not extend to an impoverished nation.

Zuider Zee Project.

Reclamation is, then, a program of peaceful conquest, as the Dutch recognized in the Zuider Zee project; and they jocularly referred to it as their new 'imperialism.' One of the dramatic episodes of 1940 was provided by the German invasion of Holland in May, for it brought into painful juxtaposition the German policy of occupation by force and the Dutch policy of occupation by peace. And it very nearly wrecked twenty years of reclamation labor and investment. In 1920, following a disastrous North Sea storm which broke dikes and inundated 32,000 acres of lowland, the Dutch embarked upon an ambitious but shrewd engineering program, by means of which they planned to transform the Zuider Zee into 550,000 acres of farmland, a large (270,000-acre) fresh water lake which will provide irrigation water and constant canal levels, and a highway over a 26-mile ocean wall connecting Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague with the northeastern provinces. The main dike or sea-wall was finished, pumps had evacuated much of the salt water, canals and sluices were in operation, and farmers were just beginning to move in when the Germans came. Although none of the engineering structures were destroyed during the invasion, fruition of the project has been seriously retarded; but when and if peace again returns to Europe, the Dutch will have under full agricultural utilization the largest tract of land which has ever been wrested from the sea.

Reclamation in the United States.

Elsewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere reclamation has come virtually to a full stop, for public money is needed to reduce population pressure by annihilation rather than by the creation of more arable lands. Only in the Americas, and chiefly in the United States, are reclamation projects continuing unabated; and so far as can be observed from official reports issued by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, the only notice which has been accorded the international emergency is to be found in a ruling to the effect that the Bureau is a defense unit of the government, and that its expert engineering personnel may not be raided by other government agencies. Reclamation, apparently, will continue undisturbed through the present emergency, unless the expanding program of national defense robs the Department of the Interior of its appropriations for salvaging the country's deserts.

For some years past the Bureau of Reclamation has been pre-occupied with the desert, and a glance at a map of Federal irrigation projects reveals the fact that reclamation activities start in the Great Plains, far to the west of the twenty-inch rainfall line, which roughly coincides with the 98th degree of longitude; they culminate in the intermountain valleys of the Rocky Mountains System and end in the West in the interior lowlands between the Sierra Nevada-Cascade System and the Pacific Coast Ranges.

Just east of the Great Plains in the eastern Dakotas, eastern Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and adjacent states lies a subhumid region in which the rainfall deficiency is slight and usually cyclic. Notwithstanding the fact that this broad strip of marginal land comprises a large fraction of the nation's corn and wheat belts, it is being abandoned to its precarious fate so far as the Bureau of Reclamation is concerned. The reasons why 200,000 farms and 10,000,000 people are being left to the whims of the mid-continent climate are best explained by E. B. Debler, hydraulic engineer of the Bureau, in a statement to a special Congressional committee investigating interstate migration of destitute citizens: 'While water resources are plentiful, . . . irrigation projects are not justified as they would be deserted between drought periods and their rehabilitation in times of need would be too slow . . . and too costly.'

In the Southeastern states the Department of Agriculture is wrestling with one of the country's most acute agricultural problems. An impoverished and badly managed soil has produced an unbalanced economy and an impoverished farm population. Drainage of nearby coastal lowlands would provide new farmland of high fertility, relieve the overworked soils of the Piedmont and alleviate some of the poverty; but there is not a single Federal reclamation project east of the Mississippi River. Reclaiming the desert is a far more spectacular job, which provides some wonderful statistics: the world's longest, largest, and highest dams have been built; the biggest power generators in the world have been installed in the largest power plant in the world; new engineering problems have been overcome, startling techniques have been developed. But the Bureau of Reclamation can sum up its own achievements in the following excerpts from the Reclamation Era: 'The engineering work of the Bureau has brought water, power, and light to western areas with a population of 4,500,000. One million farmers and townspeople gain their livelihood from Federally irrigated land. . . . Completion of the current construction program will double the number of people benefited. . . . Although new lands irrigated by Federal projects in 38 years represent only one per cent of the total cropped area of the United States, they contribute materially to the welfare of a large section of the population. . . . 52,500 irrigated farms . . . 258 cities and towns . . . 904,000 persons . . . All these benefits from Reclamation . . . make Reclamation a builder of the Nation.'

In the face of this laudable record, it is unkind to recall that there are 2,000,000 farms and 10,000,000 persons in the subhumid corn and wheat belt, struggling toward recovery after several years of drought and dust, despite the fact that 'water resources are plentiful.' A $500,000,000 investment would provide irrigation for most of the better farms in this region against an investment of $380,000,000 in 52,500 farms and 904,000 people.

Although practical considerations of this kind must come to mind, they cannot detract from the magnificent projects which have recently been completed or are nearing completion. Except for additional power installations and some supplementary but distinctly minor extensions, the Boulder Canyon project is now finished and in full operation, and the Parker Dam power project is progressing rapidly. The Grand Coulee project in Washington will receive $19,000,000 during the current fiscal year, which will very nearly bring it to completion. The most ambitious undertaking is now in the Central Valley of California, and $28,600,000 will be utilized here in 1940-41. In all, the Bureau of Reclamation is working on 24 projects in a dozen western states, and the work is being prosecuted with a skill and an efficiency which has excited the admiration of the engineering profession and the imagination of the public. Only the relative value and the geography of the projects which have been, and are being, sponsored can be challenged. Even if it be granted that the purpose of reclamation from its start in 1902 was to do something with western desert lands, the crucial problems of the established farm populations seem to demand some compromise and concession. See also CONSERVATION.