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REFLECTIONS OFAN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 ~ finally, after centuries, even millennia, of struggle, we rise to the level of civilization. Iraq is a civilization, France is a civilization, Russia is a civilization, Prussia is a civilization, and only a handful of countries will ever rise to the acme of human achievement which is a republic, and that's what the United States is. Thanks to men like Jefferson and Franklin and Thomas Paine and Frenchmen like Condorcet and Rouseau and Voltaire. The United States is a republic. We have to be unsentimental about peoples who are not at that stage. We have to say we understand that it's not your fault that you're stone age people but nor do we need to bend over backwards to protect you. You must now accelerate your cultural pace. We will help you. We will try to send the best of our own culture to yours but we cannot, given our mission as a republic, we cannot yield to what might be seen as the cultural sovereignty of another people. In other words, to put this in a much shorter way, the people of my time, and I among them, were not in any sense of the term cultural relativists. The mistake that we Americans have made is not to develop systems which are hannonious with the actual landscape of the West. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I find some similarity between your water philosophy with that of southern Spain that was brought to this country, that in turn was brought to Spain, I believe, by the Moors. For example, the water bank that is taking place each Tuesday in Valencia was a sharing similar to what you described. POWELL: Southern Spain, if you read the history of the Old Testament as a water master, its all about water. It's all about the sharing and adjudication of water. Water disputes, the tainting of wells, the protection of wells. When do you share water with someone outside of your own culture, et cetera, et cetera? All peoples of all arid cultures have developed systems and I think the mistake that we Americans have made is not to develop systems which are harmonious with the actual landscape of the West. I'll close with this story. In 1889, five states came into the union at once. By now, the dispute between myself and the boosters had become a kind of national news and so Sen. Stewart of Nevada and I were sent on a tour of all of the five states that came in 1889 and we gave speeches to their Constitutional Conventions. First I gave mine and then he gave his. My speech was always the same. This would only be pardy true in North Dakota but certainly true West of there, but in Bismarck I said, "You are an arid state or a semi-arid state. If you are now plan- ning the future of your constitutional order, I urge you to have watershed counties, watershed common- wealths, to abandon the rectangular survey grid system, to abandon the doctrine of prior appropria- tion, to develop some sort of cooperative systems, and to plan for droughts as a part of your state's destiny. If you do it now, you have a chance of building happiness and justice in your proposed state. If you simply accept the inherited tradition, you're looking for a long history of trouble in litigation." Then Sen. Stewart stood up and said, "Don't listen to this bubble headed theorist, just do what seems right." And they all did, they all just recapitulated Mr. Jefferson's vision. As if Thomas Jefferson would have continued to cling to those views that he held in Virginia in 1784 if he could have been brought on a train to the land beyond the 100th meridian. It's a travesty of Jefferson's genius to talk that way and its a travesty of an enlightened people. Why do we have science? The Lewis and Clark Expedition was Mr. Jefferson's brainchild. The first time that government science occurred in the republic. Why do we have government science? We have government science because science tells us the truth and it's in the interest of a great people to listen to science. If we're not willing to listen to science, then what good are we? So science tells us, you cannot have prior appropriation in Utah and have a society that can sustain itself. Then if we ignore that, if we veto that on behalf of habit and greed and complacency, then we deserve our fate. It seems to me that science should be an absolute. Now sometimes scientists disagree but we should be able to find a consensus of rational scientists on any subject and then it should be the interest oflegislators to line up behind that science and people to line up behind the legislators. So I don't understand this. It troubled me. I'll give you one last example before I close. I was the first ethnologist to use photographs as a way to enchant Congressmen. Appropriations are always grudging but if I gave copy sets of the photographs of the peoples that I was studying to key Congressmen, they always champi- oned the work of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology. So I did this, I would send them beautiful sets of photo- graphs.