Regional Conflict and National Policy

Compare the jumbled national frontiers of Europe with the orderly state borders of the American West. For that matter, compare those of the original thirteen colonies and the other older, eastern states with the neat rectangles and straight lines that predominate west of the Mississippi. There are few straight lines in nature, let alone a nature complicated by human diversity. The conclusion is inescapable that the boundaries of the western states were established more or less arbitrarily.

This is important in the context of conflicts among regions in the United States because many such conflicts now have a distinctly western flavor. Disputes over water and energy resources are not unknown in the rest of the country, for example, but they seem to reach a higher pitch in the West. The Sagebrush Rebellion of course is a purely western phenomenon. And the size, configuration, and location of the western states play parts in these interregional dramas. If Montana were as small as Vermont or as populous as New Jersey, for example, the controversy over its taxation of its coal resources—and the extent of those resources—surely would be very different. Eastern Colorado might well be part of Kansas if its principal activity—wheat farming—were given due weight. Could what is considered to be the worst-case example of energy boomtowns—Gillette, Wyoming—have happened outside of the sparsely populated, wide-open West? States by no means are inconsequential entities, but their borders frequently are violated by less precisely drawn forces—climate, geography, agriculture, industry, population size and characteristics, resource endowment, and history, to name only the most prominent.

The notion of region

Nor do states necessarily capture the feelings and loyalties of their citizens. When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s, the feeling that northern and southern California were two different states (of mind, if not legally) was almost palpable. When a San Francisco radio personality suggested partitioning the state at the Tehachapi Mountains—thus severing Los Angeles—the popular response was enthusiastic. The claims of separateness were many and varied—from climate to culture—but significantly they included water. The north had it and the much more populous south wanted it, and the squabbles over its distribution then were and continue to be intense.

I now live in northern Virginia, which the rest of the state justifiably regards as beyond the pale. Never mind that George Washington and George Mason were northern Virginians, nor indeed that Robert E. Lee himself was Alexandria-bred, the area now unmistakably is an extension of Washington, D.C., and thus foreign to those who keep alive the flame of the Old Dominion. Similarly, New York City long has been viewed with understandable suspicion by upstate New Yorkers. Pensacola and the rest of the Florida panhandle have much more in common with Alabama than with Miami. Some citizens of the Nebraska panhandle are talking up secession from that state and affiliation with Wyoming. Not to belabor the point, state lines often seem to be anomalies. Whatever reasons once led to their establishment, in some cases they now are anachronisms.

What is a region?

To the extent that states fall short of representing how their inhabitants feel, what they produce, and dozens of other characteristics, the notion of regions perhaps best fills the gap. However intangibly, people clearly do regard themselves as, say, New Englanders, or Southerners. But just what is a region?

Interestingly—and significantly for regional disputes—regions do not even exist legally. As Harvard's Richard Stewart points out in RFF's forthcoming Regional Conflict and National Policy, "States, not regions, are the entities recognized by the law." This is echoed and amplified by RFF's Clifford Russell: "Regions lack decision-making institutions and thus are nothing but collections of states, with state decisions and actions defining 'regional' positions."

Yet regions certainly do exist, and the real and potential conflicts among them are so manifest that we at Resources for the Future deemed the topic worthy of our first major forum in some years. Hence, too, of course, this issue of Resources and the forthcoming book noted above. In that volume, Stanford's Nathan Rosenberg essays this definition: "Loose geographic units larger than a state and smaller than the nation and presumably with some objective characteristic of homogeneity." No one can argue with that, but a greater degree of specificity can elicit disagreement. As Rosenberg says, "Different criteria lead to the identification of very different geographic entities, and most criteria are confronted with continua of variation, with no well-defined, or discrete, boundaries."

Regions are hard to define because the realities they reflect shift with time, perspective, and technological progress. The now immensely productive Great Plains, for example, once were known as the Great American Desert. To a native Californian, the idea that such a state as Ohio is part of the Midwest is almost inconceivable; everything the other side of Wyoming is considered "back East." The textile mills of New England have moved en masse to the South. Air conditioning has given birth to booming Houston. And on and on. Much of regional reality is fixed: climate, rainfall, natural resources, capital infrastructure (although even these are subject to human influence). But much of that reality is defined by characteristics that change over time and according to one's preferences. Regions are geography, but they also can be much more.

Regional conflict

Disputes between regions are as American as apple pie. Conflicts up to and including the armed variety occurred well before the Civil War, for example, and indeed were a primary cause for abandoning the Articles of Confederation. The Civil War and Reconstruction marked the nation indelibly, and in the century or so that followed, scores of lesser conflicts provide historical benchmarks.

Several current conflicts involve natural resources. Thus, energy-poor regions grapple with those that nature has graced with oil, natural gas, or coal. Arid regions struggle for scarce water supplies. Environmentally clean areas resist the exportation of air- and waterborne pollutants from heavily industrialized areas. None of this is surprising: land and its attributes and services may be the oldest sources of social contention. And it is all but guaranteed by the sheer size and diversity of the United States. In a 1942 trip around the country as a "war correspondent," Alistair Cooke learned "that in a continent of (then) forty-eight governments, a half-dozen radically different climates, a score of separate economies, and a goulash of ethnic ingredients, nothing that you could say about the whole country is going to be true." As the Smithsonian Institution put it in a Bicentennial exhibit, this truly is "a nation of nations." The absence of conflict in such a stew would be surprising.

The sometimes hyperbolic tone of the news media when discussing regional problems may suggest something both new and darkly portentous. Yet, as touched on above, regional conflict is older than the republic. Indeed, who would think it extraordinary? No one considers it strange that, say, Norwegians and Spaniards have different cultures, customs, economies, politics, and other distinguishing characteristics, yet Norway and Spain are no more geographically separate than are Maine and Florida; all of Europe could be tucked between Georgia and Oregon. The continental scope and cultural breadth of its peoples assures the United States of conflict along with diversity, and both can be healthy as well as divisive.

One even can wonder at the relatively low level of disagreement in the United States. Compare the minor frictions of the Snowbelt versus Sunbelt confrontation, for example, with the disputes plaguing Belgium, Spain, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, or other countries where regional differences loom large. U.S. regional conflict is important, but it is not nation-threatening.

Why does so much of the conflict that does occur seem to happen in the West? Among other factors—water obviously is critical, for example—two stand out because of their dynamism, their importance, and their relationship to each other.

First, the population of the country has not only grown enormously in two-plus centuries, but also it has shifted decidedly westward.

During the 1970s, the region with the nation's oldest urban settlements—the Northeast—actually recorded an absolute decline in population. Washington, D.C., was close to the population center of the country when it became the nation's capital in 1800, but that center now has marched across the Mississippi. The readers of political tea leaves must estimate how much the westward flow of population has contributed to the propensity of politicians to "run against Washington," even while living and working in the capital, but surely the shift west has changed both political and economic realities and perceptions. In the context of regional conflicts concerning natural resources and the environment, the influx of people to regions previously sparsely populated could not fail to generate friction over land and water and their products and services.

The related factor is the sudden emergence of energy commodities as critical; it is no coincidence that the single most discussed case in Regional Conflict and National Policy is that of Montana's severance tax on coal. To an important degree, U.S. energy resources—oil, natural gas, oil shale, coal, uranium, geothermal, even solar—are western energy resources and, despite the westward tilt of population, the West still is relatively underpopulated; in RFF guest scholar Christopher Leman's apt shorthand, "Energy is where people aren't."

Thus, two tides merge and conflict. The West is getting both more people and more energy development, and the results are boomtowns, water scarcity, air pollution, severance tax disputes, swiftly changing economies and life-styles, Sagebrush Rebellions—in short, the whole range of simmering issues that prompted RFF to take a careful look at regional conflicts over natural resources and their implications for national policy.

Also new—or at least revived—is the depth of feeling that regional differences now generate. Pithy, not to say nasty, bumper stickers shout out the hostility of Texans for New Englanders, who in turn vilify Montanans for taxing coal. The Southwest envies the Northwest's abundant water, and the Northeast and Mid-west—the so-called Snowbelt—believe their industrial lifeblood is draining away toward a rapacious Sunbelt. Feelings are running high.