The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large-scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet-age” type thinking. It proposed to re-engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal.

The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a high modernist continental water diversion project drafted in Los Angeles in 1964, is examined for the impact it had upon social conceptions of nature, the scale of water diversion in North America, and the extent of American Southwestern efforts at sustaining unsustainable Northern lifestyles. Drafted to address the anxiety of perceived ecoscarcity regarding water shortages in the early 1960s, NAWAPA emerged after a century of increasingly large-scale diversion projects, and seemed a logical continuation of such grandiose, “jet-age” type thinking. It proposed to re-engineer the North American landscape to provide water from the North to the arid Southwest. Reasons for the plans failure (including the monumental shift in scale, and Canadian territorial and environmental opposition) are examined in relation to how nature was conceived – or forgotten – in the proposal.