In 1964, American engineers drew up NAWAPA, a plan to redirect the rivers of Alaska and Canada through the Rockies to water the US desert, re-plumbing an entire continent

Why go with the flow when you can redraw it? Have you ever picked up a map and thought: "Why does Alaska have so much water while Arizona is begging for a few drops?” That idea led to an ambitious infrastructure plan proposed 60 years ago. Not a dam or a canal, but a completely new plumbing system for a continent.

The Ralph M. Parsons Company was the first to propose the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) in 1964. The idea was to move excess water from Alaska and northwestern Canada southward through an extensive system of reservoirs, canals, tunnels, and pumping stations to the arid American West and northern Mexico. It would have provided for the transfer of an estimated 160 to 190 million acre-feet of water per year plus hydroelectric power generation and an increase in irrigated agriculture.

When bigger was always better
To understand NAWAPA, it helps to know the history of America in the 1960s. It was the time when the Interstate Highway System was developed, astronauts were sent to the moon, and virtually every challenge was seen as a problem that could be solved by engineering. Rivers were diverted behind dams, deserts were irrigated, and mountains were cut through.


In that context, NAWAPA didn't sound like too much of an outrageous idea. The plan included dozens of dams, hundreds of miles of canals, huge pumping stations and vast reservoirs across the Pacific Northwest, which would be used to divert water into California, Nevada and Arizona and beyond. Its aim was to not only supply water, but also flood control, new land, hydroelectric power, navigation and economic growth on a continental scale. This would have been a megaproject by today’s standards. At the time, it was presented as a national vision.

A blueprint that ignored more than gravity
The engineering was ambitious. The politics? Even more so. Water does not know borders, but governments do! The majority of the water NAWAPA would be diverting was from Canada, which would require unprecedented international collaboration. According to critics, the plan gave little attention to indigenous communities, provincial governments, environmental regulations, and water sovereignty.

In retrospect, critics note that the proposal did not clearly explain how damage would be measured. Like many grand Cold War infrastructure visions, NAWAPA treated geography less as a political landscape of communities with differing interests than as a puzzle to be solved. Its maps treated rivers as lines to be rearranged. However, in this instance, reality turned out to be messier.

In a 2012 study titled: "Engineering the North American waterscape: The high modernist mapping of continental water transfer projects," published in Political Geography, geographers Benjamin and Patrick Forest argued that the maps reflected a 'high modernist' worldview focused on centralizing decision-making and monumental engineering.

The environmental bill arrives
By the early '70s, the discussion on water had turned around. The first Earth Day had already been celebrated. Environmental assessments were now routinely carried out. Rivers were increasingly seen as ecosystems, not just channels for moving water.

The diversion of huge amounts of freshwater would have had significant adverse effects on salmon habitat, wetlands, sediment transport, and downstream ecosystems across Alaska and western Canada. Scientists also wondered if the large price tag, energy consumption, and environmental destruction were worth the potential gains.

Why the dream refuses to die
Well, here's the curious part. Although never constructed, NAWAPA never really went away. When the Colorado River flow decreases, Lake Mead sinks to new record lows, the Southwest is in another megadrought, and the old maps resurface. Journalists revive them. The politicians and entrepreneurs dream them up again. That persistence is more profound than a mere sense of nostalgia.

NAWAPA lives on because it embodies a recurring American impulse: in the face of scarcity, create something large enough to out-engineer the problem. That instinct can make wonders at times. Sometimes it creates wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important thing that NAWAPA left behind is not the water it failed to move, but the questions it still raises.

Does technology help solve the ecological crises or just postpone them? How much is too much in terms of innovation? And who decides what the “surplus” of one region is the solution for another's? The 1964 proposal is one of the best examples of what-ifs in history, a reminder that megaprojects are never just about engineering. It's about values, politics, economics, and our relationship with nature. After all, river diversion is an engineering feat. Redirecting human ambition is much more challenging.