Regional Conflict and National Policy

Kent A. Price

• Publisher: RFF Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135998134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

First Published in 2011. This is Volume 9 of fourteen in a set of titles on Policy and Governance. Resources for the Future is a non- profit organization for research and education in the development, conservation, and use of natural resources, including the quality of the environment. The issues of conservation, the environment, and energy have enormous implications not only in terms of those issues specifically, but also for regional conflict in the United States. If we are to have any kind of resolution of these issues, there must be a sense of equity, that everyone is sacrificing equally. If there is a perception of inequity, then all of the ingredients are there for social unrest. This volume explores this issue.

chapter one
Introduction and Overview

Kent A. Price

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 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 were and are 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

Figure 1-1. Drawing by D. Fradon; © 1979. The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.

of regions perhaps best fills the gap.¹ 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 Richard B. Stewart points out later in this volume, "States, not regions, are the entities recognized by the law." This is echoed and amplified by Clifford Russell in chapter 6: "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 Resources for the Future deemed the topic worthy of its first major forum in some years. Hence, too, of course, this book. Nathan Rosenberg essays this definition in chapter 2: "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 on 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 so 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. As Hans Landsberg demonstrates in chapter 3, regional politics can make for some strange bedfellows. 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—and all those on which we focus in this book—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."² As the Smithsonian Institution put it in a Bicentennial exhibit, this truly is "a nation of nations." The absence of conflict ia such a stew would be surprising.

What is new is the sudden and pervasive importance of energy as a generator regional fractiousness. The oil price shocks of the 1970s in effect redefined wealth, and the production, consumption, and waste products of energy now are key factors in nearly every major current economic, environmental, and social issue. As Christopher K. Leman has phrased it, "Regional issues in energy development present ethical, constitutional, and economic questions that go far beyond simple concepts like greed and envy."³

Also new—or at least revived—is the depth of feeling that regional differences now generate. Pithy, not to say nasty, bumperstickers 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 Midwest—the so-called Snowbelt—believe their industrial lifeblood is draining away toward a rapacious Sunbelt.⁴ Feelings are running high, so much so that even Canadian leaders—certainly no strangers to regional conflict—express their shock at the extent and tone of conficts among U.S. regional representatives.⁵

Resources for the Future mounted a major forum in the fall of 1981 to examine the current spate of regional conflicts in the United States, to place them in perspective, and to assess their implications for national policy. The six papers commissioned for the forum have been revised and edited and form the bulk of this volume. In the next few pages I will present brief summaries of the authors' principal themes and offer an overview of the issues they present.

History and Perspective

In chapter 2, Nathan Rosenberg ranges widely across American history and demonstrates that conflict among regions is a normal state of affairs The present round of conflict, he notes, has its source in the development since the Great Depression of a national move "beyond greed and envy" to a position of concern about income distribution. The debate over energy pricing policy, for example, is dominated by questions of fairness or equity. To this notion—grounded solidly on what happens to individuals or groups—Rosenberg adds the perception of regional equity. We collectively seem to believe that disparities among regions at the least should not be worsened by national policy, and at best might be ameliorated.

Regional Development

To what degree has economic development produced fair or unfair regional results? In exploring this question, Rosenberg traces agricultural specialization and the advances in mechanization, refrigeration, and transportation that opened the world market to American food and fiber. Of course, agriculture long has been characterized by cycles of boom and bust, a pattern that reinforces the problems of areas that experience losses of labor and capital to regions of greater efficiency. Even given economic fluctuations, however, Rosenberg is impressed by the results of regional specialization coupled with labor and capital mobility—high rates of growth for the nation as a whole and, perhaps surprisingly, converging income differentials among regions. Uneven growth certainly causes pain at some times in some places, but, in the aggregate, all U.S. regions have experienced economic growth and increasing real incomes. Disparities in rates of growth exist, but the direction in all cases—at least since 1880—has been substantially upward.

Indeed, Rosenberg sees the national pattern of progress as so striking that he perceives the concern for regional equity as both futile and threatening. The danger of defining equity in regional terms, he concludes, is that it may lead to policies to mitigate regional problems at the expense of national efficiency and growth. Over the long haul, he demonstrates, regional economic disparities often are better left alone.

Energy “Haves” and “Have-Nots”

In chapter 3, Hans H. Landsberg views current regional conficts through the prism of the energy "crisis" precipitated by the oil price shocks of the 1970s. In particular, he examines two main components of the popular Snowbelt-versus-Sunbelt notion. Have income and employment shifted from energy-poor to energy-rich areas? And—again the question of equity—how unevenly are the burdens of high energy prices distributed around the country?

With regard to the first question, Landsberg resists the temptation to seize on a few suggestive statistics as proof of a major move of income and employment to the energy-surplus states. It is true that population growth is shifting from the North and East toward the South and West, and that this is consistent with a theory based on energy prices. But it also is true that these shifts are continuations of trends at least four decades old. The energy component—if there is one—is masked by the overall trend. The data for per capita income distribution are similarly suggestive and inconclusive, lost for now at least in the overall trend of converging regional incomes.

Landsberg analyzes in considerable depth the unequal burdens borne by different regions because of differing climates, energy endowments, and fuel uses, among other factors. He documents what every New Englander knows without the benefit of comprehensive statistics: cold winters and heavy reliance on expensive fuel oil make the Northeast the area hardest hit by high energy prices. This does indeed make for regional divisiveness, but Landsberg sees this diminishing as the 1980s progress, largely because of likely price hikes for the natural gas and electricity that now account for lower prices elsewhere in the country. As energy prices become more equal, regionally differential pain will be less acute. Cold winters will remain, of course, but they are at least as cold in Wyoming as in Massachusetts.

Future Problems

For Landsberg, the principal worry for future regional conflict lies in the application of severance taxes—taxes on minerals (or forest products) assessed when they are removed from the soil—by states amply endowed with fuel minerals. The most celebrated current example is Montana's tax on coal, but more than twenty other states also assess severance taxes. Energy-deficient regions can and do become highly exercised over this concept, despite its present marginal impact on consumer prices, and the friction it generates could become intense. Landsberg warns, however, that seeking to mitigate the effects of severance taxes or any other regionally perceived slight due to energy prices could backfire. Shifts in economic activity, including those in population, employment, and investment, he concludes, are appropriate responses to changing prices and availability of energy resources. Government cannot change reality.

Typical Cases Involving Natural Resources

As suggested at the outset, much of the regional conflict now perceived to be at an abnormally high level occurs either in the West itself or has a western component. It therefore is not surprising that the three contemporary cases chosen for review by Allen V. Kneese in chapter 4 are drawn from the Rocky Mountain region (although each also involves other parts of the country). All three involve not only conflicts between and among states, but also between states and the federal government.

Colorado Salinity

Kneese first takes up the case of the Colorado River, which becomes increasingly salt-laden as it flows toward Mexico. Salt springs, salt leached from earth and rock, and salt in return-flow irrigation water al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• chapter one Introduction and Overview
• chapter two History and Perspective
• chapter three Energy "Haves" and "Have-Nots"
• chapter four Typical Cases Involving Natural Resources
• chapter five The Legal Structure of Interstate Resource Conflicts
• chapter six Externality, Conflict, and Decision
• Epilogue
• About the Contributors
• Index