We could

Long quote from David Lilienthal’s magnificent little book on the TVA.

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There is a grand cycle in nature. The lines of those majestic swinging arcs are nowhere more clearly seen than by following the course of electric power in the Tennessee Valley’s way of life. Water falls upon a mountain slope 6000 feet above the level of the river’s mouth. It percolates through the roots and the subsurface channels, flows in a thousand tiny veins, until it comes together in one stream then another and at last reaches a TVA lake where it is stored behind a dam.

Down a huge steel tube it falls, turning a water wheel. Here the water’s power is transformed into electric energy, and then continuing on its course it passes through ten such lakes, over ten such water wheels. Each time electricity is created.

That electricity, carried two hundred miles in a flash of time, heats to great temperatures a furnace that transforms inert phosphate ore into a chemical of great possibilities. This phosphatic chemical, put on the land by a farmer, stirs new life in the land, induces the growth of pastures that capture the inexhaustible power of the sun.

Those pastures, born of the energy of phosphate and electricity, feed animals and men, hold the soil, free the streams of silt, and store up water in the soil. Slowly the water returns into the great manmade lakes, from which more electricity is generated as more water from the restored land flows on its endless course.

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Politics transformed to life. We did it once, we could do it again.