At the turn of the 20th century, floods, fires, and waste plagued the United States. Industries burned through resources and blew toxins into the air, with few restrictions. States and federal governments were only beginning to approach questions of the environment and did so in piecemeal ways.

In 1907, responding to the need to improve transportation, President Theodore Roosevelt tasked the Inland Waterways Commission with studying how to better manage rivers. The commissioners recognized a need for interstate coordination in this effort. Two in particular—Gifford Pinchot and William John “WJ” McGee—went further. They asked Roosevelt to invite all the country’s governors to Washington to discuss the pressing issues of water and natural resources.

Roosevelt complied, inviting the governors of all the states and territories, along with representatives from hundreds of civic, economic, and media organizations, to the White House. The resulting Conference of Governors, beginning on May 13, 1908, and lasting three days, offered a glimpse of political and economic collaboration that extended beyond normal boundaries of party, state, industry, and even time. The conference represents a not-so-distant precedent for today’s need to extend our political thinking beyond narrow parameters.

According to the New York Times, the Conference of Governors’ unprecedented composition and purpose promised “history-making possibilities.” The paper reported 44 governors attending, though the published proceedings identified 36. Alongside them, four at-large members were invited to “represent the public,” which appears to have meant ensuring the discussion integrated economic concerns: steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, railroad executive James J. Hill, labor leader John Mitchell, and Democratic mainstay William Jennings Bryan. Finally, 500-some representatives from myriad organizations—trade associations, unions, publications, and the like—joined as observers.

At the opening dinner, the attendees dined with Supreme Court Justices, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and other prominent officials in the White House’s state dining room while the United States Marine Band played.

Despite the night’s pomp, the tone of the following day’s conference was serious, even somber. According to Roosevelt’s opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” nothing less than the “continuance of the Nation” was at stake. During the 50-minute speech, interrupted by frequent nonpartisan applause, the president asserted the importance of cooperative planning and for elevating community rights over individuals’ pursuit of riches. “In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit,” Roosevelt said. “The time has come for a change.”

Others shared this view. The following day, railroad executive James J. Hill spoke on “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation.” Hill spent most of his allotted time offering chilling statistics of shrinking forests, diminishing ores, and declining soil fertility. He argued that these statistics represented not only a bleak economic future but also a potentially violent political one, borne out of desperation and poverty.

Hill believed that if industry leaders understood the dire resource situation, they would manage resources more carefully. Espousing a key element of Progressive conservation doctrine—that of applying sound business principles to resource management—he compared the nation to a corporation and the leaders gathered as a board of directors. The “board” needed to consider the resource wealth available and marshal it responsibly, he suggested, looking toward long-term investments over near-term profits, or they would ruin “a national patrimony that can never be restored.”

As the conference concluded, the governors approved a slate of resolutions and presented them to President Roosevelt. The declaration reiterated the themes of resources as foundational wealth, the importance of planning, and the need to cooperate. Its final line announced the governors’ intent plainly: “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

By the end of the three days, the governors were also eager to discuss collaborating on other matters, such as extradition laws and divorce standards. They resolved to meet regularly thereafter. That commitment eventually turned into the National Governors Association, which now meets twice a year.

Another effect of the summit was that Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission, which would inventory the nation’s resources. The commission produced a three-volume report that appeared in February 1909 and featured a detailed accounting of the nation’s dwindling stocks of various resources, including estimated dates for when they would be exhausted.

These achievements were all the more striking because the Progressive Era was no harmonious nonpartisan moment. Progressives saw themselves in a battle between good and evil on behalf of “the people” versus “the interests.” Muckraking journalists took down corruption from city halls to corporate boardrooms. Roosevelt used the power of government to tame big business. One of the biggest victims was James J. Hill himself: Roosevelt ordered the investigation that led to the 1904 Northern Securities Co. v. United States case that broke up Hill’s holding company. Roosevelt also invited his political rival Bryan to the conference.

Still, the participants overcame these differences and set their eyes on the nation’s shared future. As Secretary of State Elihu Root urged in his address to the group, they performed their duties not only for their parochial interests but also for “the common good.” Pinchot later wrote that the Conference of Governors “a conception of the land they lived in that was brand new,” and suggested history might remember the conference as one of history’s turning points. More measured historians have called it one of the “climactic moments” of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Today, Roosevelt’s concerns about the risks to the “continuance of the Nation” have transformed into warnings about global catastrophes. Twenty-first-century environmental concerns extend past accounting stocks of national resources. Now, researchers aim to identify thresholds of global ecological viability. Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for instance, have investigated planetary boundaries to determine the requirements for sustaining life. Our worries encompass the globe and question whether the planet can maintain its resilient capabilities.

Meanwhile, the “common good” is more elusive than ever. While pulses of reform have appeared—the rise of regional planning in the interwar period, the emergence of land-use planning for conservation and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s—coming together over future shared interests feels like a faraway ambition. Imagine a similar conference today, in which Joe Biden invited Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, and Elon Musk to share a stage. Commitments to base politics and baser instincts would produce only vitriol and communicate only enmity.

In our hyper-partisan moment, looking beyond short-term advantage has become a dwindling resource. The 1908 Conference of Governors may not have been the grand historical turning point Pinchot imagined, but it can be a touchstone. A common focus and commitment beyond party, nation, personal interest, and the present has been possible and must be again for the good of the planet and all its people. As the stakes have risen beyond a nation’s supply of resources, so must the solutions and the seriousness with which policymakers, industrial leaders, and civic organizations approach the future.

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And if American democracy is going to be saved, that rescue needs to start in Southern California.

This may come as news to Americans who, when they worry about the nation’s democratic future, obsess about developments in Washington, pronouncements from Mar-a-Lago, or election-related legislation in purple states. But the truth is that it is L.A.—America’s most populous county—that best demonstrates the most fundamental failure of our democracy.

Democracy in this country starts with elected representation, and we Angelenos have less of it than Americans in the other 49 states. Angelenos are often accused of not paying attention to government and politics. But perhaps that’s because our politicians don’t pay attention to us. They are too distant from us to represent us effectively.

The core problem is that American elected bodies have not expanded, even as population has grown. This is true at all levels of government, and especially in Tinseltown.

In the city of Los Angeles, population four million and counting, there are just 15 city councilmembers. That means each councilmember represents 270,000 people, the highest such ratio in the country.

At the county level, Los Angeles is even less democratic, with just five elected supervisors to represent 10.3 million people. Those local districts, with one official per two-million residents—are by far the most populous local jurisdictions in this country, and among the largest anywhere in the world.

At the state level, Angelenos have the misfortune of being Californians, who suffer under the least representative state government in the country. Our state Senate has just 40 seats for nearly 40 million people—giving us the most populous Senate districts in the country. Our Assembly, the lower house, offers just 80 seats, with 500,000 Californians represented per district. That’s nearly three times more people per member than any lower house in the country, and five times the national average.

And if that’s not outrageous enough, look at the federal government. Suffice to say, Californians, with just two senators, have the lowest level of representation in the democratic fraud scheme that is the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives, by guaranteeing one seat to even small states, gives Wyoming and Vermont residents more than three times the electoral power of Californians. It’s also worth noting that, with San Francisco kid Stephen Breyer’s retirement, there is not a single Californian on the nation’s real ruling body, the unelected U.S. Supreme Court.

This sorry state of democratic representation hurts Angelenos, and Californians, and dangerously undermines our trust in government. In order to get elected in districts of such size and scale, our representatives must pay attention to those who can fund their massive campaigns. Our relative lack of representation thus allows big-money politics to co-opt our interests. And that, in turn, explains why people with less wealth or fewer connections—especially women and people of color—are so badly underrepresented in our governments.

The answer to this problem is straightforward: massively expand the number of our representatives at every level. That way, each elected official would represent a smaller number of people. And creating more positions would open doors for more regular people with more diverse backgrounds and less attachment to political careers to join our governments.

The good news is that there is real momentum for such change, including in Los Angeles. L.A. city attorney Mike Feuer, now running for mayor, has called for doubling the size of the Los Angeles city council—an idea that has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Times.

And at the county level, the new Citizens Redistricting Commission, even as it discharged its duties to draw those five giant supervisorial districts, issued an unsolicited public plea to increase the number of supervisors. There are too few supervisors to truly represent the diversity of Los Angeles, they argued. With more districts, supervisors would be “more responsive to their communities’ needs” and citizens would “have greater opportunities to have their voices heard,” wrote the commission.

At the state level, recent years have seen debate around a proposal to increase the size of the legislature to as many as 10,000. But that idea has been hurt by its association with the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, whose 2018 initiative to expand the legislature narrowly failed to qualify for the ballot.

The momentum for expanding representation has been quietly growing at the federal level, too, and on both sides of the political spectrum. In December, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives.

The proposal would lift the 1929 cap on the House of 435 representatives and add 150 seats. (California might get 13 new seats under the proposal, and close the gap in representation with smaller states.) Such an increase in House representatives would also increase the number of Electoral College members—mathematically making it more difficult for the loser of the popular vote for president to win the election.

In recent months, I’ve heard people as different as Ace Smith, a top Democratic political strategist who has worked for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and Paul Jacob, a Libertarian-minded activist for term limits and direct democracy, argue for a larger House of Representatives. Lately, I’ve been joining conversations among Californians and other Americans about expanding representation, as part of a national campaign for more democratic representation by the organization Citizens Rising.

One crucial lesson: If you want to go big in democratic representation, it’s essential that you think small. Adding a few districts to our city council, or even a few hundred to the House, won’t bring people that much closer to their representatives. Instead, the country needs a real commitment to keeping districts so small—between 30,000 and 50,000—that we actually know our democratic representatives.

Yes, that might give the county board 200 supervisors, and create a House of Representatives of 6,000 people, a huge number of people to gather under one roof and make decisions. But such numbers will allow for more oversight of government, and the pandemic has shown that large legislative bodies can meet and effectively make decisions via digital technologies.

An America with larger city councils and county boards and more legislators would offer many more opportunities for people to serve, and makes money less determinative of who wins elections. Indeed, such larger bodies might be filled not just by elections but also by lot, in the manner of citizen assemblies that are now used around the world to bring everyday people into decisionmaking.

Such changes would make the biggest difference in Los Angeles and in California, where our democracy deficit is largest. So, the next time you hear public officials here talk about the need to save American democracy, please ask them to start by giving us more democracy right here at home.

The post What If Everyday People Ran Los Angeles? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.