Straight Line Borders

After a previous blog post mentioning dividing California into multiple states, I started thinking more about redrawing the borders of several other political entities. I love the idea in theory, as so many political borders in the world don't reflect the cultural or economic realities on the ground. A good number of conflicts in the world today are created by borders drawn by colonial powers without regard to the people living there.

Within the US, there have been a number of ideas for redividing the states, such as Joel Garreau's Nine Nations of North America, George Etzel Pearcy's 38 states proposal and a host of other secessionist movements. I've seen various ideas for breaking up California, Texas, New York, Florida and so on. I also wouldn't mind to see my home state of Oregon modified a bit along with Washington to better match the Republic of Cascadia. That then draws in Idaho, and you might as well edit Nevada a bit as long as you're redrawing California. Then there are all those low population states with three electoral votes that get disproportionate political power in the US, so I wouldn't mind combining some of those. Maybe combine Montana and Wyoming, Vermont and New Hampshire, and go down to one Dakota, though I imagine that people in those states wouldn't necessarily be happy with those divides. Of course I need to do some more research before actually calling any of this a serious suggestion, but I am playing around with a map that seeks to work along the lines I've suggested while minimizing disruption to existing states. If anyone has or knows of any well researched maps in this vein, please let me see.

Additionally there's the part of me that likes Ameriwank alternate histories and would like to see Canada and the UK and other English speaking territories lumped together into one large American/English country, and that would require a whole new set of borders.

Ignoring that for now, there a lot that could be done to improve international borders. I've seen suggestions for the Middle East, Africa and the rest of the world. This Wikipedia article on unrepresented nations and peoples lays out some of the changes I would like to see. Now to just generate some easy to look at maps.