Saturday, February 02, 2008

Fun in the Arizona Sun

With the Super Bowl taking place tomorrow in the western suburbs of Phoenix and the PGA Tour making its annual stop in Scottsdale, Ariz., I thought it might be a good time to see what the future holds for this desert paradise beyond this weekend:

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, writes:

The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

Arizona Public Interest Research Group explains:

Due to Arizona’s rapidly increasing population, existing water supplies may become insufficient to meet the demands of people, farms, and our environment. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona faces a potential water supply crisis by 2025, and in over 80 percent of Arizona, developers can build subdivisions with hundreds of thousands of houses, even if the state declares the region’s water supply to be inadequate.

Arizona’s population is on track to double by 2030. Exploding development in areas where there are few protections and little water—such as the 200,000 homes planned for bedroom communities of Las Vegas—threatens to overwhelm Arizona’s water resources.
Even municipalities in Arizona that have conserved water, such as Phoenix and Tucson, could lose financial and water resources to bail out developments with inadequate water supplies.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources issued this notice in 2007:

On May 22, 2007, Governor Napolitano signed a Drought Declaration for the State of Arizona to raise awareness of Arizona’s drought and encourage conservation. Arizona is entering its second decade of a statewide drought due to long-term precipitation deficits and increased demand for water. The declaration calls upon citizens, businesses, schools, institutions of higher learning, local governments and federal agencies to increase water conservation efforts.

Arizona’s drought declaration provides a mechanism for both preparedness and response to drought through the implementation of the Arizona Drought Preparedness Plan and action of local drought impact groups. The state is implementing proactive measures to limit the effects of the long-term dry spell and minimize the risk of a drought emergency situation. By creating a culture of conservation, we can greatly reduce the impacts of drought on our natural resources, our economy, and our quality of life. Adopting a low water use lifestyle can be accomplished through simple changes to our daily routines. Visit ADWR’s conservation web site at http://www.azwater.gov/dwr/Conservation/ for outdoor and indoor water conservation tips.

Razing Arizona writes:

The Phoenix metro area is starting to resemble a 1000-year-old creosote bush that has grown into a ring of green around a dead-and-decayed center. The latest frontier for the developers now seems to be far-north Scottsdale where private lands inside the boundaries of Tonto National Forest have been annexed into the city, and places as far as Sun Valley west of the White Tank Mountains (a good way towards California) may eventually be marred by houses and the conveniences of our car-crazed culture.

In addition to the migrations of residents, new people from out-of-state contribute further to sprawl. Our short-sighted economic and political “leaders” go out of their way to attract new jobs to Arizona. (Some of them even seem to support our Phoenix Suns simply because of television and other media exposure that they hope will translate to relocations into the state.) Problem is, too many of those jobs come with their original out-of-state employees, adding to the demand for more houses, cars, and roads (rather than benefiting people already living here.)

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