Narrative Possibilities: An Introduction

History is a form of storytelling. Here’s a story that concerns modern Arizona (but not it alone). In the Grand Canyon State, water and development are inextricably linked. That has been especially evident in the decades since World War II. The mid-twentieth century, as Marc Reisner noted years ago, marked a pivotal moment in the state’s history when its most scarce natural resource—water—was suddenly set against a burgeoning human population. “Phoenix—population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000—grew overnight from outsized village to big city.”¹ The state’s population swelled in tandem with its capital city, while innovative irrigation infrastructure made the desert bloom. The only dilemma was how to stretch the limited supplies of water to meet the deep thirst of booming Arizona, a dilemma for which the new migrants were partly responsible: they had not “bothered to ask whether there was enough water, before they loaded their belongings and headed west. They simply came; no one could stop them. How they were to fill their pools and water their lawns was Arizona’s problem.”²

The political and policy response to this difficult situation was three-fold: to accelerate groundwater mining, courtesy of enhanced technologies in pump-and-pipe, and canals; launch a decade-long lawsuit, Arizona v. California (373 U.S. 546, 1963), to secure a greater share of water from the Colorado River; and, once that was achieved, construct the multibillion-dollar Central Arizona Project (CAP). Completed in 1993, the CAP is a 336-mile-long system of canals, tunnels, and pumping facilities that channels Colorado River flows from Lake Havasu in the northwestern corner of the state to four central and southern counties, where upwards of 80 percent of the population resides. Metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson are the prime beneficiaries of the funds spent and water delivered. Dilemma resolved.³

Or so it appeared. After all, the plumbing system only functions smoothly if there is enough precipitation falling in the Colorado River Basin, a vast watershed that encompasses 246,000 square miles. The limits that this climatic reality imposes on Arizona’s ability to divert water into the CAP were revealed most glaringly in the summer of 2022. Following years of drought, the Colorado’s flow diminished considerably. So much so that water managers feared that the once-mighty river would reach dead-pool status, in which water levels were so low that no flow could pass through Hoover Dam or other downstream structures.⁴ The scramble that ensued included an unprecedented negotiation in early 2023 between the three lower-basin states with the most to lose from a desiccated Colorado—Arizona, Nevada, and California. Their discussions centered around the need to voluntarily reduce the amount of water each could siphon from the beleaguered river. However stop-gap the result—the states agreed in principle to cut their collective take by three million acre-feet between 2023 and 2026—the fact of the discussion itself was a signal that the punishing drought had forced these usually combative entities to the table.⁵

Perhaps even more meaningful was the related news in June 2023 that due to uncertainties surrounding the amount of water that would pulse down the Central Arizona Project, and the continual over-pumping of groundwater, developers in Maricopa County/Phoenix would not receive building permits if their projects relied on groundwater supplies. Being compelled to purchase water from willing sellers seemed to represent a turning point, the New York Times suggested: the “rush to buy water is likely to rattle the real estate market in Arizona, making homes more expensive and threatening the relatively low housing costs that had made the region a magnet for people from across the country.”⁶ Once the source of its booming economic development, once-cheap water had become symptomatic of an era of constraint.

Whether the events of 2022–2023 prove to be a watershed moment may not be known for some time. But what is clear is that the river’s fluctuations—and the political waves they have generated—reveal the intense and complex relationship between natural and human systems (and the climatic drivers that can complicate this dynamic). These varied interconnections are among the key elements that environmental historians explore to better understand where we fit in those places we call home. These landscapes—geologic, geographic, cultural, and material— are also set in, and over, time. How they respond to one another, and alter the conditions that shape life in each, are among the evolving links between past, present, and future.

Certainly, that’s been the case in Arizona, to judge from scholarly analyses of the state’s environmental history. Start with Thomas E. Sheridan’s Arizona: A History, which provides a sweeping overview from the Hohokam era to the present. Yet, however expansive its chronological scope, the book particularly focuses on how people have forged their lives and livelihoods out of available resources. Indeed, the book’s central section, entitled “Extraction,” identifies the melding of capital, transportation, and labor that enabled a settler-colonial society to mine, ranch, farm, and occupy Arizona’s deserts, valleys, foothills, and mountains.⁷

Other historians have focused on the state’s urban environmental history, notably the megacities of Phoenix and Tucson.⁸ Grand Canyon National Park, like some of the state’s many national monuments and landmarks, has been the subject of considerable attention.⁹ The threats that wildfires pose to forests and range have been as carefully assessed as have its river systems—the Colorado, to be sure, but also the Gila and the Santa Cruz. Ditto for the state’s electric grid, and the politics that are intertwined with its high-voltage transmission lines.¹⁰

As for the Journal of Arizona History, its pages are replete with site-specific and/or thematically concentrated essays. Articles on smelter pollution, the City Beautiful Movement, Indigeneity, the Borderlands, and roadside photography capture some of the periodical’s range of coverage. Its three recent special issues devoted to Arizona monuments and memory, Arizona’s diverse past, and the centennial of the Grand Canyon National Park further widen the scope of what constitutes environmental history.¹¹

“Rethinking Arizona’s Environmental History,” the journal’s latest special issue, adds several new dimensions to the already rich trove of scholarly exploration of the state’s environmental conflicts, collaborations, and conundrums. Its first two contributions, individually and collectively, compel us to rethink what we thought we already knew. They do so by introducing new frameworks and forms of analysis to help revise and reimagine some of Arizona’s received traditions.

Small things matter. That’s one reason why Michelle Berry asserts that environmental historians should pay much closer attention to ecology, a scientific discipline that is place-based and species/habitat-centered. It is also Other-oriented, focusing on the non-human world. This framing can challenge the anthropogenic nature of those environmental histories that presume nature is passive, more backdrop than foreground. A decentering that no flora or fauna—neither organ pipe cactus nor ponderosa pine; rim-rock wolf nor suburban-street-patrolling coyote—would deign to notice. As for the convergence of climatic forces— drought and deluge, intense heat, haboobs, and floods—these, like conflagrations and avalanches, signal nature’s disruptive power.

A confluence, where the Gila River meets the Colorado, is the focus of Christopher Sudol’s exploration of the American conquest of the region. He unpacks the nation’s determined efforts to disrupt and redefine the land and its uses that dovetail with dominant settler-colonial ideologies. Illustrating this transformation was the work of American cartographers, who contributed to the often-violent conversion of people and place by erasing Indigenous sovereignty and geographies.

So how might we contextualize these and other natural pressures? Consider the Colorado River, whose life-beyond-the-human has generated rafts of commentary, some of which have swirled into public and private archives. That is where Berry locates records that reveal how river rats, Johnsongrass, and microbial agents have disrupted human control over the river. As she knows, to make the best use of these repositories requires river guides, special collection librarians. Their contributions to “Rethinking Arizona’s Environmental History” are as vital as the primary sources housed in their respective libraries, so we are thrilled to include two essays by archivists that examine archival collections of interest to Arizona and western environmental historians. One essay—co-authored by archivists Lisa Crane, Eric Milenkiewicz, Sarah Jones, Andrew Lippert—identifies material available in two lower-basin states, California and Nevada, and they direct our attention to shared documentation that will allow researchers to develop more nuanced understandings of the river as a river, and as a site of contestation.

The river as agent and artifact: this same twinning could be applied to other hybridized terrain in Arizona. One source of evidence for the complicated interaction between the built and natural, writes archivist Gwen Granados in the issue’s final essay, is the National Archives regional centers in Riverside, California, and Denver, Colorado. Seeking records of the National Park Service’s management of such national monuments as Canyon de Chelly, Casa Grande Ruins, and Chiricahua? Or those pertaining to the national forests and grasslands that the U.S. Forest Service stewards, from the Kaibab National Forest in the north to the Coronado in the south? The National Archives has them. Other records there detail the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation across the state. A federal repository, by definition, contains information developed by federal agencies; it is therefore incomplete and partial. Its top-down perspective will offer little in the way of bottom-up counternarratives—such as those that emerged in response to federally funded highways bulldozing through disem-powered communities; or references to grassroots organizations mobilizing against controversial land-management decisions; or Indigenous resistance to encroachments on their sovereignty. Archives can obscure, deflect, even silence.¹²

Yet they can also clarify, direct, and give voice to those rarely heard. That is one result of their publicness—they are open and accessible (even more so when they have been digitized and posted online).¹³ Containing living records, these repositories— much like the articles in this special issue—help document decisions that individuals or organizations made at a particular time for a particular set of reasons, and as such are crucial as starting points. That makes the archived correspondence, broadsides, pamphlets, judicial proceedings, and blueprints heuristic texts. And whether they are read with or against the grain; whether interpreted for what they reveal, elide, or ignore, they offer historians opportunities to ask questions we had not known to raise, to craft stories we had not known we could tell.