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political Ecology of a Desert State 399 18 ThE pOLITICAL ECOLOgy OF A DESERT STATE In 1976, Arizona business leaders commissioned Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute to peer into its crystal ball and divine Arizona’s future. The institute’s report, entitled Arizona Tomorrow, called Arizona “the development prototype for post-industrial society.” During the nineteenth century, many people perceived Arizona as a desert wasteland on the route to California, hot, parched, and desolate. But in the second half of the twentieth century, the state had managed to redefine “the very term desert.” Desert, Arizona style, now meant “an appealing landscape, an attractive place to live, and a new kind of adult playground.” According to Arizona Tomorrow, “Desert living with air conditioning , water fountains, swimming pools—getting back to nature with a motorized houseboat on Lake Powell (itself a man-made lake), and going for an ocean swim in a man-made ocean are all contemporary examples of the marriage between life-style and technology.” It was a futuristic vision of paradise in an arid land, with technology the handmaiden of lifestyle, and the old extractive order banished by the economic miracle of the Great Transition. Rust Belt industrialism had given way to Sunbelt postindustrialism. There were no undocumented Mexican workers living in citrus groves and drinking from irrigation canals, no striking copper miners forced to take minimum-wage jobs, no unemployed Indians hauling uranium-contaminated water in the beds of old pickup trucks. Instead, everyone was a young, upwardly mobile urban professional with plenty of leisure time to pursue Arizona’s beguiling pleasures. Water images permeated this Xanadu. Redefining the desert meant pouring massive amounts of water onto it. A water-rich desert was an oxymoron futurists and their developer patrons promoted without a trace of irony. Whether the water was used for the old extractive purposes or for creating this bright, new playworld, the vision assumed an endless flow. It also presupposed plenty of cheap energy to run the air conditioners, fill the swimming pools, power the houseboats, and keep the manmade waves cresting. Water 400 arizona and energy were just two sides of the same coin—the currency that bankrolled the postwar boom and made the down payment on the postindustrial future. One without the other was inconceivable and unusable. Gravity caused runoff from the Rockies to surge down the Colorado River and rainfall from thousands of years of desert storms to percolate through the alluvium to create underground aquifers. Whether with pumps, canals, or dams, Arizona history has been one long reversal of gravity. In the modern West, water flows uphill toward money. Cheap energy makes that astonishing feat of legerdemain possible. It also gives us the illusion that we have freed ourselves from most environmental constraints. We are living at a time when the relationships between that fundamental cultural dichotomy—culture and nature—are increasingly ambiguous. For most of human history, nature was a collection of forces to be propitiated and feared. Two centuries ago, however, the relationship began to change as western industrial civilization harnessed steam, electricity, fossil fuels, and vaccines. People boasted about triumphing over nature as distances shrank and the terrifying threats of flood, drought, and pestilence diminished. In the words of Arizona Tomorrow, we have transformed the desert into an “adult playground,” vanquishing heat, aridity, and all the other ancient constraints on endless growth. Or so we think. “Just as our own lives continue to be embedded in a web of natural relationships, nothing in nature remains untouched by the web of human relationships that constitute our common history,” historian William Cronon observes. And as the old Earth First! bumper sticker proclaimed, “Nature Bats Last.” Nature has a way of slipping through our consciousness and control in novel and unexpected ways. Intentionally or unintentionally, people have shaped vegetation, animal populations, and disease environments from pre-Columbian times to the present. Now we are changing global climate patterns as well. Sometimes those changes benefit human beings; at other times they unleash new plagues. Africanization of the Sonoran Desert A good example is what ecologist Tony Burgess calls the “Africanization of the Sonoran Desert.” Ever since the collision of the Old World and the New beginning in 1492, exotic species of plants and animals from Europe, Asia, and Africa have invaded ecosystems across the Americas. But the pace has accelerated in the past century. Before World War II, about 190 of Arizona’s 3,200 plant species were exotics; by the 1980s, that...

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