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PAUL HIRT, ANNIE GUSTAFSON, KELLI L. LARSON
the mirage in the
VALLEY OF THE SUN
ABSTRACT
The Valley of the Sun, a booming metropolitan region of 3.7 million people in a desert that gets seven inches of annual rainfall, has enjoyed an oasis lifestyle during the twentieth century, supported by government-funded reclamation projects and water pumped from aquifers deep underground. Following World War II, groundwater depletion accelerated rapidly, threatening the sustainability of that Sunbelt boom. The state of Arizona, with prodding from the federal government, passed the Arizona Groundwater Management Act of 1980 designed to end groundwater overdraft by 2025. Initially considered a progressive statute, the law has been systematically weakened over the past twenty-five years, increasing water insecurity and delaying necessary conservation and growth control measures.
| WALK ACROSS A DESERT VALLEY in the mid-day sun and you may see a familiar mirage: a lake shimmering in the distance. Even though you know surface water in this parched landscape is scarce, you wonder if it might be real, your hopes increasing with the degree of your thirst. Inevitably, you arrive at the location to find nothing wet in sight. On the far horizon, though, another lake glistens through the desert heat....1 |
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Current water politics in rapidly growing desert cities of the U.S. Southwest resemble chasing this kind of mirage. Exploding with subdivisions and shopping malls and golf courses, creating artificial oases all around them, these desert cities and their citizens, urban planners, political leaders, real estate developers, and public opinion-molders all see a hopeful vision of water on the horizon, even though the natural landscape they are transforming is unrelentingly dry. Carrying a load of water they managed to acquire over the years, these cities grow into an uncertain future, believing that when they need more of the wet stuff they will find it. They have faith that the shimmer on the distant horizon will be real water, not a mirage. But Sunbelt cities in the arid Southwest increasingly find themselves in the position of the hiker with a half-empty water bottle arriving at the imagined oasis only to find desert. |
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This most feared scarcity—running dry—has dominated resource politics in the West for the past 150 years and continues to profoundly shape the politics and economics of the region today. Cities with millions of inhabitants now depend on overallocated and vulnerable fresh water supplies. This challenge to sustainability is unprecedented in scope and scale. Never before have water supplies in the arid West been so severely strained with the potential to affect so many people. Arizona is particularly vulnerable, especially its rapidly growing urban areas. Our focus in this essay is the urban region in central Arizona's Sonoran desert dubbed the "Valley of the Sun," a Chamber of Commerce moniker that includes Phoenix and twenty-four adjacent rapidly growing towns and cities spreading inexorably across the desert like ink spilled on porous paper.2 Commonly, people within and beyond the region refer to the whole megalopolis by the name of its capital city: Phoenix. An icon for Sunbelt demographic growth, Arizona held the record for the fastest growing state in 2006, and Phoenix supplanted Philadelphia as the nation's fifth most populous city.3 Every year since 2000, more than 100,000 people have moved to the Valley of the Sun. Three million people called this place home at the start of the new millennium with six million people expected by 2025.4 |
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