Phoenix Isn’t Doomed to Evaporate Into the Blistering Solar

The Valley

What was absent to me from George Packer’s current article on Phoenix and Maricopa County was any dialogue of Tucson and Pima County, barely 100 miles south. As political entities go, these two neighbors couldn’t be extra completely different: There is just one single Republican throughout each the Tucson Metropolis Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, for example, and attitudes towards water and immigration differ considerably. Grass and water options are uncommon, and Pima County, which really borders Mexico, suffers from much less vitriol with respect to immigration. The Phoenix-versus-Tucson divide shouldn’t be the one and even one of the best instance of America’s divisions, however it’s actually one price exploring given the proximate geography concerned. I’d like to learn a follow-up.

Bruce Skolnik
Tucson, Ariz.

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George Packer’s exhaustive investigation of Arizona and its water constraints lacked a vital aspect: the position of innovation in marshaling water assets in ever smarter methods. As new houses are constructed, Phoenix and the encircling areas have an opportunity to make use of new kinds of water-efficient home equipment, backyard designs, and swimming swimming pools. These might show pivotal in addressing the state’s water disaster.

The 37,000-acre Teravalis venture that Packer mentions gives a living proof. Teravalis will embrace infrastructure to seize rain for reuse, a plant to deal with the group’s wastewater and reuse it for public areas, water-usage displays, leak detectors, and stringent garden necessities to encourage pure landscapes that don’t want irrigation. All home equipment might be extra environment friendly than what’s now generally present in Arizona and across the nation. In all, the event has dedicated to decreasing water consumption by as a lot as 35 p.c in contrast with present requirements.

In contemplating Arizona’s future, the water information doesn’t need to be gloomy. Israel has had a fast-growing inhabitants for greater than 75 years in a water-constrained area. Due to an array of latest applied sciences and sensible insurance policies, folks there reside water-rich lives no completely different from these of individuals in New York or London—and this may be Arizona’s future too.

There may be water in Arizona—a lot of it. What has been lacking is the ingenuity to make use of it for optimum affect. Moderately than run from improvement in Arizona, let’s see the state as a laboratory for different locations which can be, or quickly might be, going through the identical constraints.

Seth M. Siegel
New York, N.Y.

Though there’s a lot to commend about George Packer’s in depth story on Phoenix and what town’s dysfunction can educate us about the way forward for America, he makes a mistake that so many guests and transplants make when discussing town: shopping for into its founding mythology. Packer opens his article by writing, “Nobody is aware of why the Hohokam Indians vanished,” earlier than describing how within the 1860s, white settlers found the irrigation canals left behind by the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples and determined to repurpose them, naming their city as a nod to “a misplaced civilization within the Valley.”

This founding fantasy has been repeated advert nauseam for properly over a century, regardless of it by no means having a lot of a relationship to historic reality. The O’odham peoples of southern Arizona declare to be immediately descended from the Hohokam (the identify is a corruption of the O’odham phrase for “ancestor”). One of many earliest American guests to the area, a U.S. Military lieutenant named Nathaniel Michler, was amazed by the farms of the Akimel O’odham he noticed across the Gila River, writing that they have been extra refined “than something we had seen since leaving the Atlantic States” and included plots of “cotton, sugar, peas, wheat, and corn.” This was in 1855, practically twenty years earlier than Phoenix was based simply 20 miles to the north.

By framing his inquiry with the ahistorical notion of Phoenix as a metropolis born from the ashes of an inexplicably vanished folks, Packer permits the reader to think about it as an inherently ephemeral place, doomed to evaporate into the blistering solar. A extra edifying method would have been to have interaction with the complete scope of Arizona’s historical past and deal with the truth that folks have discovered methods to reside and thrive within the Sonoran Desert for millennia. Absolutely these generations upon generations of authentic Arizonans have classes to show us, if solely we might carry ourselves to pay attention.

Kyle Paoletta
Cambridge, Mass.

I like the detachment and empathy with which George Packer engages the principal characters of “The Valley.” At 77, although, I’m not as able to such empathy towards the MAGA tribe, particularly those that create their very own messes with their self-destructive values and decisions. “That was our civilization down within the Valley, the one one we had,” Packer concludes. “Higher for it to be there than gone.” Actually? Is the madness of Phoenix what we now have to sit up for? I hope not.

Carl Flowers
Olympia, Wash.

George Packer’s considerate article asks a standard query: Why do folks reside in Arizona?

I’ve lived right here for nearly two years now, and I can affirm his reporting. The state is absurd, costly, and, in so some ways, fully untenable. As Packer notes, the politics are dangerous, the water is drying out, and unhoused folks usually have nowhere to go. When the thermostat registers greater than 110 levels for 31 days in a row, life will get fairly bleak. So why can we reside right here?

I don’t faux to know why anybody does something. However sometimes, after I go by means of the elements of city the place strip malls give strategy to rusted fences, this buzzing begins. And when you’ve been out right here lengthy sufficient, you understand that it by no means actually stops. In the event you pay attention fastidiously, you may hear it within the mountains, reverberating someplace between nightfall and twilight. Sure—this place has a pulse, in the event you listen.

I felt it as soon as on the backside of the Grand Canyon, that sedimentary cathedral, the place, as I gazed upward, sweaty and sporting the incorrect sneakers, the one thought that occurred to this lifelong agnostic was I perceive why folks pray.

I by no means wish to depart.

Kallen Dimitroff
Phoenix, Ariz.

George Packer replies:

Even with 25,000 phrases, it wasn’t doable to say every thing that must be stated concerning the Valley. It wasn’t doable to inform the story of the area for the reason that fifteenth century, although the disappearance of the Hohokam stays an essential historic thriller. (I did discover area to say their connection to the Tohono O’odham Nation and Gila River Indian Group.) Tucson and Pima County deserve a report of their very own, however my assigned goal lay north of them. I wished to make room for the testimony of Trump supporters—nearly half the inhabitants—even when we didn’t agree. As for the way forward for the area, its contradictions, and its attract, these are topics on which everybody I met had robust private views.

Behind the Cowl

For our cowl picture, the illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visible language of outdated Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to painting a circus wagon on its ominous method to a defiled Capitol. One thing Depraved This Method Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a specific inspiration; it’s the story of Mr. Darkish, who grifts strangers into becoming a member of his malevolent carnival. Over the course of The Atlantic’s 167-year historical past, solely very not often have we printed a canopy with out a headline or typography. The imagery speaks for itself.

Backstory

“The Anti–Rock Star,” by Stephen Metcalf, options an ink-line portrait of Leonard Cohen made by Bono, who additionally drew the cowl of our June 2023 difficulty. Bono instructed us about celebrating Cohen’s 79th birthday with him at a Los Angeles restaurant. On the dinner, Bono requested Cohen if he had plans for his eightieth. “Oh sure—severe plans,” Bono recollects Cohen answering. “I’ve not been smoking for 23 years, and there’s a cigarette maker off Jermyn Avenue in London who has a means with Virginia Gold tobacco. A single handmade cigarette might be my delight.” Bono stated he couldn’t make Cohen’s eightieth, “however I’m shamefully proud to say I despatched him a extremely polished silver cigarette field.”

Corrections

“The Valley” (July/August) misstated the quantity of water held within the Salt River Venture’s lakes. The lakes maintain greater than 650 billion gallons of water, not 650 trillion gallons. “The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson” (September) misstated how Stevenson traversed Panama in 1868.

This text seems within the October 2024 print version with the headline “The Commons.” The print model of this text said that the duvet of this difficulty is likely to be the primary in The Atlantic’s historical past bearing no headline or typography. A reader has since directed us to the December 1954 cowl, a seasonal illustration by Frederick Banbery bearing no headline or typography (however that includes a number of high hats). Banbery had made an analogous cowl for the December 1953 difficulty.