ROCKY MOUNTAIN LAND USE GROK

The Ashes of Phoenix

By David Frey, 4-19-07

Could the future of Phoenix lie in its past?

In the current edition of High Country News, writer Craig Childs explores the ancient civilization of the Hohokam, who disappeared from the desert landscape before the first Anglo settlers arrived. Even their name, a Pima word meaning “all used up,” gives a hint to the fate of a culture that disappeared. It left behind empty adobe ruins, Childs writes, and a new city to rise from its ashes.

“Growing faster than any other population center in the nation, Phoenix is balanced on an environmental tightrope,” he writes. “Thirty new skyscrapers are proposed for downtown alone, while metastatic sprawl carves up surrounding desert. At the moment, there is a robust water supply — for greater Phoenix alone — but the city’s water-wealth has created a growing inequity in the state. Even while Phoenix has become Arizona’s solitary Green Zone, depending almost entirely on water imported from mountain reservoirs and the Colorado River, it is having its own problems, whole pieces of land subsiding into falling water tables. Phoenix seems either on the verge of unparalleled success or catastrophic failure. At this point, it might be hard to tell the difference between the two.

“This is not the first time unchecked growth has filled the Valley of the Sun. If you lift the rug of Phoenix, buried directly below you will find the remains of an ancient city, a Neolithic version of Phoenix. The first communities appeared in the low basin of the Salt River 3,000 years ago, as shown by remains recently discovered under the new Phoenix Convention Center. From there, prehistoric settlements took an escalating course of empire, filling the basin to overflowing. They sprawled all the way south to Tucson, while satellite communities appeared even north of Flagstaff. They grew until they were no longer able to sustain themselves. Then, their civilization fell.”

It’s nail-biting time in Telluride, Colo. The town has been engaged in a Herculean effort to scrape together $24.5 million by May 14 to snatch up the Valley Floor through condemnation. The vast swath of open space is in the hands of developers, who have been engaged in a battle over the value of the prized piece of landscape. The verdict: it’s worth $50 million if the town wants to take it from them.

A month shy of the deadline, the fund-raising campaign is $2.4 million short. So close but yet so far.

Still, the Telluride Town Council is poising itself to move forward. It has unanimously approved a “Moral Obligation Resolution,” writes the Telluride Watch, a document needed before it can issue $20 million in bonds.

Plans to dump nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain have suffered a setback. The Walker River Paiute Tribe has withdrawn its cooperation to allow a railroad route to the site through its reservation. The tribal council has passed a resolution removing the tribe from an environmental impact study that included nuclear shipments by rail through the reservation. The tribe has faced growing opposition from its members and from nearby communities, writes the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“The tribe will not allow nuclear waste to be transported on rail through our reservation,” says tribal Chairwoman Genia Williams.

The decision doesn’t, well, derail the project. It just takes one possible rail line off the table, leaving officials probably focusing on the longer, costlier corridor from the town of Caliente. Still, Yucca Mountain critics were pleased. Sen. Harry Reid, D, is among them.

“There are better ways to strengthen the economy in Nevada’s rural and tribal communities, like investing in renewable energy sources, which alone could create more than 3,300 Nevada jobs,” Reid said.  “The Tribe’s decision is yet another blow to this (Yucca) project, which is on its last legs.”

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.