“For so many Americans, it is only in recent years that the climate has begun to be understood as a hostile force. To them, I say: Welcome," writes Kyle Paoletta in the opening pages of his new book, “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest.”
Paoletta grew up in New Mexico. When he moved to the east coast for college, he found himself constantly having to justify why people live in the southwest. The intensity of the heat, the harshness of the living conditions — why would anyone choose that?
In the course of defending his home turf, Paoletta found himself making the case that, thanks to climate change and a dwindling water supply, pretty soon, a lot of Americans are going to find themselves living in harsh conditions, whether they want to or not. But Paoletta says that’s not necessarily a reason to panic.
Paoletta joined The Show to discuss how, for millennia, the southwest has been an ongoing experiment, an ever-evolving human experiment in surviving — and even thriving.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: For millennia, Kyle Paoletta told me, the Southwest has been an ongoing experiment, an ever evolving human quest to survive and even thrive.
KYLE PAOLETTA: One of the questions that I was really trying to answer in the book is one that I've had since I was a teenager in Albuquerque. Why is Phoenix so big? Why is Phoenix so much bigger than Albuquerque? And I, I think my answer to that is in Arizona and in southern Nevada, it was actually possible to create a society out of whole cloth. They could just begin developing the city as they wanted it to be.
And then in the years after World War II, of course, there's the attraction of all these aerospace companies, technology companies, and they were able to offer these visiting executives, you know, this kind of fantastical vision of life in the Southwest.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but the timing of this, I think, is also important, right? Because this period, particularly post World War II, was a period when there was this attempt to kind of re-establish the notion of American cultural might and the ability not just to to be anywhere and to exist anywhere, but to do it up to this imagined. Standard of what American life was and and as you write, when white Americans founded First Phoenix and then Las Vegas, the plans became baroque. Mere presence was no longer sufficient. No, with sufficient drive, the desert was a place where one could remake their entire life around the pursuit of permanent leisure.
PAOLETTA: Yeah, yeah, I think there is, I, I one thing that I write about. In the book is this idea of the Southwest syndrome, which I take from a study that was published in 1990 called The Sun Belt Syndrome, where basically, these researchers from Michigan and New York were trying to understand why so many people were moving to states like Arizona, California, Texas, Florida. And they kind of identify this emphasis on leisure, personal pleasure, a de-emphasis of family, churchgoing, these sort of supposedly traditional values.
And I think I, I kind of try to refine that for just the Southwest, where there is this kind of strange effect where the extremity of the environment provokes kind of some delusions of grandiosity or some some real desire to, to, you know, look out on that infinite horizon and feel it.
DINGMAN: Right, well, and this gets to the heart of your goal with this book, right? You're, you're arguing that the future of life everywhere in the United States is gonna look a lot like the way it looks here in the Southwest for better or for worse.
PAOLETTA: Yeah, I think that's a good way to frame it. Recently I was working on a story and this was right after Governor Hobbs had issued the quote unquote moratorium on new development that relies on groundwater, and I was talking to a real estate agent in Buckeye and she just like didn't understand that there was a problem. Like there is a limited amount of groundwater and the scientists believe that you will go through it in the next 100 years.
Like, so I do think there is still for many people and certainly people who are in the real estate industry in unwillingness to engage. I live in Boston now and here we had a a really brutal drought the past couple months, and there were, you know, small reservoirs that were beginning to go dry, and there are all of these communities in New England that still pump groundwater because, you know, it snows a lot, it rains, usually you can kind of draw down your groundwater supply and it will be replenished, but it became clear that there's no kind of backup plan.
These are the issues that the Southwest has been contending with forever, and the rest of the country is going to be contending with them more and more as the 21st century wears on.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, what is something that is maybe being done a bit more thoughtfully that you see as a model for a perhaps less deleterious future.
PAOLETTA: Actually, I would look at Las Vegas, which, contrary to its reputation, is the most efficient water user in the country. They recycle about 40% of all the water they take out of Lake Mead, and that has allowed greater Las Vegas to double in population without using any more water than they did in the 1990s. So I think that's one of the few examples I've seen of, what, you know, climate scientists called decoupling this idea of trying to have growth without using more and more resources.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but what a, what a refreshingly benevolent take on that old hack line, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. If you think about that in a water context, it's like, hey, that's actually kind of a good thing.
PAOLETTA: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, we want, we want as much water to stay in Vegas as possible.
DINGMAN: So in, in closing, Kyle, there's a really lovely sequence in the book. Again, this is towards the beginning, but, you talk about Tucson's mission garden, and you call it, again, to quote you one more time, “a model of mutual respect and ecological sensitivity.” Can you expand on that a little bit? Like, do you see the mission garden as kind of a microcosm of what the future could and and maybe should look like?
PAOLETTA: Yeah, yeah, I was really struck when I visited there because for folks who haven't been in the Mission garden that's it's basically arranged so that there's a different garden plot for each of the peoples who have lived in the Tucson Basin. So going back to ancestral Indigenous people, there's an autumn plot, there's a kind of Spanish colonial, a Mexican plot, and then also more contemporary plots that represent the African-American community, the Chinese immigrant community.
And it's just this, it's a really striking experience to see all of these different cultures, to see how they do agriculture in this place that's supposedly so hostile, and we're only getting more diverse and we're also only facing more challenges from the climate.
So I do think there is a real need for, you know, the many different peoples who make up the Southwest to to have that solidarity, to have that sense of common purpose, and, you know, figure out how do we live in this place together rather than point fingers, blame someone, and, you know, look elsewhere, look for someone else to solve our problems.