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Social Liberation: A Good Place for Water Refugees By Doctress Neutopia November 2022
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman
“Water is the messenger that’s delivering the bad news about climate change to your city, to your front door.” - Jay Famiglietti, Executive Direction of the Global Institute for Water Security
Abstract
Doctress Neutopia investigates the water crisis of the Colorado River Basin. Her quest is to know the wisest action a southwesterner should take with the water level moving into a “dead pool.” Her investigation into the river called the American Nile touches on the history of the overallotment of river water, climate change, river diversions, dams, irrigated agriculture, hydro electrical power, cooling water for nuclear reactors, urban development, and restoration efforts to bring life back to the Colorado River Delta. She concludes by looking at the pattern of urban development that has caused capitalist megacities such as Los Angles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and her home of Tucson, Arizona to rise out of the desert and become some of the most unsustainable cities in America. Examining possible solutions to the crisis, her focus is on meeting the mega crisis by building a federal test site for a prototype car-free, net-zero arcology (ecological architecture) as a new model for climate adaptation and mitigation that thrives within the river's planetary boundaries.
The report “CNN: Duluth is becoming a safe haven for climate refugees” (Ramerez) starts by interviewing an elderly woman who lives in California. As the western state dries up, she doesn’t feel safe in our house after living through several fire seasons. She is looking for a safer place to live. Where can she, or anyone, go for climate refuge?
The report “CNN: Duluth is becoming a safe haven for climate refugees” (Ramerez) starts by interviewing an elderly woman who lives in California. As the western state dries up, she doesn’t feel safe in our house after living through several fire seasons. She is looking for a safer place to live. Where can she, or anyone, go for climate refuge?
The report focuses on the Minnesota city of Duluth in the Midwest on Lake Superior. It’s been dubbed a haven for climate refugees. Professor Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptive architect, has an entire lecture on YouTube in which he describes why Duluth is a climate change
Not everyone is thrilled about Duluth being a refuge. An interviewee asks what will happen to Duluth’s infrastructure and way of life if 50 to 100 thousand people flee there? Only 100,000 climate refugees? The number seems rather low to me if you think of the whole region of the Southwest drying up and running out of water and hydroelectric power. In a CNN report, The Southwest’s unchecked thirst for Colorado River Water could prove devasting upstream,[ii] posted on June 18th, 2022, reporter Bill Weir points out that the Southwest is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years. The reality is that if the water crisis gets even worse, westerners will need to start looking for a new home. Unlike the fast-moving crisis of wildfires in California and Arizona, the water crisis is a slow-moving ecological disaster that took a century to reach the critical point we are now approaching. It’s not unthinkable to imagine the collapse of the Colorado River ecosystem.
So where do 40 million Southwesterners who rely on the Colorado River water and the underground water table go when water no longer flows from their taps? Should we escapees go to the Eastern Seaboard where rain is not a problem? It might not be the best place to retreat since coastal habitats will be lost as sea levels rise due to the melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice. Residents of Eastern megalopolises such as Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. could have difficulty finding their own climate refuge. Heading up to the Great Lake States might be their best bet too. Here we come, Duluth!
Can you imagine good, Midwestern Christians opening their hearts to climate refugees and their extra rooms in their houses for not 50,000 climate refugees but millions of desperate Americans? I can almost see the exhausted climate refugees. They have just arrived from a long bus ride across the county to Duluth, lying down for a rest on the newly cut grass outside a suburban middle-class home, waiting for that kind-hearted, Jesus-loving homeowner to say, “Welcome! Come in!”
Now let's get real. The more likely image is that homeowners with guns shout, “Get off my property! Get off, or I will shoot!” The national guard rounds up climate refugees and puts them into Third World-type refugee camps with First World surveillance technologies.
Hurricane Katrina and the Superdome
Images of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans still haunt my memory. I reflect on the people who had cars and drove out of town after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation before the storm hit landfall. Thousands and thousands of cars were on the highway in a contraflow after officials opened all lanes to one-way traffic out of town. Anyone with the means (a private car) and good sense left town. But an estimated 112,000 who didn’t have access to a car couldn’t leave because they didn’t have transportation. Then there were those too sick, poor, or old to leave. Or maybe they were in a position where they were obligated to stay, such as Doug Thornton, the Louisiana Superdome general manager, and his skeleton crew.
The Superdome became a “shelter of last resort” – a polite term for hellhole – for those who couldn’t evacuate from the catastrophic devastation of the category 5 hurricane. History.com reports on Hurricane Katrina, “Yet the government–particularly the federal government–seemed unprepared for the disaster. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took days to establish operations in New Orleans, and even then did not seem to have a sound plan of action.” (History.com Hurricane Katrina) The population of the evacuees of the Superdome swelled to 30,000 people before the doors were locked. People locked out of the Superdome, desperate for water, food, and shelter, resorted to breaking into the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center complex, only to find more chaos. Attempting to leave New Orleans, refugees walk over the Crescent City Connection bridge to the suburb of Gretna, only to be forced to turn back after being confronted by police officers with shotguns.
Journalist Nate Scott describes what was going on inside the Superdome. He writes, “But inside the Superdome, things were deteriorating rapidly. Temperatures had reached the upper 80s, and the punctured dome at once allowed humidity in and trapped it there. Food rotted inside the hundreds of refrigerators and freezers spread throughout the building; the stench was inescapable. In the restrooms, every toilet had ceased to function. The water pumps had failed, and without water pumps to the elevated building, they couldn’t maintain water pressure. Every sink was broken.” (Scott 2015)
Anarchy took over as the situation worsened, and the managers struggled to keep the electrical generators on. The crisis broke down into racial gangs, girls were raped, and food and water were stolen. On our TV screens, news reports showed people stuck in the Superdome crying for help, thirsty for clean drinking water. Their need to be evacuated from the hot and humid Superdome was apparent to all TV viewers. Those who watched from the safety of our homes experienced indirect trauma; those inside the trauma were living through hell, waiting for the government to rescue them for days until buses finally arrived to relocate the refugees.
In June 2006, the Army Corp of Engineers published a 6,000-page report stating that they were largely responsible for the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina. The report said the failure was due to outdated and flawed engineering practices used to build them. The engineers had predicted the levee would not withstand a Category 5 hurricane, but nothing was done to protect the people living in the flood zone if such an intense hurricane hit New Orleans. Why do humans develop the power of scientific foresight when we don’t act on it?
After Hurricane Katrina, the federal government spent $14 billion upgrading the levees, floodwalls, and floodgates to protect New Orleans and the southern suburbs of Lake Pontchartrain. More protection is being built to save residents from flooding who live outside the 130-mile surge barrier. But as Marcie Jacob Hebert, an evacuee whose New Orleans suburban LaPlace house was flooded during Hurricane Ida stated, “I’m glad they’re building us a levee, but I worry about what happens to the next group further to the west. The water has got to go somewhere. We can’t just keep funneling it from person to person, place to place.” (Associated Press 2021)
Katrina became (and still is) our collective nightmare. Hurricane Katrina has been called the greatest disaster in U.S. history, destroying or compromising over 800,000 housing units. Thousands were left homeless. FEMA trailers eventually housed 114,000 households. Homeowners with flood insurance had the means to build back. Others were not so fortunate.
Could Hurricane Katrina only be the first disaster of this magnitude that had the power to destroy an entire city? As the Southwest dries up, aren’t we facing an environmental catastrophe affecting an entire Colorado River basin bioregion? Is the planet ramping up its defense against humans from the scale of a city like New Orleans to threatening an entire bioregion like the Southwest?
Then summer of 2022, there was a flood on the other side of the world, in Pakistan, which displaced 33 million people whose houses, bridges and roads were flooded, affecting a third of the country and killing more than 1,000 people, half of whom were children. The flood was called a “climate catastrophe” when huge IMF- and World Bank-funded dams and barrages couldn’t hold back the monsoon deluge. In a revealing article, journalist Amy Goodman says, “according to the Global Climate Risk Index last year, Pakistan ranked eighth among countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, despite contributing less than 1% to the global carbon emissions.” In the same article, Pakistani artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto calls on the International Monetary Fund to “cancel debts and commit to climate reparations.” (Democracy Now 2022) Furthermore, inspecting the damage of the Pakistan flood, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pleaded, “Emissions are rising as people die in floods and famines. And this is insanity. This is collective suicide. From Pakistan, I am issuing a global appeal: Stop the madness; end the war with nature; invest in renewable energy now.” (Democracy Now September 12, 2022)
Megadrought in the American Southwest
Back to the other extreme weather: the worst drought in more than 1,000 years, a millennial drought.
I remembered one Earth Day, perhaps in 2017. Jonathan Overpeck, a university professor, awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with Al Gore for work on climate change, showed Powerpoint slides of the science behind the drying up of the Colorado River basin. He pointed out that the Southwest was the region of the US experiencing the most significant rise in temperatures due to global warming. Phoenix, the fifth most populated city in the US, has been called the epicenter of climate change in the US because it is changing so fast.
Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Ian James concurs with Dr. Overpeck’s conclusion. He cites a paper published in Nature, “Rapid intensification of the emerging southwestern North American megadrought in 2020-2021,” whose head researcher was A. Park Williams. James writes, “The researchers found the current drought wouldn’t be nearly as severe without global warming. They estimated that 42% of the drought’s severity is attributable to higher temperatures caused by greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere.” (James 2022)
Overpeck then told the Earth Day audience his futurist scenario of what could happen. As the Colorado River continues to dry up and its water is rationed, property values will fall as the water crisis takes on more urgency. It doesn’t take much imagination to see what will happen when the Colorado River descends to 895 ft and reaches “dead pool” level, which means there will not enough water to make electricity or for the flow of water to run to Arizona for most of the year. As prices for water and electricity skyrocket, people will begin to sell their houses and leave. At some point, the property loses value as a mass exodus out of the Southwest becomes a “dead zone.” Even though insurance companies offer flood insurance, there is no such thing as drought insurance. The American economy moves towards a failed nation-state when people lose their houses and their life savings.
The only assurance Arizona gives that homes will not go dry is the Groundwater Management Act (GMA) that the 1980 Arizona legislature passed, which created five “active management areas.” These areas include less than a quarter of the state’s land mass but nearly 75% of Arizona’s populated areas. The law means that developers must prove to the State that their proposed new developments have an assured water supply to cover 100 years.
Water managers hoped that GMA would encourage sustainable development that would protect water sources for the future. To circumvent the law, instead of building housing subdivisions of hundreds of houses that require GMA permits, developers have been building “many small, scattered groups of houses, so-called wildcat developments.” Jeremy Miller reports in “Inherit the Dust,” that “this tactic has allowed developers to evade the 100-year water requirements of the Groundwater Management Act. Since those rules apply only to homes built in subdivisions.” (Miller 2022)
Outside the five “Active Management Areas” (AMAS) created through the GMA, in rural Arizona, water mining goes unregulated unless the local government decides it is occurring in an AMAS area. Groundwater can be pumped without metering. Corporate agricultural giants moved into Arizona’s rural areas to take advantage of the free water supplies. For example, a Saudi Arabian agricultural firm, Fondomonte, rented a 3,500-acre plot of state-owned land to grow alfalfa for export to feed cattle. In an article titled “Saudi Firm has pumped Arizona groundwater for years without paying. Time to pony up,” Bruce Babbitt (governor of Arizona from 1978-1987) and Robert Land (State Land Commissioner from 1982-1987) tell the story of the groundwater under Butler Valley, west of Phoenix.
In 1982, the director of the Department of Water Resources, Wes Steiner, proposed that the State of Arizona buy Butler Valley for its groundwater which could be used as a backup water source since it was close to the Central Arizona Project canal. The State officials worked with the federal Bureau of Land Management to place the land in state ownership managed by the State Land Department. An AZCentral report exposed how in 2015, Fondomonte leased Bulter Valley land west of Phoenix for an annual fee of $25 per acre. The lease allowed for unlimited groundwater pumping, free of charge.
To rectify the travesty, Babbitt and Lane write, “What should be done to clean up this scandal? First, they write, the current governor, Doug Ducey should instruct the State Land Department to void the lease and restore Butler Valley to its intended use as a groundwater reserve for the future. Second, Gov. Ducey should instruct the attorney general to collect past due rentals of about $38 million to be held in trust for the benefit of Arizona school children.” (Babbitt 2022)
The sad fact is that even if Fondomonte were to pay the State of Arizona $38 million, the water they have pumped from the underground aquifer for cattle crops would be gone. How pertinent is this Cree Indian prophecy “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish been caught, the last stream poisoned, will you realize that you cannot eat money.” (Goodreads) We cannot drink money either. Generally, a person can survive three days without water. After that time, water needed to maintain the internal temperature balance can’t keep cells alive.
Another water-sucking industry with deep wells that have taken over rural Arizona is dairy farming. They use unrenewable groundwater wells for cows to drink and to grow cattle-feed crops. Because of the mild climate and favorable conditions to grow cattle-feed crops such as alfalfa, grass, and corn silage, giant cow industry corporations have settled into parts of rural Arizona to take advantage of no laws restricting the water pumped from the acquirers.
One such mega dairy industry company, Minnesota-based Riverview LLP, has moved its dairy, beef, and cattle-feed crops operations to 25 facilities across five western states: Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Arizona. Like California farmers who have moved to Arizona to take advanced of no regulations on groundwater mining to grow water-intensive crops like pecans and pistachios, dairy cows need lots of water, so they drill deeper wells as neighboring smaller farms’ wells dry up.
Journalist Tony Davis finished his article “Mega-dairies, disappearing wells, and Arizona’s deepening water crisis” by writing, “The fact that they are taking water from the bottom, it’s like taking water with straws from a bucket,” says Uhlman. [Kristine Uhlman, a retired University of Arizona hydrologist] “If you’re going to the bottom, you will have water till it’s empty. The people who have shorter straws are lost.” The law of the wild west, corporations with the money to drill the deepest wells get the water. (Davis 2021)
Water experts see that Arizona’s aquifers are threatened. Lawmakers struggle to pass reasonable water policies and laws restricting groundwater mining so that our collective water sources will be around for future generations. One such effort is Regina Cobb’s 2021 bill, HB 2679, Rural Management Areas (RMAS), which comprises rural groundwater conservation concepts Not all Arizonan politicians support water metering.
When the Bureau of Reclamation declared a “Tier 1” water shortage for the first time on the Colorado River, executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, Jay Famiglietti, said in an interview with journalist Abrahm Lustgarten, “Arizona had to cut nearly 20% of its Colorado River Water. To placate the farmers, the deal was that they could have free access to the groundwater. Around $20 million was allocated to help them dig more wells. So, it was just a direct transfer from surface water to groundwater.” (Lustgarten 2021)
The Bureau of Reclamation demands that states cut up to 40% of their allotments to save the river. The federal government will enact laws if the states don’t make the cuts voluntary. Famiglietti recommends that the United States create a National Water and Food Agency to manage the crisis on a national level because what the water crisis means farming will be impossible for California and Arizona.
Where to go?
Dr. Overpeck told the Earth Day audience not to worry because he still had a house in Tucson.
Several years pass. I heard Dr. Overpeck was no longer a professor at the University of Arizona. He moved from Arizona to the Great Lakes state of Michigan. With this news, I began experiencing major eco-anxiety, waking up at 3 A.M. with panic attacks caused by water insecurity. Thoughts like these pounded in my head, “Overpeck left! He knows more than I do. Why did he leave? Is this not the sign to get out of Dodge now?”
I found Overpeck’s email address, where he was teaching at the University of Michigan, and asked why he left. He wrote me back and said he left for several reasons. The first reason is that he got an academic position at the University of Michigan. The second reason was that, in his opinion, the Colorado River was being mismanaged. The desert is getting hotter. So, climate change was one of the reasons he left. He could see the writing on the wall.
Parts of the Southwest could become uninhabitable. Climate migration was already happening in AZ as animals and people were seeking to live in places of higher elevation to escape the heat. Real estate prices reflected this move as most people have become priced out of owning and renting a property in Northern Arizona, where the higher elevation keeps the weather cooler.
Pat Mulroy, who was called a “water czar,” retired from her job with the Southern Nevada Authority. She was responsible for making water deals with other states so Las Vegas could continue growing and light up the night with its casino madness. She was interviewed in a CBS News report, “Study finds 42% of megadrought in the West is due to human-caused climate change: “Worst-case scenario keeps getting worst.” [J.T.U.S,1.1]Looking at the “bathtub rings” around Lake Mead, she says in the video that we’ve reached a “tipping point, an existential issue for Arizona, California, and Nevada. It’s a river system and water supply that cannot fail.” (CBS 2022)
The Southern Nevada Water Authority offers rebates for homeowners who remove grass and restore desert landscaping in a $189 million rebate program, “cash-for-grass.” It’s only legal to water one’s landscape on certain days. Still, even with conservation measures, Lake Mead and Lake Powell’s water levels continue to drop as the desert heats up with months of over one hundred degrees weather, and demand for more air conditioning continues to rise.
Reports from around the world about rivers and lakes drying up fill the news of Summer 2022 with shots of drying river and lake beds along the Danube, the Rhine, the Yangtze, the Po, the Loire, the Aral Sea, Lake Poopo, Lake Chad, etc. It’s not just an existential issue for Arizona, California, and Nevada. The world is going through an existential crisis as the human population reaches 8 billion, with everyone needing safe drinking water to live. The water facts are “3% of the earth’s water is fresh,” and “2.5 of the earth’s fresh water is unavailable: locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and the soil; highly polluted, or lies too far under the earth’s surface to be extracted at an affordable cost” which means only “0.5% of the earth’s water is available fresh water.” (Bureau of Reclamation 2020)
Capitalist Fantasy: Unlimited growth model
It seems clear that capitalism, with its unsustainable infinite growth ideology, is the wrong approach to maintaining life on Earth. However, capitalistic, profit-motivated politicians call for innovation, such as building ocean desalination plants or building pipelines to move water from the Mississippi River to the Southwest or seeding clouds in the Rockies with silver iodide to produce rain, or incentivizing conservation with toilet-to-tap schemes or drilling deeper groundwater wells, all in hopes of saving business as usual so that the exploitation of resources and go on indefinitely, which is a true delusional fantasy that denies the factual universe.
For example, in the Ag Policy Blog: “Drought-Stricken West Looks to Mississippi River to Solve Water Woes,” editor Chris Clayton informs readers that "The Bureau of Reclamation did a thorough study of the idea of pumping Mississippi River water to Arizona in 2012, concluding that the project would cost $14 billion (in 2012 dollars) and take 30 years to complete. As recently as 2021, the Arizona state legislature urged Congress to fund a technological and feasibility study of a diversion dam and pipeline scheme to harvest floodwater from the Mississippi River to replenish the Colorado River." (Clayton 2022)
The Mississippi River is also experiencing record drought and low water levels that are causing a supply chain crisis since barge traffic on the river is halted by the low water levels.
Also proposed are desalination plants that require intensive energy use and produce a toxic byproduct—brine. One idea is to build a desalination plant on the Gulf of California and pipe the filtered water over the border in a Central Arizona Project-like aqueduct system. Another option is for Arizona to put money towards constructing a desalination plant for Mexico to use that desalted water in exchange for the Mexican allotment of Colorado River water. Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, and Governor Claudia Pavlovich of Mexico’s Sonora state have agreed to look for a potential site. The downside of desalination is that plants are energy intensive and create a brine; that is, salty water heavier than seawater.
There are ways to mitigate brine that results in 70 to 55% of intake flow. Since it is much denser than seawater, once it flows out of the outflow pipe, it creates a “plume effect,” creating a layer of very salty brine that sinks to the sea floor. Because of its higher density, it is harmful to marine life. An article in Sciencing.com explains that the organisms “most commonly affected by brine and chemical discharge from desalination plants are plankton and phytoplankton, which for the base of all marine life by forming the base of the food chain.” Also certain are the negative consequences of the “impingement” and “entrainment” of sucking seawater into the desalination plant that “trap and kill animals, plants and eggs, many of which belong to endangered species.” (Ackerman 2018)
To avoid the plume effect, the outflow pipe can be designed to reach out to a strong ocean current which will then release the brine into the current to mix, diffuse and dilute the plume. NPR report by Alex Hager, “States dependent on Colorado River wonder if desalination could help the water supply,” concludes with Sharon Megal, a water policy researcher at the University of Arizona, says that desalination plants are not a solution to the crisis on the Colorado River. She states that the agricultural sector uses nearly 80% of the river’s water. Paying farmers and ranchers to stop growing will free up the water needed to continue the river’s flow. However, Hager says that building desalination plants takes planning and time to build, and it would be a good idea to add desalinated water to Arizona’s portfolio.
An innovative way to deal with brine is to build masonry bricks from desalination waste. Architectural students at the Bauhaus Universitat Weimar are experimenting with making a porcelain-like construction material that can be a constructive use of brine rather than piping back out into the sea. These bricks can interlock with each other, so cement mortar is not necessary. The bricks can carry as much weight as conventional bricks without using “emission-intensive materials.”
“California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought” reports Daniel Trotta in a Reuters article on May 13, 2022. The proposal to build a $1.4 billion desalination plant was rejected based on its destruction of marine life, its low-lying location that could be affected by sea level rise, and that it would mean higher prices for water that would be difficult for low-income people to pay. The plant would have made 50 million gallons of drinking water daily, enough for 400,000 people. Environmentalists opposing the project said the “plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.” (Trotta 2022) Another criticism of desalination is that energy-intensive energy would require more use of fossil fuels at a time when we desperately need to reach a zero-carbon society.
California’s Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest desalination plant in the US, opened in December 2015 to provide San Diego with drinking water. It can produce 50 million gallons of fresh water daily, about one-tenth of the water supply in the county. Colorado River supplied around 68 percent of San Diego’s drinking water in 2020.
Instead of more pipelines and desalination plants, Robert Glennon, a water policy expert at the University of Arizona, says the disaster could be diverted by stopping growing fields of water-intensive crops such as alfalfa grown to feed cattle. The facts are that “cattle are the number one agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. Each year, a single cow will belch about 220 pounds of methane, which is shorter lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere, said Mitloehner, a professor and air quality specialist.” (Quinton 2019) The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reports that “livestock produces 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities.” (Mitloehner 2018) By metering groundwater mining and forcing the cutback of the cattle industry in Arizona would help scale back on greenhouse gas emissions and water use.
Unsustainable Growth or Controlled Degrowth
Mulroy reveals her forever growth capitalist perspective in Abrahm Lustgarten’s, 2015 ProPublica’s article published in Scientific American’s “Vegas Water Chief Preached Conservation While Gambling on Growth.” Mulroy states, “We live in a free country where people can move wherever they want. I can build a de-salter. I can cause more conservation. I can’t slow growth and manage growth. I’m not going to waste a lot of time trying to create something that stands in exact contradiction to an ever-exploding human population.” (Lustgarten 2015)
Water managers such as Mulroy decoupled water and economic growth so unrestrained growth in the Southwest could go on until the day the river crashed. As the elevation of Lake Mead dropped, the first intake pipe of Lake Mead constructed in 1971 was too high up to withdraw water. In 2005, desperate to suck out the last remaining water of Lake Mead, where Las Vegas gets 90% of its water, another intake pipe was built, referred to as the “Third Straw.” It allows Southern Nevada to “extract water from the lake at water levels as low as 1,000 feet above sea level.” (Arthur Michael and Demian Saffer) Now, with the receding reservoir, bodies of the murder victims are surfacing along with sunken boats and landing vessels from World War II. Gregory Natural Bridge, once under Lake Powell, has now emerged.
For Mulroy, infinite economic growth and the expansion of cities means civilization can continue down the road of so-called progress indefinitely. With a new water source flowing into Arizona, for example, Phoenix in 1950 was a large town with a population of 100,000 residents. Today it is the fifth largest city in the United States, sprawling 15,000 square miles and growing into a desert megalopolis of 4.9 million residents. Phoenix and its neighboring communities top the list for the number of residential swimming pools, with 37% of homes having them and 200 golf courses.
Phoenix’s growth was also made possible by air conditioning. As summer temperatures reach dangerously high levels, air conditioning makes rising temperatures outside bearable inside homes and businesses. In some parts of the world, rising temperatures are making it impossible to survive without AC, so human rights activists call for leaders to make access to AC a human right as necessary as clean drinking water. Unfortunately, poor people who can’t afford access to AC or jet airplane rides are not the ones responsible for greenhouse emissions, but they suffer the most from extreme weather conditions.
Running air conditioning is energy intensive which means burning more greenhouse gases or using more nuclear fuel rods. We are in the age when positive feedback loops accelerate the global heat trap effect. The more people require AC to maintain their health, and carbon-intensive energy sources such as coal continue to run the AC, the hotter it will get. Jason Woods, a senior research engineer at National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said, “According to Woods and his colleagues, air conditioning is responsible for the equivalent of 1,950 million tons of carbon dioxide released annually or 3.94 of this figure, 531 million tons arise from the energy expended to control the temperature, 599 million tons from removing humidity and the rest from leakage of global-warming-causing refrigerants and emissions during the manufacturing and transport of the air conditioning equipment.” (Ionescu 2022) Water from the bottom of the lake is not as clean, requiring more filtration to make it drinkable, which requires more energy use.
Outside of metropolitan Phoenix, the largest nuclear power plant in the US, the Paolo Verde Generating Station, was built to help bring electricity to the exploding housing developments in Arizona’s desert. It’s the only nuclear plant that wasn’t constructed beside a significant body of water. Each of its three reactors requires “20,000 gallons of water per minute.” Most of the water in the nuclear power process comes in from 36 miles of pipe, pumping effluent water from Phoenix’s 91st Avenue wastewater treatment facility and Tolleson’s facility.
By 2040, Phoenix is expected to grow by 2.1 million people at its current growth rate. New housing developments are seeking permits like the project Douglas Ranch in Buckeye, Arizona. The master planners call it responsible, sustainable development that is building “city of the future” with “100,000 homes, 300,000 residents and 55 million square feet of commercial development.” The Howard Hughes Corporation announced, “Douglas Ranch is located off the future home of the I- 11 interstate which has received Congressional approval and is projected to create $30 to $60 billion of economic impact in the region. I-11 will connect Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Southern California, and eventually establish a new trade route between Canada and Mexico by way of Idaho, Arizona and Nevada.” (Dion 2021)
Broadacre City
The model of housing development that shaped the West has been called the American Dream: the single-family house and a car. Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright had an architectural laboratory in Scottdale, Arizona, named “Taliesin West,” where he spent winters. In the 1920s, Wright worked on this theory for the salvation of America; his utopian vision, Broadacre City, a new American city, would be designed around the mobility of the automobile, the highway system, and new communication technologies. The car meant the city could be decentralized to create a democratic foundation for the American Republic. His utopia responded to the influential thinkers of his day, such as pragmatist William James, John Dewey, economists Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, and John Commons. With mega projects such as the Hoover Dam and the taming of the Colorado river underway, there was reclaimed land to make his vision possible.
In Wright’s view, Broadacre City allowed space for the process of democracy, not only as a form of government but also as a way of living. Unlike the old cities of high density and social hierarchies of unearned privilege, Broadacre city gives freedom for the individual to own one’s home with an acre of land to grow food and own a business. The idea was to cut out commuting time so that more time could be spent with family and professional careers at home. In contrast to corporate ownership and old aristocratic urban power centers of traditional cities, Broadacre City would be designed for a community scale, moderate-cost housing governed by public ownership of common utilities such as power, transportation, and money. Commercial and manufacturing buildings would also support life in the city. Much attention was given to the transportation system with separate lanes for cars, trucks, and a monorail in the center, explains one of his apprentices, Cornelia Brierly. Warehouses were built underneath roads so trucks could unload cargo to be distributed locally by smaller trucks.
The importance of individual freedom to pursue dreams and steward the land was the essence of Broadacre City. Wright said, “The American citizen must abandon his favorite expedients—especially the idea that money plus authority can rule the world. He must realize that ideas inspired by spiri¬tual integrity will make the modern world.” (Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation 2017) Wright’s attempt to build spiritual integrity within the built environment where the city was “everywhere and nowhere” clearly led to urban sprawl it’s dependent on the fossil fuel industrial society and in Arizona, to CAP water.
Hydraulic Reckoning
Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter Director Sandy Bahr said, “A moment of hydraulic reckoning has come for Arizona and its largest metropolitan area. But even as a new era of water scarcity looms over the state, local leaders continue to preach the gospel of endless growth. No one even mentions that Arizona might have a water problem, because admitting that would be bad for business.” (Miller 2022)
Even with water reckoning on the horizon, residents of the upper basin states who, in the past, have not taken their full allotment of Colorado River water want it now. There are new pipe diversion plans, such as Utah’s proposal to pipe Lake Powell water roughly 140 miles to St. George, Utah. Since the 1990s, Washington County Water District (WCWCD) has been pursuing the “Lake Powell Pipeline” to run from Lake Powell to Sand Hollow Reservoir to solve the problem of insufficient water for St. George’s growing population. The water diversion would support 150,000 households. Even though with water allotment cuts, in The Spectrum article, “St. George is not going to get their pipeline: Some look at Utah amid Colorado River cuts,” Joan Meiners reports, “According to the WCWCD and the Utah Division of Water Resources' website, Utah is entitled to "23% of 7.5 million acre-feet of the water appropriated to the Upper Basin states," which is more than the state currently withdraws from the Colorado River.” (Meiners 2021)
The State of Colorado is also planning two new water storage projects to capture Colorado River water to serve the rapid growth of the Front Range. The projects are Northern Water’s Chimney Hollow Reservoir west of Berthoud and, in Western Boulder County, Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion, which is planned to service 320,000 new homes. According to Water Education Colorado, Denver Water serves about 1.5 million people and is projected to grow by 1 million by 2040.
Environmentalists question the wisdom of making new storage reservoirs when the Bureau of Reclamation has declared a river emergency because of the climate-induced megadrought. Save the Colorado’s director Gary Wockner said, “These two projects will further drain and destroy the Colorado River at the exact moment the system is collapsing.” (Emmer 2022) When we see the water shrinking, isn’t it common sense not to make new divisions and reservoirs on the Colorado River? As one writer noted, you don’t need to be a futurist to see what is happening with the Colorado River!
As the water in the reservoirs continues to sink, The Bureau of Reclamation is ready to declare emergency cuts to save the river system, reports LA writer Ian James in “As Water Crisis worsens on the Colorado River, an urgent call for the Western States to “act now.” Calling for states to scale back diversions, assistant Interior Department’s assistant secretary for water and science, “We are facing the growing reality that water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry and cities are no longer stable due to climate change.” Wanting the region to avoid “chaotic response” she is seeking collective action. (James Jun 2020)
How much longer will the agency be able to release 500,000 acre-feet of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream from Glen Canyon Dam like it did summer of 2022 so that it will be able to continue producing energy that keeps the lights on for thousands of homes? James’s article points out the danger of engineering problems with the dam once water levels reach historic lows. The White House, Remarks by President Biden on Hurricane Ian Response and Recovery Efforts” said October 5, 2022, “And the reservoirs out west are down to almost zero. We’re in a situation where the Colorado River looks more like a stream.” (Biden 2022) Extreme weather events are threatening not only our national security but civilization itself.
Colorado River Delta
Water managers have total control over America's “hardest working river” flow and have worked it to the point of exhaustion. The Morelos Dam on the border of the United States and Mexico for decades has stopped the river from reaching the great river’s delta at the Sea of Cortez. Instead, it diverts the river through canals to feed irrigated agricultural land on both sides of the border.
Filmmaker Brian McNeece’s “The Early History of Water in the Imperial Valley” tells the story of how the Colorado River Delta, the Imperial Valley on the California side of the international border, and Mexicali on the Mexican side became central agricultural lands providing 80% of the US’s winter crops. In 1900, the area was a desert known as devil’s pass. But in other geological times, it was determined that the desert had been the site of a massive lake created by years when large snowfalls upstream created floods on the Colorado River’s delta. The soil was fertile because of the layers and layers of dirt and silt deposited from the river.
Visionaries, investors, and engineers such as irrigationist George Chaffey and developer Charles Rockwood began to see that magnificent agricultural land could be cultivated by diverting the Colorado River to its ancient dry riverbed of the Imperial Valley. Work began to make these visions possible. With the completion of the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal, the irrigated agricultural fields provided greater food security for Americans. The All-American channel also brought water to nine cities in California.
The law of the river, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, was an interstate agreement between seven river states, Arizona, California, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah Arizona refused to sign the Compact until a Supreme Court ruling in 1963 determined that the Gila River, a Tributary of the Colorado River, could not count against Arizona's allocation the way California suggested. Even though California was lobbying against the Central Arizona Project (CAP), Arizona preceded to seek congressional authorization to build CAP so that Arizona’s water allotment could flow through a 336-mile concrete canal to the metropolitan areas of Phoenix, Tucson, and the agricultural fields of Pinal Country in between the two cities.
CAP was finally authorized after Arizona agreed to give California water priority during shortages. Arizona could move ahead with building the federally financed CAP’s aqueduct. Construction began in 1973, and water reached its terminus 14 miles from Tucson in 1992. In 1996, Arizona began taking its total apportionment of 2.8 million acre-feet to put into water banks for use in times of water shortage.
Since the Colorado River crossed an international border into Mexico on its way into the Delta, Mexico was not included in the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) oversees the 1944 Mexican Water Treaty signed by Mexico and the United States. It agreed to deliver “1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico on an annual basis,” Amendments are added when conflicts arise called “Minutes.” (Water Education Foundation)
The water reaches the Morelos Dam between Los Algodones and Yuma, Arizona; it is diverted to Mexicali Valley farmland and to supply the Mexican cities of Mexicali, Tecate, and Tijuana.
For decades after the Hoover Dam system was built, the Colorado River stopped flowing to its natural floodplain and wetlands, the Gulf of California. Before the dam and the diversions, the Delta was a place the giant watershed’s delta expanded across 9,650 square miles. What an oasis for plant and animal refuge surrounding the desert it was! It consisted of woodland, wetlands, water habitat, and complex ecological habitats.
In the 1990s, environmental groups from both sides of the border became interested in “restoration ecology” of the delta to regain the river's environmental health. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) devised plans to use water transfers and market forces to bring back water flows. In 2014, a five-year restoration pilot program was agreed to between the US, Mexico, and NGOs to release a base flow total of 52,696 acre-free of water through the Morelos Dam to keep water in the delta’s canals year-round for riparian vegetation.
In the spring of 2014, one percent of an estimated natural spring flow of the Colorado River was released from Morelos Dam to mimic nature called a “pulse flow.” The water went down the desiccated riverbed for eight weeks until the freshwater reached the sea at the Gulf of California eight weeks later. It was a momentous occasion. Since 1960, the river has not consistently reached the sea. The ecological experiment proves that the Colorado River Delta could be restored as a riparian area.
Since then, a “base pulse” has been released annually, so that surface water remains alive in the riverbed. The wetlands have long been an important wildlife refuge. An Environmental Defense Fund article on the Raise the River Campaign writes, “Even happier is the conservation community that first put the pulse flow in motion more than 10 years ago. They stand by, watching and celebrating each development as the delta shows more signs of life.” (Clay 2014)
The pulse flow is an example of giving legal rights to nature—the river—and the multi-species that depend on it for its drinking source. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) is an alliance of organizations struggling to bring such a focus into policy. The Rights of Nature policy recognizes that the river's health is a top priority since the river’s health is the foundation of healthy bodies and our economy.[i]
[i] Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN). https://www.garn.org/rights-of-nature/
A Grand Vision
How did we reach this state of the crash of a great river system?
The West was conquered through an ideology of “manifest destiny,” a phrase coined in 1845. It believed that it was God’s will for the United States to expand across the continent to spread capitalism, democracy, and white supremacy.
A vehicle for manifest destiny and the opening of the American Wester was the railroad. The federal government gave railroad companies land grants—millions of acres of public lands to ensure they had land to lay their tracks and have a way for them to finance the construction of their transcontinental railroads. To pay back their federal debts, railroad companies needed to sell land to farmers and settlers who saw an economic opportunity to move west. Tapping into the river and irrigating desert land led to explosive growth, with barren desert land being reclaimed.
From my research into the Colorado River water crisis, it seems apparent that the water was over-allocated from the start and consequently unsustainable from the start. Some call the 100-year miscalculation of the Colorado River Compact “bad math” done by the early hydrologists of the Bureau of Reclamation, who disregarded inconvenient science about the river's inability to support large desert populations.
Unrestrained capitalist growth is still part of the driving engine toward the watershed precipice. As the once mighty Colorado River water becomes a stream to a possible Lake Mead “dead pool,” it seems as though we are approaching Day Zero, the day when the taps are dry and water rationing begins.
Should we hold the Bureau of Reclamation responsible for the loss and damage the miscalculation has caused? Loss and damage are terms used within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) to refer to loss and damages that occurred because of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change.
Other vital questions include: How much have we overshot the water resource? Under the current development and agricultural patterns, what is the river's carrying capacity? How much more capitalistic growth can the river take before it crashes? Is it time to degrow the human population of the Southwest to save the Colorado River system? Can we develop a new model of housing and agriculture that can create a sustainable type of civilization that has not been done before?
As the essay has explained, we are not only discussing a water crisis because it involves a nexus of water, food, energy, housing, explosive human population growth, and climate change. It seems apparent that the crisis concerns our relationship with nature and how we define ourselves.
What is the best strategy to address the multi-layered crisis? Should we scrap the 100-year-old Colorado River Compact and work with the actual math that addresses the current water flow projected for a globally warmed world? Is it time to see the river not as a commodity for human consumption but as a living organism that we must co-create with to survive?
Jay Famiglietti, Executive Direction of the Global Institute for Water Security, “Water is the messenger that’s delivering the bad news about climate change to your city, to your front door.” (Lustgarten 2021) Around the world, we witness carbon emissions changing the hydrological cycles that have moved us into new territory--—unstable climate deterioration.
Interior Department Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, Tanya Trujillo, said, regarding the 20% decline of water in the Colorado River since the year 2000, “We are facing the growing reality that water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry, and cities are no longer stable due to climate change.” The Department of Interior is working with states to scale back diversions and imposing unilaterally cutbacks in water allocations. She continues, “Our collective goal is to be able to very quickly identify and implement strategies that will stabilize and rebuild the system so that we don’t find ourselves constantly on the brink of a crisis.” (James 2022)
How we respond to our new reality will determine the quality of our lives on Earth. So what collective strategy do we need to save the river’s ecosystem?
Gary Pitzer has an article on the Water Education Foundation’s website, “Can A Grand Vision Solve the Colorado River’s Challenges? Or Will Incremental Change offer Best Hope for Success?”. He explains the two strategies: “Should stakeholders pursue a visionary “grand bargain” to wrap their arms around the host of challenges facing the Colorado River? Or is an incremental approach – solving the puzzle piece by piece instead of the whole puzzle at once – the best path toward getting disparate stakeholders to reach a consensus?”(Pitzer 2019)
Bruce Babbitt, Interior Secretary under President Clinton, stated that we need a new regulatory framework to manage the river. He said that the 1922 Colorado River Compact should be adapted to the real water flow numbers and for less water flowing into the river due to climate change. He said, “The compact will have to be adjusted to say, at some point, further river declines due to drought much be shared equitably across both basins in a kind of proportionate basis.” (James, May 2022)
Existential Crisis
An existential crisis—questioning the meaning and purpose of life—can arise from a negative situation, such as the threat of nuclear war or abrupt climate change. Witnessing the collapse of ecosystems worldwide, civilization faces an existential crisis that threatens our existence and the existence of all the other species that rely on the same hydraulic system.
History shows us that humans don’t react to slow-moving threats that are perceived in the future. If water comes out of our taps and toilets have enough water to flush, people keep smiling, dancing along the oblivious road of business as usual. After hearing YouTube lecture “ADHD Model: How Normal Self-Control Develops,” by clinical psychologist Dr. Russel Barkley, I realized that humanity suffers from massive attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Rather than focusing our attention, social media distracts us from issues that need to be addressed.
Dr. Barkley says that for us to heal from an ADHD disorder, we must first be able to stop impulsive behavior. COVID-19 got humanity to slow down, shelter in place, and stop many behaviors that cause our climate crisis, such as air travel or commuting to work or school. Only essential businesses remained open. People became more thoughtful about travel plans. Unnecessary trips were cut down. As a result, our air became cleaner as our CO2 emissions decreased. But with the reopening of the industrial consumer economy, it didn’t take long for business-as-usual to bounce back.
The single-minded focus we experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns has been lost as we respond to distractions and irrelevant events. The lack of leadership to use COVID-19 as a moment of opportunity to stop and retool the economy along ecocity guidelines to curb climate change failed to happen. The seduction we faced was that if things could go back to normal, no profound changes in our consumptive lifestyle were necessary.
Barkley explains that people who have ADHD can’t stop and reflect to gain hindsight on the consequences of their behaviors. For adults with ADHD, the concept of time is the temporal now. They are unable to delayed gratification to achieve an anticipated future. The executive function of a brain is to develop through the various steps to finally achieve the powers of concentration to problem-solve, make plans, and execute them.
The purpose of our frontal lobe is to act as a social organ—to manage our collective intelligence—so that we can come together in the spirit of cooperation to move us beyond the global crisis. We look back in time to look ahead, just like how climate science uses tree ring studies to determine that there have been megadroughts in the Southwest. Scientific hindsight gives us foresight into what needs to be done now. Still, even without all our hindsight, we haven’t been able to stop the destruction and reorganize ourselves to live in balance with nature.
Rather than using reason, science, and future studies to carve a way forward through good governmental policy and by a paradigm shift in the way we build and design cities to embrace a new image of the good life, the subconscious programming of the primitive brain reacts through the “fight or flight, freeze or fawn” response documented in trauma research. If we look at climate change as a visible form of collective trauma, we can list these responses to trauma as follows:
a. Fight = water wars.
b. Flight = climate refugees.
c. Freeze = political stalemates and paralysis.
d. Fawn = public officials lying about the facts to appease the public and gain votes.
Living unsustainably by exhausting natural resources and destroying biosphere integrity is the basis for collective trauma that perils life on Earth. We must evolve and mature from our primordial and unconscious trauma responses to climate change to use our neocortex for problem-solving to move us beyond the environmental crisis. Such a response demands that we think of new ways to overcome ancient problems causing us to live in an unsustainable civilization.
The United Nations Climate Action website reads, “Transitioning to a net-zero world is one of humankind's greatest challenges. It calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, consume, and move about.” Another section of the website continues, “Climate change, unlike many other issues, requires a wholesale transformation of our economies and societies. No corner will go untouched – energy, industry, agriculture, transport, institutions, individuals and more will need to make changes to reduce emissions and adapt to climate consequences that are already happening.” (United Nations Climate Action, All About NDCS)
Let me add that it is also about transitioning out of unsustainable cities. According to UN Habitat, “cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy and produce more than 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions,” even though they take up 2 percent of the Earth’s surface. The IPCC report stated that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would “require rapid and far-reaching transitions in uses of energy, land, urban and infrastructure (including transport and buildings), and industrial systems.” (UN Climate Action Cities Pollution)
The United Nations Climate Action website states that “net-zero commitments must be backed by credible action.” The site explains that in 2015 Paris Agreement, nations pledged to cut greenhouse gases to limit gas increases to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. These volunteer pledges are called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). They aim to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050. But the commitments made by the 193 Parties to the Paris Agreement are insufficient, leading to an “almost 11% increase of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.” (United Nations Climate Action “For a Livable climate”) The Global Carbon Project (GCP) confirmed we are off target. “Total CO2 emissions remain high at a projected 40.6 billion tons of CO2 (GtCO2) in 2022, with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to tackle climate change. If current emissions levels persist, there is a 50% change that warming of 1.5 degrees C will be exceeded in 9 years.” (Global Carbon Project)
Net zero requires nations to follow through with their pledges by cutting emissions close to zero. The remaining emissions are re-absorbed by natural systems such as forests and the ocean. Net neutrality is a similar term, only on a smaller scale. Businesses and individuals cut back emissions and “offsetting” emissions by investing in such projects as ecosystem management, forest preservation, sustainable agriculture, and renewable energy.
Since the Paris Agreement had no mechanism to force nations to follow their pledges, emissions are still rising. COP 27 failed to get governments and transnational corporations to promise to phase down fossil fuel use. Not only has the human population reached 8 billion, but the demand for resource consumption is rising. Even though the Paris Agreement targeted emissions well below 2 degrees, unable to enforce pledges, the world is headed for 2.7 degrees of warming by 2100. Such a temperature rise would be catastrophic, perhaps wiping out 65% of insect populations by the next century. The extinction of insect populations is devasting to human society since they assist with pollinating fruits, vegetables, and flowers. They also help with pest control and decompose organic matter decomposition.
Humanity is failing to meet the “race to zero” deadline. We find ourselves at a crossroads, a moment when we must integrate the present crisis through a whole-systems approach to managing the planet’s hydrosphere. Indeed, it is time to reimage our lives to move from a climate crisis to global climate management. It requires a leap in imagination to develop a radically better blueprint for collective development that sees the Colorado River as a whole system that flows to the Gulf of California with rights.
Off-world designs on Earth
Our reality is this: we need a deep-rooted change in our water policies, water economics, water practices, and how we build civilization if we want to survive. Will we wait until the water crisis becomes tangible to do anything to save the river? The only way to manage a watershed is through the sustainability of a balance of supply and demand; in order words, you don’t take out more water than the river brings in. Unsustainably, the overshot of natural resources and an over-allotment of a river is a death sentence to the Southwest. The water crisis is partly a result of rising temperatures due to our CO2 emissions, so if our goal is to save our river, we must build a zero-carbon civilization as quickly as possible.
Phoenix, Arizona, has been dubbed one of the most unstainable cities in the United States. Even so, future population growth trends predict that the “Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler metro area in Arizona is projected to grow from 5,021,500 in 2022 to 8,398,600 in 2060. The 67.3% projected population growth in the metro area is the 17th highest of all 384 U.S. metro areas.” (Stebbins 2022)
Why not use this growth projection to build a radically better design for civilization’s expansion, a truly 21st Century ecocity design called an “arcology,” a design that considers the new water reality for the Southwest as an example for the rest of the world? It’s a compact, car-free design that uses science and technology to create social liberation through a 21st Century model of democratic corporations and AI-assisted governance structures that support the arcology.
Such an architectural revolution has built-in sustainable practices, which means not retrofitting old blueprints of a fossil fuel-based culture. It is an evolutionary civilization founded upon values and economics that thrives on living in balance with nature. The infrastructure of an arcology is designed to be sustainable. It is not an afterthought. It prepares us to live in off-world habitats by incorporating a circular economy into its conception.
Within an arcology, balance with nature is achieved through steady-state “donut” or circular economics rather than the clash that results when an unrealistic capitalistic growth model bumps up against the reality of living in a finite-resourced world. Like children's growth into adults, the rationale is that growth leads to maturity. Once an organism reaches maturity, growth turns inward, taking care of what has been grown. The word “sustainable” stems from the Greek word “prosecho” which means to take care and notice. We mature from a growth economy to a caring economy that moves into its mature stage. We begin to take care of everyone and all living things bringing about a world based on justice and equality for all. We move our attention inwardly to explore the human psyche to find a way to live peacefully with nature and each other.
Once a prototype has been successfully demonstrated both on the physical engineering and biological levels and on the human cooperation and governance level, a network of arcologies throughout the US and the world could be built in record time using space age 3D printing and robotic labor. Peacemaker Marilyn King calls us to “speed shift” into a seven-generation mindset. Not only is an arcology a lovolution in habitat and political space, but it also radically changes how we do industrial agriculture that grows monocrops with petrochemical fertilizers, deep tilling, herbicides, and pesticides that eventually ruin the soil. As we witness, much of the world’s topsoil has been lost. Healthy microorganisms and mycelium that sequester carbon from the atmosphere are dying as we head toward planetary collapse. Ed Muller explains the agricultural crisis in Humanity Rising Day 578: COP 27 III: Regenerative Agricultural as Key to Stopping Global Warming.
Perhaps we need a new name for a regenerative new agricultural technique within the arcology framework, “arcoculture.” Arcoculture provides farm-to-table local foods. No need for food refrigeration shipping food supplies thousands of miles from where they were harvested. Like living on Mars, farming becomes permaculture and forest gardens underneath protected domes to shield crops from the heat of a globally warmed world. The advantage of clinical and robotic farming is that no herbicides and pesticides are required making food tastier, healthier, and safer for farm workers to manage.
We can apply the wisdom of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes to our uses of space technologies necessary for colonizing new worlds, “That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.” As humanity prepares to ascend into outer space in search of habitable worlds, we must use this knowledge to build back better on Earth. NASA’s strategy is to follow the water, whereas our strategy needs to be to take care of the water. As above, so below, meaning to live on Mars, we need airtight arcologies. To know how to build sustainably on Earth, we need that science and technology to descend on Earth to build open-air arcologies.
In Dr. Robert MacNeil Christie’s newsletter, Look Up, he says, “Survivors of existential threats recognize the need to act differently and shift their paradigms (basic assumptions about the lived-in-world) to reflect the new conditions of an emergency; victims do not.” (Christie 2022) We have reached a teleological end point of one paradigm. The world's major religions have prophecies about such times in their millennium myths. One such prophecy in the Old Testament’s story of Noah’s ark. Obeying God’s command, Noah followed God’s instructions and built an ark to protect his family and the world's animals before the rain began.
In our updated 21st Century millennium story, God is science. The legacy carbon heating our world is threatening life on Earth. Our arks are arcologies needed to protect and shelter us from floods, droughts, and other extreme weather events. If we move into a hothouse Earth, living in closed-resource loops within arcologies might be our only refuge in surviving a hostile environment, just like on Mars. We must build arcologies before climate change disrupts food supplies and supply chains, in other words, before climate chaos destroys our unstainable civilization. If such an end-time event were to happen, there would be no time left to restructure our social organizations into a net zero world in any reasonable phase-out of fossil fuels matter.
The water crisis indicates the bankruptcy of the current idea system that controls the American Empire and global capitalism. To move into a new paradigm, we need a different set of democratic values represented through architectural design helps us make an ontological shift in who we are and what we do with life, the move from controlling nature to working with nature. Consider it a climate endgame where we must reinvent the vision of the good life in a low-intensity carbon culture where the mysteries of the mind and our place in the cosmos are the focus of our lives. Such a change is not superficial. It’s a cultural and architectural shift equivalent to when the glaciers receded, and homo sapiens migrated out of the caves to begin building settlements and planting crops. Climate change was the evolutionary driver then, just like now, forcing us to change our way of life to adapt to a changing environment.
I, for one, am ready and willing to experiment with life in an urban laboratory arcology to create new social organizations that support the liberation of humanity now. My hunch is that I am not alone in the desire to live in 21st Century structures that take full advantage of the wonders of AI and our global communication networks. It’s time to call in pioneers with the same ecological spiritual longing as I do so that together we can be part of an ever-expanding human race headed to the stars with wisdom in our hearts.
How can we transition to a net-zero future in time?
Ecocide is a form of slow mass suicide, which is what we are carrying out. Thanatos, the God of Death, can be seen between the numbers of massive defense budgets when the real struggle we face is our imbalance with Gaia, the earth systems science that runs our life support systems. Saving the Colorado River is linked with building a net-zero future and reclaiming peace with the environment. Decarbonization is also decolonization, a new order of things that allows for rewilding and for natural resources to be managed and distributed wisely.
The arcology theory needs to become part of high-level discussions at international climate conferences such as the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP). I can imagine the President of the United States at a COP. On the world stage, projecting on giant theater screens, Madame President unveils a blueprint of a car-free, zero-carbon arcology. She explains a few concepts of arcology’s biomimicry, circular economy, and revolutionary AI infrastructure. Other slides illustrate food forests, edible permaculture gardens, and vertical farming inside arcology, moving beyond traditional agriculture that has depleted the soil and the underground water tables. Surrounding arcology wilderness begins to take over what was asphalt wastelands of suburban sprawl with the goal of half the Earth returning to nature so that biodiversity can heal.
To make a new American dream possible, she declares a national emergency. Faced with catastrophic climate change, she invokes the International Emergency Economic Powers Act or the IEEPA. She explains how it is within the powers of the presidency to “declare a national emergency “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, foreign policy or the economy that “has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States” (Goitein 2019). She says that the shutdown of nonessential business and international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic was a test run for us to learn how to clean up our atmosphere and move forward into a regenerative worldview.
The President’s contingency plan builds a bridge between the 20th Century and the 21st Century by radically scaling back fossil fuel use in our current cities by increasing public transportation and deploying military forces to construct solar arrays and wind power wherever possible to feed into a transnational world energy grid envisioned by the American genius Buckminister Fuller. Initiating universal basic income for all people in the United States gives people the resource to stay at home, lower carbon emissions, take part in “agrihoods” (community gardens), and voluntarily join online Gaia Production Teams needed to restructure every sector of society. You can think of universal basic income as the cornerstone of universal love, the bases for an ecological spirituality needed for climate governance to succeed, giving everyone the means to become a climate activist. It’s a blue and green new deal, cleaning up the water and the earth.
We live in an Internet-connected world where lightning-speed communication can cause rapid societal mobilization. Section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934 authorizes the president to “assume control over U.S. internet traffic.” Madame President’s plan is not to control the distractions of internet traffic, but to advance a new creative purpose for the internet, a platform to mobilize us to build a network of arcologies on Earth and in Outer Space. Information technologies allow for new forms of direct digital democracy as citizen advisory councils form with the goal of building local regenerative economies as a bridge to our supreme goal, to build a network of net-zero arcologies.
To fulfill its commitment to reaching the Paris Climate Accords pledges, the United States must be committed to building a great new public works megaproject, a net-zero arcology for one million people, which is as challenging as building a moon base, orbital habitat, and space infrastructure, currently being conducted. She explains how in the past, great public works have united America by building the railroad and highway systems across the Northern American continent.
The Hoover Dam was a public works project that became not only the symbol of the modern West by the psyche of the pioneering American spirit that settled the West. It created America’s largest reservoir that is now in deep trouble with Lake Mead and Lake Powell at record low levels because of the millennial megadrought, anthropogenic climate change, and the human mistake of taking out more water than was coming into the Colorado River Basin. We must stop the denial of the dark American history of what settler colonialism did to the indigenous peoples through genocide, removal, and exclusion policies. The time demands that we initiate a just transition to phase out fossil fuels and their brutal and thoughtless legacy.
Constructing a national megaproject as a new American symbol requires all research universities to combine brain power in a global emergency response to save our future. All sectors of society will be activated to work within the arcology framework by enacting the Defense Production Act. Using these presidential powers to manifest the architectural vision, the backing of transnational industries manifests innovative robotic technologies and 21 Century construction forces needed to construct evolutionary designs to meet the Paris Agreement deadline.
Epilogue
At the time of writing this (November 2022), I am 66 years old. For the past 23 years, I’ve lived in Arizona. For 22 years in the Southwest, I was oblivious to where my water came from. When I first moved to the desert to live in Paolo Soleri’s urban laboratory, Arcosanti, I thought it was odd that there was no significant conservation effort. After moving to Tucson two years later, people used water like they were on the East Coast, except lawns were replaced with Sonoran Desert landscaping. My vague awareness of CAP allowed me to unconsciously trust that water managers knew what to do and that I didn’t need to be concerned about it. Trusting them, I brought into the American dream, buying a house in downtown Tucson.
After writing this essay, I am embarrassed to admit how ignorant I was of the Colorado Watershed in which I live. Knowing about how one’s watershed sustains one’s life should be basic education, but it isn’t. Such ignorance has got to change. Water education is the indigenous wisdom that “water is life,” a resource not to be polluted nor wasted nor overused. It must be worshipped as if it is a sacred element of life since it is. I hope this essay will help enlighten the public about what we face and how we can face it with creativity, innovation, and grace.
Many of us are ready to be part of a water renaissance that builds a new kind of global civilization that knows the indigenous wisdom that “water is life.” Maps of the possible are written only when we stop abusing nature and begin to treat water as a holy resource to share with all.
The motivation to write this essay was that I was scared. I saw the bathtub ring around Lake Mead. I thought that if I knew more, maybe my fear would subside. Seeing the ABC 15 Arizona video report, “Too hot to handle? Experts weigh in on if Phoenix could become uninhabitable due to climate change,” the report says, “Experts agree and combating and acclimating to change will require a multi-faceted approach, from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to rethinking urban development and how our cities grow and finding ways to cool ourselves without the need for more electricity.” (Hermosillo 2021)
I have choices to make: Either to,
1) Move to a region with hardly any water worries before I become a water refugee.
2) Stay in the present city, Tucson, AZ, adapting to the rising temperatures and water scarcity.
3) Be part of the movement to build climate-resilient cities, arcologies.
No one wants to be a climate refugee. It’s like digging a plant up with established roots and replanting it in an entirely new region where she has no friends or family to a place where she may not survive. But with temperatures in Southern Arizona rising to months of three-digit temperatures, surviving summers are difficult. Air conditioning units are not designed to work well after 100 degrees.
Should I sell my house before the real estate market tumbles when the new water reality begins sinking in? Was it time for me to beat the herd to the Great Lakes region? What happens when 40 million water refugees migrate to places around water like Duluth? The infrastructure, of course, wouldn’t be able to bare it. The housing market would skyrocket so only the privileged few could buy homes. Maybe refugees would find themselves on the outskirts of resource-scarce cities, in refugee camps, shanty towns, just like we see now in poor nations struggling with climate-related disasters.
The truth is there is nowhere to go because the crisis is everywhere, even though some places are on the frontlines and the blooding edges of climate change. The only way forward is a new way of thinking and being, what I call neutopia, finding the inner sanctum needed to build a network of arcologies on Earth and in Outer Space, starting now.
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End Notes
[1] Destination Dulth: The Fact and Fiction of a Shared Climate Future by Jesse M. Keenan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUhSckQsrwY
[1] The Southwest’s unchecked thirst for Colorado River water could prove devastating upstream https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/18/us/flaming-gorge-green-river-fly-fishing-climate/index.html
[1] Babbitt, Bruce and Robert Lane. “Saudi Firm has pumped Arizona groundwater for years without paying. Time to pony up.” AZCentral, 11 August, 2022, https://news.yahoo.com/saudi-firm-pumped-arizona-groundwater-130044725.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall
[1] James, Ian. “It’s just a free-for all”: As water declines in rural Arizona, oversight faces resistance.” https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2021/02/10/bills-groundwater-rural-arizona-opposition/4254990001/
[1] Isidore, Chris. “Another supply chain crisis: Barge traffic halted on Mississippi River by lowest water levels in a decade.” CNN. 8 October, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/07/business/mississippi-river-closures-grounded-barges-drought-climate/index.html
[1] Hager, Alex. “State dependent on Colorado River wonder if desalination could help the water supply.” NPR Morning Edition 21 September, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/09/21/1124218312/states-dependent-on-colorado-river-wonder-if-desalination-could-help-the-water-s
[1] Bau.Salz: Building Bricks Made from Desalination Waste. 19 April 2022, https://www.verycompostable.com/posts/bau-salz-building-bricks-made-from-desalination-waste/
[1] “The Early History of Water in the Imperial Valley” YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsntugo710
[1] Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN). https://www.garn.org/rights-of-nature/
[1] Dr. Russel Barkley “How Normal Self Control Develops 2009”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5aAp7Qk0f8
[1] NASA Global Climate Change Vital Signs of the Planet, https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3231/climate-change-can-put-more-insects-at-risk-for-extinction/
[1] Humanity Rising Day 578: COP 27 III: Regenerative Agriculture as Key to Stopping Global Warming, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uft-xS5s4E