The Southwest as a cautionary tale for our hot future
Living in the Southwest means being routinely scolded by outsiders. How can you live in a place so unsustainable? With that kind of politics? With that kind of culture, or, rather, the lack of it? Rarely does a summer pass in my home city without somebody standing up a roundtable with a title like “Should Phoenix Exist?”Subscribe for unlimited access to The PostYou can cancel anytime.SubscribeIn his book “American Oasis,” journalist and Albuquerque native Kyle Paoletta does a little bit of scolding, too. Yes, the region’s development outpaces its resources. And it is indeed a gaudy and strange place — he’s not wrong to liken Las Vegas to “a pop-up ad the country didn’t mean to click on.”But Paoletta also understands that we underestimate and segregate the Southwest at our peril. No part of the country is immune from drought or reckless development, which is to say that the Southwest’s critics are often committing an epic feat of projection. The region is not America’s weird cousin but its starkest mirror. And, if we’re willing to see it clearly, a source for solutions.Making that case means rejecting some of the region’s most familiar origin stories. The Southwest story, for Paoletta, is a tale not of Wild West frontiersmen but mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and willful neglect of their legacy — Puebloans in New Mexico exploited and massacred by conquistadors, Phoenician settlers who reused abandoned ancient canal lines but removed Native tribes from any discussion of water rights. In the centuries since the region was first visited by non-Native settlers, he notes, it has been marketed as a blank (read: White) slate — the better for resort developers to draw visitors. That vision is bolstered by a softly romantic vision of “a prelapsarian world where comely doñas gamboled about the estates their princely families established along the Rio Grande.”Paoletta lays bare the hypocrisy that drove the region’s development, where Dwight Heard, Phoenix’s most dedicated collector of Indigenous Southwestern art (an excellent museum near downtown bears his name) ran redlined property developments that ensured tribal descendants wouldn’t live near him. In border cities like El Paso, the Border Patrol relies on humanitarian groups to support migrants awaiting processing but dedicates none of its $17 billion budget to maintain shelters. Such contradictions exemplify what Paoletta calls the “Southwest Syndrome: delusions of grandeur mixing with the pursuit of pleasure to disastrous results, all of it amplified by the extremity of its desert setting.”Still, Paoletta is right to note that the region’s reputation for environmental recklessness and cultural know-nothingism isn’t entirely deserved. Since the 1990s, Las Vegas and Phoenix have practiced much-improved water stewardship, maintaining consistent levels of consumption even while the population has exploded. They’ve achieved it through a mix of carrots (subsidies to households that tear out their lawns and farmers who let their fields go fallow) and sticks (jacked-up water rates in summer). As the whole of the United States slides into drought, their lesson will be worth heeding.As for culture, Paoletta argues that the Southwest, by burying its Native past, has risked polishing itself into nothingness. Surprisingly but not wrongly, one of the places he makes a point to visit in Arizona isn’t a dry well or a water-sucking cotton farm but the offices of Arizona Highways, a magazine that has persistently celebrated the state’s natural (and tourist-drawing) wonders. For Paoletta, this idealism offers a scapegoat: So long as there’s a field of saguaros somewhere, we can run roughshod over everything else. That kind of boosterism, bundled with willful neglect, defines the region and ignores its realities — Natives still live here; life on the border need not be a function of surveillance and demonization. But dismiss Vegas at your peril: It “has become one of the few cities in America where service work is a sustainable career, one that can provide a home, health insurance, and a comfortable life.”So forget “Should Phoenix exist?” It does, and will. But thriving requires a kind of reckoning with itself that the region (and the country) is only intermittently interested in. Violent protests in 2020 in Albuquerque over a statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate are, for Paoletta, a signal of the battles ahead, as people whom developers wish away won’t magically disappear. The same thinking afflicts the border, where hyper and bigoted “invasion” rhetoric complicates the tense relationship between residents, humanitarian nonprofits and the Border Patrol. (The incoming Trump administration’s threats to remove restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering sanctuary spaces like churches could further roil the region.)Living in a humanitarian way, and within one’s means, is the Southwest’s constant challenge. That, Paoletta notes, will require more than a few water policy and development changes, a slow-moving prospect at best. Here in Arizona, water managers are forever squabbling with other states over its apportionment from an ever-thinning Colorado River, agreeing just enough to fend off federal intervention. Paoletta rightly recommends that Phoenix address its sprawl issues by promoting denser housing, but lobbying groups have stood in the way for years; laws addressing the matter passed in 2024 but will be slow to take effect and will be fought tooth and nail by municipalities and developers. The blank slate is too appealing, too profitable.What Paoletta suggests is something closer to an existential transformation. “How different would the contemporary Southwest be if, when Anglos arrived, they’d simply accepted that the desert was hot?” he writes. It’s a good question, and not a regional one — a whole country on a heating planet will have to reckon with it.Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”American OasisFinding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest
In his book “American Oasis,” Kyle Paoletta explores the region’s environmental and cultural struggles and what they mean for the rest of the nation.
Living in the Southwest means being routinely scolded by outsiders. How can you live in a place so unsustainable? With that kind of politics? With that kind of culture, or, rather, the lack of it? Rarely does a summer pass in my home city without somebody standing up a roundtable with a title like “Should Phoenix Exist?”
In his book “American Oasis,” journalist and Albuquerque native Kyle Paoletta does a little bit of scolding, too. Yes, the region’s development outpaces its resources. And it is indeed a gaudy and strange place — he’s not wrong to liken Las Vegas to “a pop-up ad the country didn’t mean to click on.”
But Paoletta also understands that we underestimate and segregate the Southwest at our peril. No part of the country is immune from drought or reckless development, which is to say that the Southwest’s critics are often committing an epic feat of projection. The region is not America’s weird cousin but its starkest mirror. And, if we’re willing to see it clearly, a source for solutions.
Making that case means rejecting some of the region’s most familiar origin stories. The Southwest story, for Paoletta, is a tale not of Wild West frontiersmen but mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and willful neglect of their legacy — Puebloans in New Mexico exploited and massacred by conquistadors, Phoenician settlers who reused abandoned ancient canal lines but removed Native tribes from any discussion of water rights. In the centuries since the region was first visited by non-Native settlers, he notes, it has been marketed as a blank (read: White) slate — the better for resort developers to draw visitors. That vision is bolstered by a softly romantic vision of “a prelapsarian world where comely doñas gamboled about the estates their princely families established along the Rio Grande.”
Paoletta lays bare the hypocrisy that drove the region’s development, where Dwight Heard, Phoenix’s most dedicated collector of Indigenous Southwestern art (an excellent museum near downtown bears his name) ran redlined property developments that ensured tribal descendants wouldn’t live near him. In border cities like El Paso, the Border Patrol relies on humanitarian groups to support migrants awaiting processing but dedicates none of its $17 billion budget to maintain shelters. Such contradictions exemplify what Paoletta calls the “Southwest Syndrome: delusions of grandeur mixing with the pursuit of pleasure to disastrous results, all of it amplified by the extremity of its desert setting.”
Still, Paoletta is right to note that the region’s reputation for environmental recklessness and cultural know-nothingism isn’t entirely deserved. Since the 1990s, Las Vegas and Phoenix have practiced much-improved water stewardship, maintaining consistent levels of consumption even while the population has exploded. They’ve achieved it through a mix of carrots (subsidies to households that tear out their lawns and farmers who let their fields go fallow) and sticks (jacked-up water rates in summer). As the whole of the United States slides into drought, their lesson will be worth heeding.
As for culture, Paoletta argues that the Southwest, by burying its Native past, has risked polishing itself into nothingness. Surprisingly but not wrongly, one of the places he makes a point to visit in Arizona isn’t a dry well or a water-sucking cotton farm but the offices of Arizona Highways, a magazine that has persistently celebrated the state’s natural (and tourist-drawing) wonders. For Paoletta, this idealism offers a scapegoat: So long as there’s a field of saguaros somewhere, we can run roughshod over everything else. That kind of boosterism, bundled with willful neglect, defines the region and ignores its realities — Natives still live here; life on the border need not be a function of surveillance and demonization. But dismiss Vegas at your peril: It “has become one of the few cities in America where service work is a sustainable career, one that can provide a home, health insurance, and a comfortable life.”
So forget “Should Phoenix exist?” It does, and will. But thriving requires a kind of reckoning with itself that the region (and the country) is only intermittently interested in. Violent protests in 2020 in Albuquerque over a statue of conquistador Juan de Oñate are, for Paoletta, a signal of the battles ahead, as people whom developers wish away won’t magically disappear. The same thinking afflicts the border, where hyper and bigoted “invasion” rhetoric complicates the tense relationship between residents, humanitarian nonprofits and the Border Patrol. (The incoming Trump administration’s threats to remove restrictions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement from entering sanctuary spaces like churches could further roil the region.)
Living in a humanitarian way, and within one’s means, is the Southwest’s constant challenge. That, Paoletta notes, will require more than a few water policy and development changes, a slow-moving prospect at best. Here in Arizona, water managers are forever squabbling with other states over its apportionment from an ever-thinning Colorado River, agreeing just enough to fend off federal intervention. Paoletta rightly recommends that Phoenix address its sprawl issues by promoting denser housing, but lobbying groups have stood in the way for years; laws addressing the matter passed in 2024 but will be slow to take effect and will be fought tooth and nail by municipalities and developers. The blank slate is too appealing, too profitable.
What Paoletta suggests is something closer to an existential transformation. “How different would the contemporary Southwest be if, when Anglos arrived, they’d simply accepted that the desert was hot?” he writes. It’s a good question, and not a regional one — a whole country on a heating planet will have to reckon with it.
Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”
American Oasis
Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest