The Valley
What was absent to me from George Packer’s latest article on Phoenix and Maricopa County was any dialogue of Tucson and Pima County, barely 100 miles south. As political entities go, these two neighbors couldn’t be extra totally different: There is just one single Republican throughout each the Tucson Metropolis Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, as an illustration, and attitudes towards water and immigration differ considerably. Grass and water options are uncommon, and Pima County, which really borders Mexico, suffers from much less vitriol with respect to immigration. The Phoenix-versus-Tucson divide will not be the one and even the very best instance of America’s divisions, however it’s definitely one price exploring given the proximate geography concerned. I’d like to learn a follow-up.
Bruce Skolnik
Tucson, Ariz.
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George Packer’s exhaustive investigation of Arizona and its water constraints lacked an important component: the position of innovation in marshaling water assets in ever smarter methods. As new properties are constructed, Phoenix and the encompassing areas have an opportunity to make use of new kinds of water-efficient home equipment, backyard designs, and swimming swimming pools. These might show pivotal in addressing the state’s water disaster.
The 37,000-acre Teravalis venture that Packer mentions provides a working example. Teravalis will embrace infrastructure to seize rain for reuse, a plant to deal with the group’s wastewater and reuse it for public areas, water-usage displays, leak detectors, and stringent garden necessities to encourage pure landscapes that don’t want irrigation. All home equipment can be extra environment friendly than what’s now generally present in Arizona and across the nation. In all, the event has dedicated to lowering water consumption by as a lot as 35 p.c in contrast with present requirements.
In contemplating Arizona’s future, the water information doesn’t should be gloomy. Israel has had a fast-growing inhabitants for greater than 75 years in a water-constrained area. Because of an array of recent applied sciences and sensible insurance policies, individuals there reside water-rich lives no totally different from these of individuals in New York or London—and this may be Arizona’s future too.
There may be water in Arizona—plenty of it. What has been lacking is the ingenuity to make use of it for optimum impression. Quite than run from growth in Arizona, let’s see the state as a laboratory for different locations which might be, or quickly can be, going through the identical constraints.
Seth M. Siegel
New York, N.Y.
Though there’s a lot to commend about George Packer’s in depth story on Phoenix and what the town’s dysfunction can train us about the way forward for America, he makes a mistake that so many guests and transplants make when discussing the town: shopping for into its founding mythology. Packer opens his article by writing, “Nobody is aware of why the Hohokam Indians vanished,” earlier than describing how within the 1860s, white settlers found the irrigation canals left behind by the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples and determined to repurpose them, naming their city as a nod to “a misplaced civilization within the Valley.”
This founding fable has been repeated advert nauseam for nicely over a century, regardless of it by no means having a lot of a relationship to historic reality. The O’odham peoples of southern Arizona declare to be straight descended from the Hohokam (the identify is a corruption of the O’odham phrase for “ancestor”). One of many earliest American guests to the area, a U.S. Military lieutenant named Nathaniel Michler, was amazed by the farms of the Akimel O’odham he noticed across the Gila River, writing that they have been extra subtle “than something we had seen since leaving the Atlantic States” and included plots of “cotton, sugar, peas, wheat, and corn.” This was in 1855, almost 20 years earlier than Phoenix was based simply 20 miles to the north.
By framing his inquiry with the ahistorical notion of Phoenix as a metropolis born from the ashes of an inexplicably vanished individuals, Packer permits the reader to consider it as an inherently ephemeral place, doomed to evaporate into the blistering solar. A extra edifying method would have been to interact with the complete scope of Arizona’s historical past and cope with the truth that individuals have discovered methods to reside and thrive within the Sonoran Desert for millennia. Certainly these generations upon generations of authentic Arizonans have classes to show us, if solely we might deliver ourselves to pay attention.
Kyle Paoletta
Cambridge, Mass.
I like the detachment and empathy with which George Packer engages the principal characters of “The Valley.” At 77, although, I’m not as able to such empathy towards the MAGA tribe, particularly those that create their very own messes with their self-destructive values and decisions. “That was our civilization down within the Valley, the one one we had,” Packer concludes. “Higher for it to be there than gone.” Actually? Is the madness of Phoenix what we’ve to sit up for? I hope not.
Carl Flowers
Olympia, Wash.
George Packer’s considerate article asks a typical query: Why do individuals reside in Arizona?
I’ve lived right here for nearly two years now, and I can affirm his reporting. The state is absurd, costly, and, in so some ways, fully untenable. As Packer notes, the politics are unhealthy, the water is drying out, and unhoused individuals usually have nowhere to go. When the thermostat registers greater than 110 levels for 31 days in a row, life will get fairly bleak. So why can we reside right here?
I don’t faux to know why anybody does something. However often, after I cross by the components of city the place strip malls give approach to rusted fences, this buzzing begins. And when you’ve been out right here lengthy sufficient, you notice that it by no means actually stops. In the event you pay attention fastidiously, you would possibly hear it within the mountains, reverberating someplace between nightfall and twilight. Sure—this place has a pulse, should you listen.
I felt it as soon as on the backside of the Grand Canyon, that sedimentary cathedral, the place, as I gazed upward, sweaty and carrying the flawed footwear, the one thought that occurred to this lifelong agnostic was I perceive why individuals pray.
I by no means need to depart.
Kallen Dimitroff
Phoenix, Ariz.
George Packer replies:
Even with 25,000 phrases, it wasn’t potential to say the whole lot that must be stated in regards to the Valley. It wasn’t potential to inform the story of the area because the fifteenth century, although the disappearance of the Hohokam stays an vital historic thriller. (I did discover house to say their connection to the Tohono O’odham Nation and Gila River Indian Group.) Tucson and Pima County deserve a report of their very own, however my assigned goal lay north of them. I needed to make room for the testimony of Trump supporters—nearly half the inhabitants—even when we didn’t agree. As for the way forward for the area, its contradictions, and its attract, these are topics on which everybody I met had sturdy private views.
Behind the Cowl
For our cowl picture, the illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visible language of previous Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to painting a circus wagon on its ominous method to a defiled Capitol. One thing Depraved This Method Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a specific inspiration; it’s the story of Mr. Darkish, who grifts strangers into becoming a member of his malevolent carnival. Over the course of The Atlantic’s 167-year historical past, solely very not often have we printed a canopy and not using a headline or typography. The imagery speaks for itself.
Backstory
“The Anti–Rock Star,” by Stephen Metcalf, options an ink-line portrait of Leonard Cohen made by Bono, who additionally drew the cowl of our June 2023 problem. Bono instructed us about celebrating Cohen’s 79th birthday with him at a Los Angeles restaurant. On the dinner, Bono requested Cohen if he had plans for his eightieth. “Oh sure—critical plans,” Bono recollects Cohen answering. “I’ve not been smoking for 23 years, and there’s a cigarette maker off Jermyn Road in London who has a means with Virginia Gold tobacco. A single handmade cigarette can be my delight.” Bono stated he couldn’t make Cohen’s eightieth, “however I’m shamefully proud to say I despatched him a extremely polished silver cigarette field.”
Corrections
“The Valley” (July/August) misstated the quantity of water held within the Salt River Challenge’s lakes. The lakes maintain greater than 650 billion gallons of water, not 650 trillion gallons. “The Wild Adventures of Fanny Stevenson” (September) misstated how Stevenson traversed Panama in 1868.
This text seems within the October 2024 print version with the headline “The Commons.” The print model of this text acknowledged that the quilt of this problem is perhaps the primary in The Atlantic’s historical past bearing no headline or typography. A reader has since directed us to the December 1954 cowl, a seasonal illustration by Frederick Banbery bearing no headline or typography (however that includes a number of prime hats). Banbery had made an analogous cowl for the December 1953 problem.
