Phoenix Isn’t Doomed to Evaporate Into the Blistering Sun

The Valley

For the July/August 2024 issue, George Packer searched for the nation’s future in Phoenix.

What was absent to me from George Packer’s recent article on Phoenix and Maricopa County was any discussion of Tucson and Pima County, barely 100 miles south. As political entities go, these two neighbors couldn’t be more different: There is only one single Republican across both the Tucson City Council and the Pima County Board of Supervisors, for instance, and attitudes toward water and immigration differ significantly. Grass and water features are rare, and Pima County, which actually borders Mexico, suffers from less vitriol with respect to immigration. The Phoenix-versus-Tucson divide is not the only or even the best example of America’s divisions, but it is certainly one worth exploring given the proximate geography involved. I’d love to read a follow-up.

Bruce Skolnik
Tucson, Ariz.

George Packer’s exhaustive investigation of Arizona and its water constraints lacked an essential element: the role of innovation in marshaling water resources in ever smarter ways. As new homes are built, Phoenix and the surrounding areas have a chance to employ new types of water-efficient appliances, garden designs, and swimming pools. These could prove pivotal in addressing the state’s water crisis.

The 37,000-acre Teravalis project that Packer mentions offers a case in point. Teravalis will include infrastructure to capture rain for reuse, a plant to treat the community’s wastewater and reuse it for public spaces, water-usage monitors, leak detectors, and stringent lawn requirements to encourage natural landscapes that don’t need irrigation. All appliances will be more efficient than what is now commonly found in Arizona and around the country. In all, the development has committed to reducing water consumption by as much as 35 percent compared with current standards.

In considering Arizona’s future, the water news doesn’t have to be gloomy. Israel has had a fast-growing population for more than 75 years in a water-constrained region. Thanks to an array of new technologies and smart policies, people there live water-rich lives no different from those of people in New York or London—and this can be Arizona’s future too.

There is water in Arizona—lots of it. What has been missing is the ingenuity to use it for maximum impact. Rather than run from development in Arizona, let’s see the state as a laboratory for other places that are, or soon will be, facing the same constraints.

Seth M. Siegel
New York, N.Y.

Although there’s much to commend about George Packer’s extensive story on Phoenix and what the city’s dysfunction can teach us about the future of America, he makes a mistake that so many visitors and transplants make when discussing the city: buying into its founding mythology. Packer opens his article by writing, “No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished,” before describing how in the 1860s, white settlers discovered the irrigation canals left behind by the ancestral Sonoran Desert peoples and decided to repurpose them, naming their town as a nod to “a lost civilization in the Valley.”

This founding myth has been repeated ad nauseam for well over a century, despite it never having much of a relationship to historical fact. The O’odham peoples of southern Arizona claim to be directly descended from the Hohokam (the name is a corruption of the O’odham word for “ancestor”). One of the earliest American visitors to the region, a U.S. Army lieutenant named Nathaniel Michler, was amazed by the farms of the Akimel O’odham he observed around the Gila River, writing that they were more sophisticated “than anything we had seen since leaving the Atlantic States” and included plots of “cotton, sugar, peas, wheat, and corn.” This was in 1855, nearly two decades before Phoenix was founded just 20 miles to the north.

By framing his inquiry with the ahistorical notion of Phoenix as a city born from the ashes of an inexplicably vanished people, Packer allows the reader to think of it as an inherently ephemeral place, doomed to evaporate into the blistering sun. A more edifying approach would have been to engage with the full scope of Arizona’s history and contend with the fact that people have found ways to live and thrive in the Sonoran Desert for millennia. Surely those generations upon generations of original Arizonans have lessons to teach us, if only we could bring ourselves to listen.

Kyle Paoletta
Cambridge, Mass.

I admire the detachment and empathy with which George Packer engages the principal characters of “The Valley.” At 77, though, I am not as capable of such empathy toward the MAGA tribe, especially those who create their own messes with their self-destructive values and choices. “That was our civilization down in the Valley, the only one we had,” Packer concludes. “Better for it to be there than gone.” Really? Is the insanity of Phoenix what we have to look forward to? I hope not.

Carl Flowers
Olympia, Wash.

George Packer’s thoughtful article asks a common question: Why do people live in Arizona?

I’ve lived here for almost two years now, and I can confirm his reporting. The state is absurd, expensive, and, in so many ways, completely untenable. As Packer notes, the politics are bad, the water is drying out, and unhoused people often have nowhere to go. When the thermostat registers more than 110 degrees for 31 days in a row, life gets pretty bleak. So why do we live here?

I don’t pretend to know why anyone does anything. But occasionally, when I pass through the parts of town where strip malls give way to rusted fences, this humming starts. And once you’ve been out here long enough, you realize that it never really stops. If you listen carefully, you might hear it in the mountains, reverberating somewhere between dusk and twilight. Yes—this place has a pulse, if you pay attention.

I felt it once at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that sedimentary cathedral, where, as I gazed upward, sweaty and wearing the wrong shoes, the only thought that occurred to this lifelong agnostic was I understand why people pray.

I never want to leave.

Kallen Dimitroff
Phoenix, Ariz.

George Packer replies:

Even with 25,000 words, it wasn’t possible to say everything that needs to be said about the Valley. It wasn’t possible to tell the story of the region since the 15th century, though the disappearance of the Hohokam remains an important historical mystery. (I did find space to mention their connection to the Tohono O’odham Nation and Gila River Indian Community.) Tucson and Pima County deserve a report of their own, but my assigned target lay north of them. I wanted to make room for the testimony of Trump supporters—almost half the population—even if we didn’t agree. As for the future of the region, its contradictions, and its allure, these are subjects on which everyone I met had strong personal views.

Behind the Cover

For our cover image, the illustrator Justin Metz borrowed the visual language of old Ray Bradbury and Stephen King paperbacks to portray a circus wagon on its ominous approach to a defiled Capitol. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury’s 1962 masterpiece, was a particular inspiration; it is the story of Mr. Dark, who grifts strangers into joining his malevolent carnival. Over the course of The Atlantic’s 167-year history, only very rarely have we published a cover without a headline or typography. The imagery speaks for itself.

Backstory

“The Anti–Rock Star,” by Stephen Metcalf, features an ink-line portrait of Leonard Cohen made by Bono, who also drew the cover of our June 2023 issue. Bono told us about celebrating Cohen’s 79th birthday with him at a Los Angeles restaurant. At the dinner, Bono asked Cohen if he had plans for his 80th. “Oh yes—serious plans,” Bono recalls Cohen answering. “I’ve not been smoking for 23 years, and there’s a cigarette maker off Jermyn Street in London who has a way with Virginia Gold tobacco. A single handmade cigarette will be my delight.” Bono said he couldn’t make Cohen’s 80th, “but I’m shamefully proud to say I sent him a highly polished silver cigarette box.”

Corrections

“The Valley” (July/August) misstated the amount of water held in the Salt River Project’s lakes. The lakes hold more 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 article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.” The print version of this article stated that the cover of this issue might be the first in The Atlantic’s history bearing no headline or typography. A reader has since directed us to the December 1954 cover, a seasonal illustration by Frederick Banbery bearing no headline or typography (but featuring several top hats). Banbery had made a similar cover for the December 1953 issue.