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Severe drought and mandatory water cuts are pitting communities against each other in Arizona:
As the climate crisis intensifies, battle lines are beginning to form over water. In Arizona -- amid a decades-long megadrought -- some communities are facing the very real possibility of losing access to the precious water that remains.
Outside the city limits of Scottsdale, where the asphalt ends and the dirt road begins, is the Rio Verde Foothills community. Hundreds of homes here get water trucked in from Scottsdale, but those deliveries will end on January 1, 2023.
That's because last summer, for the first time ever, drought conditions forced the federal government to declare a tier 1 water shortage in the Colorado River, reducing how much Arizona can use.
[...] "We are what I call the 'sacrificial lamb' for the bigger areas," Irwin told CNN. "In my opinion, look somewhere else -- we need to be able to sustain ourselves."
The scarcity of water in the state is pitting small towns against fast-growing metropolitan communities.
[...] Arizona's population growth and extreme drought have increased demand for water in limited supply. Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow with the Kyl Center for Water Policy in Arizona, says water scarcity in the state has resulted in the "haves" and the "have nots," and likened the coming water battles to the days of the Wild West. "Once you have your water rights, you defend it," Ferris said. "That's the way it works."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 01 2022, @03:26PM
The Southwest is vulnerable to shifts in rainfall. Pueblo Bonito [wikipedia.org] was a major population center about 1200 years ago. Local climate change and deforestation seems to have made the location unsustainable.
Likewise there are many other Puebloan sites like Hovenweep [nps.gov] or Canyons of the Ancients [blm.gov] that ultimately failed because of drought.
So drought is nothing new to the region. Human agency can, has, and does exacerbate the effects; but the converse may also be true. And those conditions can quickly reverse themselves. I have seen in the last decade the reservoirs in California's Central Valley go from near empty to almost overflowing. Snowpack in the Western ranges, which feeds the watersheds, has waxed and waned also.
All of those systems use more energy than humans can produce, or have ever produced. We can't rival nature. We should, however, avoid making things worse.
Washington DC delenda est.