Indigenous people get first priority to stay. Basically everyone else has to go. Phoenix must be obliterated. The desert should be a desert, not a golf course and alfalfa farm.
Indigenous people get first priority to stay. Basically everyone else has to go. Phoenix must be obliterated. The desert should be a desert, not a golf course and alfalfa farm.
one of the keystone strategies of "settling" the southwest was to dam+canal critical water sources and push desertification into areas of native population, especially once those people were reasonably contained into a defined geographic area and agreeable to stay there to preserve their ancestral culture. in the popular mind, this process ended and the "west was won" but in reality it never stopped and is happening today with even more ruthless efficiency to preserve and expand the white settlements, always at the expense of the indigenous people.
phoenix is archeologically interesting, as it was once home to a pre-columbian culture sometimes called Hohokam which had an extremely extensive canal and irrigation system for the Gila river to support a very large population. it ultimately collapsed, though there is dispute about why... over reliance on irrigation/saline buildup (agricultural collapse) possibly a prolonged climate event, maybe both. white settler-colonists weren't and still aren't known for giving a shit about environmental history, even when it might yield a crucial understanding of long term sustainability. phoenix the white settlement was built in the area of this ancient cultural capital, making use of those old canal and irrigation systems but basically none of the cultural knowledge.
it's one of my concerns with the US moving further into an age of destabilized climate. we have no clue where is a smart place to settle and live. many of our cities are are built on top of old population centers, but some are completely novel. and i don't mean just places like vegas. i mean like chicago. certainly there are paleoclimatologists and environmental historians who study these things, but we don't even listen to current climatologists or environmental scientists about basic, obvious shit happening right now. good luck getting the power structure to listen to some historian piece together a mysterious cyclical flood event that was once seared into the cultural memory of a now marginalized and purposely ignored people.
further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oasisamerica