What will become of American Civilization? Conspiracies and hyper-partisanship in the nation’s fastest-growing city
When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the dam that bares his name in 1911 and secured reliable water for Phoenix’s then-100,000 residents one year ahead of statehood, no one likely envisioned that the metro area would now be home to 5 million. Hyper-partisanship now threatens to tear Arizona apart. The rest of the country is watching.
MAP Strategies Group
If you haven't read George Packer's article in The Atlantic earlier this month, take the time. You'll thank us later.
Packer essentially traces Arizona's rise and current national prominence at the intersection of development, ideology and what happens next – and makes the case that as so goes Arizona, the nation follows.
Much of it seems obvious to those of us who have lived here a long time. But if you're new to the area or under a certain age, Packer's story provides valuable context and insights to help you form your own opinion of the Arizona you want to live, work and play in.
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By George Packer, The Atlantic
No one knows why the Hohokam Indians vanished. They had carved hundreds of miles of canals in the Sonoran Desert with stone tools and channeled the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers to irrigate their crops for a thousand years until, in the middle of the 15th century, because of social conflict or climate change—drought, floods—their technology became obsolete, their civilization collapsed, and the Hohokam scattered. Four hundred years later, when white settlers reached the territory of southern Arizona, they found the ruins of abandoned canals, cleared them out with shovels, and built crude weirs of trees and rocks across the Salt River to push water back into the desert. Aware of a lost civilization in the Valley, they named the new settlement Phoenix.
It grew around water. In 1911, Theodore Roosevelt stood on the steps of the Tempe Normal School, which, half a century later, would become Arizona State University, and declared that the soaring dam just completed in the Superstition Mountains upstream, established during his presidency and named after him, would provide enough water to allow 100,000 people to live in the Valley. There are now 5 million.