Word: arizona
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...exception, they discovered, was Pima County, which covers 9,186 sq. mi. of southern Arizona, including the city of Tucson. Pima has developed a conservation plan that permits growth while protecting the desert environment--a plan that has become a template for communities across the Southwest. "The old debate about whether growth is good or bad is irrelevant," says Chuck Huckelberry, Pima County administrator. "We have been growing for 50 years [in Tucson]. But we control where our growth occurs so it maximizes benefits and minimizes impacts...
There's a lot of growth to control. From 1990 to 2003, Arizona's population increased 53%, making it the second fastest growing state in the nation, after Nevada (another desert state, whose population grew 87% in the same period). Developers working in the U.S.'s four major deserts--California's Mojave, Arizona's Sonoran, Texas and New Mexico's Chihuahuan and Nevada and Utah's Great Basin--can't build houses fast enough. In the town of La Quinta, Calif., southeast of Palm Springs, property prices jumped 48% last year, and new-home buyers have to go on waiting...
...addition to the plan, the county has adopted rules governing the exterior colors of new houses, the amount of light that can be given off at night and the amount of water that can be used for gardening. In the 260-unit Arizona Senior Academy, where the Zeigers chose to settle, grass lawns and water-thirsty plants like oleander are forbidden, there are no streetlights on the roads, and half the land is preserved as open space for wildlife habitat. The houses are built in clusters of four sharing a single driveway and auto court and are designed...
...soil, forming a carpet of dry, flammable stalks that burns very hot after a lightning strike and can engulf cacti, yucca, ocotillo and the paloverde trees. "None of the native plants have fire adaptation. If they burn, they die," says Tom Van Devender, a senior research scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. "If there is recurring fire, you get a conversion from desert to savannah grassland...
...their home makes on the desert. "Given the rate the desert is being gobbled up by people like us, my feeling is we need to put some back," she says, standing on her porch and pointing to the plants in her yard. "I put in native plants only--ocotillo, Arizona rosewood, desert willow, prickly pear. I start them with a little water, but soon they will survive on their...