Word: arizonas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...million videocassette recorders sold in the U.S. last year, not one was built by an American manufacturer. Now a small Arizona company, Go-Video, has launched a battle to change that. Go-Video's design for a dual-deck VCR, which won U.S. patent approval last month, contains two recorders side by side. It would enable users to copy tapes, edit them or tape one program while watching another on cassette...
...more excited by this revelation than a wealthy American mathematician, diplomat and astronomer, Percival Lowell of Boston, who established an observatory in Arizona and dedicated it to the study of Mars. By 1908, influenced in part by optical illusions and wishful thinking, Lowell had counted and named hundreds of canals, which he believed were part of a large network conveying water from the polar ice caps to the parched cities of an arid and dying planet. Lowell's observations and musings, in turn, inspired British novelist H.G. Wells to write The War of the Worlds, a dramatic account...
Public-spirited campaigns have been far more effective in Arizona, where the forward-looking 1980 Groundwater Management Act restricts depletion of aquifers and effectively raises water costs statewide. Tucson, which had suffered an alarming 120-ft. drop in its water table, imposed a scaled billing system, charging more per gallon as water use increased. The city's per capita water consumption dropped from a high of 205 gal. a day in 1974 to 161 now. California could use similar conservation laws; in Palm Springs, where household water costs 46 cents for 100 cu. ft. (vs. $1.16 in Tucson), per capita...
...farmers could freely sell or lease their water rights, profit motives would provide a powerful incentive for conservation. In Arizona, where such "water ranching" is widespread, farmers are drawing top dollar and, in the words of former Governor Bruce Babbitt, "retiring to beachfront condos in La Jolla ((Calif.)) to raise martinis instead of alfalfa." If water rights were widely traded, proponents say, cities and factories could assure their needs for posterity. Agriculture would still receive four-fifths of the West's water and would thrive, despite the increased costs...
...these benefits, free-market water stirs enmity in rural communities. La Paz County in western Arizona has watched with alarm since 1985 as nearly half its privately held land has been sold, mostly by farmers, to water- ranching interests. County Manager Neta Bowen decries the loss of tax base and employment: "When farmlands are retired in a community that depends solely on agriculture, what happens to the corner grocery? The cafe? The gas station? The local...