Word: desertions
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...adjustment a lot of folks have been making of late. Since 1950, the population of Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada has increased from 1.6 million to 10 million as Americans discover the desert's clean air, warm weather, open spaces and relatively affordable housing. But without zoning codes to restrict it, much of that growth has been distressingly haphazard. By the time the Zeigers began looking for a retirement home in the 1990s, what they found was a lot of strip malls, golf clubs and sprawling subdivisions decorated here and there with cactus plants. They were horrified. "We didn...
...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...
What those developers are only starting to realize is that deserts are not what they appear to be. Arid, sparsely vegetated and seemingly inhospitable, they look like nature's waste lots, ripe for occupation and improvement. Even the word desert implies "unoccupied." But despite the shortage of water and wide temperature fluctuations, deserts are the host of a wide variety of species, each of which has adapted in its way to life in a desert ecosystem. Couch's spadefoot toads can live underground for much of their lives, awaiting some moisture before they come up and breed. Saguaro cacti...
...living on the extremes of viability makes desert creatures surprisingly sensitive to disturbance. Golf courses and suburban lawns soak up sparse groundwater, and indigenous species suffer from the earthmovers, off-road vehicles and domestic pets that new arrivals bring. In California's Coachella Valley in the Mojave Desert, each of the 110 golf courses uses some 750,000 gallons of water a day. "Deserts have fragile ecosystems, and they are being threatened by this development," says William Presch, director of the desert-studies program at California State University at Fullerton. "If we don't understand how the desert environment works...