I grew up in a patchwork of generic suburban development west of Phoenix, Arizona, called Surprise, where parking lots stretched as far as the eye could see and most everything was the color of a sun-bleached dog turd. So I identify with what Kyle Paoletta, in his new book American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, describes as a “sense of immensity clash[ing] with an inchoate claustrophobia.” That’s what he felt growing up in another improbably metastasizing sprawl: that of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In both places, there is no shortage of sky, no deficit of space. But this apparent abundance butts, uncomfortably, against the harsh realities of the desert. How could these cities keep expanding, as they seemed determined to do, in defiance of the limits of the natural world?

The answer, now baldly apparent, is that they cannot. The Colorado River is drying up; every year, the mercury creeps higher and higher. Across the Southwest, the warning sirens sound with alarm. “The desert,” Paoletta writes, “is not antithetical to human civilization. . . . But living there in perpetuity means adopting an outlook that accepts that there are limits and adjusts accordingly.” The settlers and developers in places like Phoenix did not imagine living within their means; they saw in the arid earth of the Southwest the opportunity to forge an ever-expanding paradise.

In American Oasis, Paoletta maps the past and future of cities like Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas, which offer both a warning and a lesson to the rest of the United States as it gets hotter and drier. We spoke earlier this month by Zoom about how the modern Southwest came to be, delusions of permanent growth, and what might be done to break the hold of the “Southwest Syndrome.” Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

—Zachariah Webb

Zachariah Webb: Early on in the book, you identify what you call the “Southwest Syndrome,” a condition generally inimical to human flourishing, if not fatal. What are its origins and symptoms?

Kyle Paoletta: That’s a riff on this study that was published in 1990 by three researchers from Central Michigan University and New York City’s Baruch College in which they identified what they called the “Sunbelt Syndrome.” They conducted a survey of residents of places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, some cities in Florida—people who had made this seemingly odd choice to move from the industrial Northeast and Midwest to the newly coined Sunbelt. The study reads as an almost Puritan tract because of what the authors identify as this loosening of social mores, higher divorce rates, less attention to child-rearing, not going to church, all these things that purportedly characterized life in the Sunbelt. But that is kind of a fiction, one that goes back to the Second Great Awakening idea of what an “American” is—this very religiously grounded, family-centric kind of idea. And the authors were so alarmed by it. They basically said that everyone in the Sunbelt was indulging hedonism, that they didn’t care about anything but themselves.

I was really struck by that study when I found it, and I really identified with it coming from the Southwest, but I wanted to specify it a little bit because—and we see this in our politics all the time—we sometimes talk about the Sunbelt as this singular place, but it includes Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California, and these are wildly different states and cultures and histories. So I wanted to take that idea of the Sunbelt Syndrome and specify it to the Southwest, to really put it in touch with the environment, put it in touch with this place that I think cuts against all of those things that those researchers were writing about.

Much of the history of the Southwest has been defined by pushing past the limits that the desert set.

This sense of infinite leisure really runs up against the limits of what you can do in the desert. To me, this is the Southwest Syndrome: it is a different relationship to work and family, and one that very much centers the individual, individual pleasure, individual leisure, but it does it in this grandiose way. You overcompensate, you go bigger, you try and live this almost imagined life, full of delusions of grandeur. That’s the real nut of the Southwest Syndrome, this sense of defiance paired with that pursuit of pleasure and that pursuit of personal gratification.

I think what’s scary is that it sort of works—just in a way that has all these profound consequences for the environment, for the people who lived in those places originally, and for the laboring classes that made all that exponential growth possible. There is a foreboding sense to that.

ZW: In the imagination of the colonizer, the desert of the Southwest was a vacancy in need of filling. Just look at Phoenix, the mythology of which is based on the idea of a modern metropolis emerging from the ashes of a vanished civilization: that of the ancestors of the O’odham, often referred to as the Hohokam, who farmed along the Salt River hundreds of years ago. But it’s something of a myth. How did this revisionist logic operate to advance the project of, first, the colonizers and, later, developers?

KP: There was a thriving agrarian society along the Salt, the Gila, and the Santa Cruz rivers in Arizona between around 500 and 1500 CE. And what happened was that the climate changed in various ways, and then they basically left the Salt River Valley to consolidate along the Gila and the Santa Cruz. That’s where the settled indigenous population is by the time you have white settlers coming to Arizona in the years after the Mexican-American War and even more after the Civil War, in the 1870s.

There were two settlers in particular in Arizona. You have “Tragic Jack” Swilling, who was this Confederate veteran—one of those old western characters who wandered from place to place, trying to find his fortune. He wound up linking up with a Union veteran named John Y. T. Smith—the Y. T. stood for “Yours Truly.” Smith was working for the U.S. Army at Fort McDowell, which was in the mountains north of present-day Phoenix. And there’s a legend that Swilling and Smith met at a saloon in Wickenburg—this kind of Gold Rush boom town—where Smith pointed out that there was all this hay growing naturally along the Salt River, and there were these ancient canals that belonged to this vanished civilization, and that it would be a simple matter to clear out the canals and reestablish agriculture there. So they got together and founded Phoenix.

That legend is gospel in Arizona. That is the founding story of Phoenix: that Swilling and Smith and then a crew of other quote, unquote pioneers start farming the Salt River. It’s immensely fertile land. It’s very profitable. There is a rapid expansion of agriculture. And then, you know, they bring in industry and then housing, and—poof—you have modern-day Phoenix.

The trouble is this idea of the “vanished civilization.” There are actually records from basically around the same time that Phoenix was being founded—or ten years earlier—of Army expeditions through the land that the United States took from Mexico, and they document visiting O’odham settlements along the Gila River, which is only around thirty miles from the Salt River. You have this army captain being like, “Wow, these beautiful farms! What a variety of vegetables!” I think he said that it was the most impressive farm he’d seen west of the Mississippi. And so these two histories actually exist side-by-side: one of continuous habitation by indigenous people and the other, in which it’s claimed that all the indigenous people are gone, but we can reclaim their birthright and create a new society in its place.

And I think a lot of why Phoenix became the leading city of the Southwest is because they successfully capitalized on this narrative. It was the one place in the Southwest where it truly could be seen as a blank page—unlike in New Mexico, where you have the pueblos, you have these very deeply rooted people going back centuries. By the time New Mexico becomes a part of the United States, Santa Fe exists, Albuquerque exists. There are existing settlements that are populated almost entirely by Spanish-speaking people or indigenous people. And so there were similar kinds of boosters in New Mexico as there were in Arizona, but it didn’t make any sense because the society—very evidently—was already there. Anyone who visited Santa Fe would be confronted with the fact that the city is older than Boston; you can’t pretend.

But in the Salt River Valley, you could pretend that it was a completely fresh slate. And I think that tapped into something in the American imagination about Manifest Destiny, of creating something out of nothing that really allowed it to surpass those older parts of the Southwest and attracted both new settlers in the early phase of the nineteenth century. It allowed that first generation to establish the idea that this place can just be tailored as necessary. You really see this in the years after World War Two, when Phoenix aggressively began courting industry.

So the entire story of how the region developed very much goes to its understanding of history—to its misunderstanding of its own history.

ZW: The tribes that established agricultural communities along the major rivers of the Southwest were flexible: they followed the cycles of the natural world, moving as necessary, digging new canals as necessary. But the Anglo settlers were committed to the inviolability, the immovability, of private property. So the water had to come to them and consistently. In 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation was established to “reclaim” the desert for agriculture and urban development. How did the emergence and consolidation of this new relationship to the natural world get us into the pickle we’re in now?

KP: The relationship to water is everything, and it’s no accident that the first dam that the Bureau of Reclamation built was outside of Phoenix in order to give the farmers of the Salt River a much more reliable supply of water.

To your point about flexible living, rivers flood, especially in the Southwest. It’s very common to encounter these cycles where you have a really bad flood—it destroys a bunch of stuff—and then the river barely runs for the next two years. And a more flexible approach to the land allowed people to recover more easily from that.

In Phoenix, you had this situation where, basically, it’s boom times in the 1880s on the river, so much so that a huge flood destroyed the first railroad bridge over the Salt River. Then a horrible drought in the 1890s, in which the actual population decreased a little bit. So there was a real sense that the river needed to be tamed if Phoenix was ever going to be what it wanted to be. So you get that first dam in the Mazatzal Mountains, which is the Roosevelt Dam, in 1911. And from then on, there is this continual cycle of building to the limit of the water you have available, surpassing it, having a crisis, and then having to seek out another water source. At first they were relying very heavily on pumping groundwater, but that very swiftly became untenable, so they built the first pipe to the Verde River, which is a tributary of the Salt. By about 1950—and I’m oversimplifying the history here—they had used up all the water they can siphon off from the Verde River, and that’s when the city of Phoenix makes a deal with the Bureau of Reclamation to be able to use that water in Lake Roosevelt. Even today, most of the buildings in the actual city of Phoenix get water from that reservoir.

That went well for around twenty years, and then once again, they were using too much water, pumping a bunch of groundwater—which is how you get the Central Arizona Project, a 330-something-mile aqueduct to the Colorado River. It’s one of the largest public works projects in the nation’s history, and it took some twenty years to be built. It was a very difficult and prolonged process to get the rest of the region to agree to let Arizona build it because they were obviously worried about the state’s propensity to use up whatever water source it got its hands on. But by 1993, both Phoenix and Tucson were connected to the Colorado River, allowing for the continued expansion of agriculture and suburban development.

So, basically, over the course of the twentieth century, Phoenix went from using up the Salt, to using up the Verde, to increasingly using up Arizona’s share of the Colorado River, all the while still pumping plenty of groundwater. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that’s an unsustainable way to form your society. And that’s why for the past twenty-five years, the region has been struggling with having overshot the water it has, so you have all these contentious negotiations over the Colorado, you have a lot of animosity between Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. So much of the history of the Southwest has been defined by pushing past the limits that the desert set—for both these cities and for the agricultural users around them—that you just inevitably get into a crisis.

ZW: You referred to it without naming it explicitly, but the Colorado River Compact is this decrepit consensus that governs water allotments throughout the seven states of the Colorado River Basin. And it is famously based on a grievous accounting error, one that way overestimated the amount of water that runs through the river every year, and so the basin states are now being forced to contend with this initial mistake as well as the effects of the ongoing drought. One of the perhaps less glamorous things you report on is one of the annual meetings of the signatories to the compact. What was that like?

KP: Every year there’s an annual conference of the Colorado River Water Users Association, and I went to the one that marked the one hundredth anniversary of the signing.

This was coming off several really bad water years in a row: the level of water in Lake Mead was lower than it had ever been, and the Bureau of Reclamation already had made mandatory cuts to the water that both Arizona and Nevada were able to divert from the river. California was not subjected to any cuts because that was part of the deal for letting Arizona build the Central Arizona Project.

What troubles me is that there’s not a deeper interrogation of the attitudes toward growth that got us into this mess.

It was a very odd event, because it was held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Like most conferences, there was a series of relatively boring panels conducted by various people from across the region talking about the problems they’re facing, the things they’re doing in their communities—but the real action was happening concurrently with the public-facing program. Each state that the Colorado, or one of its major tributaries, runs through has a governor’s delegate who negotiates new agreements about how to split the water. And so those seven people—along with officials from the Bureau of Reclamation—were locked in a room down the hall from the main convention stuff trying to work out what was going to happen in the next year because the situation was so critical. Among the things they had to consider was what they’d do if they had another really bad water year and, for instance, the levels got to a point where Glen Canyon Dam stops being able to generate power.

But the only real public version of that came on I think what may have been the second or third day of the conference when, in the big grand hall, all seven of the delegates sat at a table and a moderator asked them questions about what was going on. And it was really fascinating to see the structural dynamics of the Colorado River Basin personified, where you had the four so-called “upper basin” states, those four commissioners, complaining about the lower basin, and then in the lower basin, you had Arizona and California pointing fingers at each other, which is literally what they’ve been doing since 1923.

To me, the only real voice of reason was the negotiator from Nevada, John Entsminger, who’s a very plain-spoken dude who kept talking about how what we’re confronting now is only the tip of the iceberg. I believe the Colorado has lost about 20 percent of its annual flow since the compact was signed. Projections are that it might lose another 20 percent in the next forty or fifty years. And so he was really making the point that we simply have to use less water. We can’t keep shuffling around allotments, arguing about who has the rights to what; we just have to use less—and especially when it comes to agriculture, which uses as much as 80 percent of the water in the basin.

So what Entsminger was saying was basically that forty million people live in this basin and rely on this water. It’s insane to think that these cities are going to go without water so we can keep growing alfalfa—which was not a message anyone wanted to hear.

ZW: The big headlines that came out of that conference in particular involved Senator Mark Kelly, who floated the idea of a huge desalination plant in Mexico, which would require an obscene amount of fossil fuel in order to produce a comparatively small amount of water. He’s one in a long line of elected officials enamored with pie-in-the-sky schemes—anything to keep the economy growing.

KP: It was so interesting talking to Senator Kelly because here, again, was this sense that we need an engineering solution to this problem. And he even said that we know we can build aqueducts, we know we can build desalination plants. We just need the will to do it. And to me, it was so clear that this is just the latest iteration of looking further afield for another source of water. Okay, we used up the Colorado—let’s go to the Sea of Cortez and build a desalination plant, let’s build a pipeline to the Mississippi. A generation ago, they were talking about building an aqueduct to the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest, and the book Cadillac Desert talks about how absolutely insane that proposal was.

It’s the same pattern repeating itself when, to me, the actual solution is obvious: we need to use less water, and we need to use it more efficiently. We need to grow different types of plants in the desert than we currently do. There is enough water for the people who live in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, to keep living there. We just need to use it better.

ZW: You end the book proper at Teravalis, a planned thirty-seven-thousand-acre development in the far West Valley of metropolitan Phoenix. When it’s complete, it will have room for over three hundred thousand residents. Recently, the state modeled the next one hundred years of water consumption and found “a total unmet demand” of 4.4 million acre-feet, meaning that homes that have already been built could run out of water well before the end of the century, let alone the ones that are under construction now or will soon be. Boosters argue that we can decouple economic and demographic growth from water consumption—but can we?

KP: Theoretically, it’s possible. But I have seen very few indications that there’s the public will to actually make the necessary investments. Las Vegas is a case study of what could be done: they recycle 40 percent of all the water they take out of Lake Mead, which has allowed the city to literally double in size without using more water than they did in the 1990s. So it’s possible, but it’s also somewhat of an accident of geography that Las Vegas is next door to the nation’s largest reservoir. The engineering gets a lot more complex when you’re Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and you’re taking the water from much further away, recycling it, and then pumping it back into people’s houses. In Vegas, all the treated wastewater gets pushed back into a natural wash that returns it to the reservoir; it’s much easier.

Los Angeles is spending $8 billion on a project that will allow it to recycle all of its wastewater. San Diego is spending about $5 billion. I think both of those are supposed to be done by about 2035—a decade from now. To me, that is promising, and pretty necessary. I know Phoenix has a similar project in mind, but there are not firm plans for it yet. All of that is the good news, that these big cities recognize the crisis they’re facing and are actually spending money to fix it.

What troubles me is that there’s not a deeper interrogation of the attitudes toward growth that got us into this mess. We already know that metro Phoenix has way overshot its ability to sustain itself with the water it has if it keeps expanding the way places like Teravalis—which is in the city of Buckeye—intend to. Buckeye currently has a population of around one hundred thousand people and has dreams of becoming bigger than Phoenix. It has annexed more land than San Diego. And they get their water from pumping it out of the ground. So urban centers getting to the same water efficiency of Vegas simply isn’t going to cut it when you have these delusional plans in the suburbs and exurbs. That’s where my skepticism of decoupling comes in. There has to be a more sensible approach to growth than Arizona has displayed in literally its entire history.

ZW: When I think of water—and especially its lack—in the Southwest, my mind also goes to the thousands of migrants who’ve died, many of dehydration and heat exposure, trying to pass into the United States. You dedicate an entire chapter to efforts to assist them. Could you talk a bit about the legal challenges they faced, and might face moving forward, under a second Trump administration, when an already terrible situation will presumably get worse?

KP: I talk about the history of migrant aid in the book, which I kind of pinpoint to starting in the 1980s with the Sanctuary Movement, which began in Tucson. I particularly talk about this pastor, John Fife, at a Presbyterian Church on the south side of the city and the formative role he played in the sanctuary movement, and how that really spread nationwide. That was the last time when you actually saw some semblance of a compassionate federal policy for refugees—I mean, it was under George H. W. Bush that we got the creation of temporary protected status for people coming from El Salvador, from Nicaragua—which has since been expanded to cover Haitians and people from Venezuela.

If there’s a cure for the Southwest Syndrome, it is rejecting individualism and embracing communalism.

Today, migrant aid is mostly done by either nonprofits or churches. All of this stuff is done on a shoestring budget. This is something that governments in other countries do themselves. The European Union pays for this. For instance, when you’re talking about migrants coming into Greece or Italy, there are EU agencies that facilitate a modicum of care for migrants, in addition to international aid groups. The fact that we as a country spend some $17 billion a year on policing the border and basically no money on humanitarian assistance is unconscionable to me. But to get into the point of what happens under Trump. Part of me does not expect a radical change from what we’ve been seeing. I think the rhetoric is much more heated, obviously, but I don’t know that the border will be any different for the next four years than it was for the last four. What I am scared of is the promise of mass deportations. I don’t think it’s possible to deport eleven million people, but the effort to do even a tenth of that will be so invasive: going into people’s homes, where they work, going into schools. The kind of detention facilities that will have to be built. It’s nightmarish.

ZW: The book went to press before the election, but the outcome probably wasn’t much of a surprise to you. For years, pollsters and pundits have argued that places like Arizona, given their racial makeups, are always just about to become Democratic strongholds. But as you wrote in a recent essay for The Baffler, “Demographics have never been destiny.” Why do you think it is that the pundits keep finding themselves disappointed?

KP: The problem is the same one that touches everything that’s wrong with the contemporary Democratic Party, which is the predominance of extremely well-educated people from comfortable backgrounds making all these decisions and I think the lack of attention to working-class issues. It’s become some sort of a canard, but it’s real. The idea that demographics are destiny only makes sense if you’re someone who lives in a multicultural, progressive environment that reinforces the idea that multiculturalism is itself progressive. There is a real lack of interest in what people, both because of their racial or ethnic background and in spite of it, are left out of that governing class.

I think the idea that the demographics of Arizona mean it’s eventually going to vote like California fails to take into consideration just how much less educated Arizonans are, how much less money they make—the basic things that divide people who live in South Phoenix or South Texas or Las Cruces from someone who might have the exact same demographic profile but live in Los Angeles or San Francisco. That is the thing that we have to reconnect with.

But I do think that in New Mexico—and maybe I’m just looking at it through turquoise-tinted eyes since it’s my home state—the Democrats get it. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country, routinely ranks at the bottom on every metric that you can think of, and is also, you know, 60 percent quote, unquote minority. But there is a very robust working-class politics: you’ve had, over the past few years, huge investments in making college free for all residents. I believe they spent about one billion dollars on that, $200 million on affordable housing, expanding pre-K—all of these like real, material things meant to help provide opportunity to poor people. And I think that is why New Mexico has remained a blue state. People act as if it’s going to stay that way no matter what. But it’s important to remember the state went for George W Bush in 2004. [Republican] Susana Martinez was recently the governor for eight years.

New Mexico has had a back-and-forth electoral history—just like Arizona and Nevada. But I think today, Democrats there understand what people need and are trying to serve them. I get worried when I look at the current crop of Democrats in Arizona. We talked about Mark Kelly, but you look at governor Katie Hobbs, you look at Senator Ruben Gallego. They all represent this kind of technocratic, business-friendly politics that has always been dominant in Arizona, regardless of party.

ZW: Economic growth is all that matters to them. This is sort of tied at one point in the book where you ask: “Could those who have sought to master the Sonoran Desert with air conditioning and aqueducts really call it home?” And so my question is, can they? In other words, is there a cure to the Southwest Syndrome?

KP:  I do think there is. It’s about understanding and accepting that any environment has its limits, and the limits of the desert are much stricter than they are in other ecologies. You can’t live the same way in the Sonoran Desert, the Chihuahuan Desert, or the Mojave Desert that you do in very temperate places.

And that looks like some of the water recycling projects I mentioned earlier—but it really means much more dense living. It’s no accident that the ancient pueblos are basically apartment buildings. Living together in a more communal way is a way to make do with less, and I would love to see the cities I write about in the book become much denser, to invest in public transit, to invest in public housing. To follow a model that looks much less like the kind of sprawling Western city that we all kind of hate and is closer to how people have lived in the desert for millennia—not just in the Southwest but around the world.

If there’s a cure for the Southwest Syndrome, it is rejecting individualism and embracing communalism. That sense of community care and community uplift.