In the not-too-distant past, the American Southwest was a place that fed the imagination of non-residents. The sun, the desert, expansive canyons and gorgeous vistas have drawn visitors and retirees for decades. The Southwest is generally defined as Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Nevada, California and Texas, and the attraction is predictable – warm weather, adobe architecture, cacti and grand canyons.

But for author and essayist Kyle Paoletta, the history and ecology of the Southwest runs much deeper than these stereotypical selling points.

“It was seeing how limited the view of the Southwest was for people in the Northeast, and how limited the touchpoints were,” he says about the impetus behind writing his first book, American Oasis. 

Paoletta knows the Southwest well. Having grown up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he eventually moved to the Northeast, where he now lives. But over the last few years, Paoletta took a deep dive back into his roots in the Southwest, visiting the five major cities of the region – Las Vegas, El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix and Albuquerque. The result of his observations and interviews is American Oasis, a book that is many things – a memoir, a deep historical narrative, and a look at the ecology and climate crises of the region.

“They’re the five cities whose ecology is purely shaped by being in the Chihuahuan Desert, the Mojave Desert and the Sonoran Desert. They share the need to contend with this really extreme environment,” Paoletta says.

Kyle Paoletta’s author photo. Credit: Amy Reichenbach / Penguin Random House

The book touches on settlement history, stretching far back in time to some of the earliest Indigenous populations that settled in the area. By looking into the past while also digging into what’s happening today, American Oasis provides insight into how these cities might survive in the years ahead, as the world gets hotter and as water resources become scarcer.

“We’ve kind of overshot the ecological limits,” Paoletta says, “and we’re being forced into the same position that Indigenous people in the Southwest have been in for millennia, which is: How do we live within our limits? I think the difference now is that we have the technology for many more people to live within limits than even a century ago.”

The Five Cities

Paoletta observes that the five cities face similar threats. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, it’s the heat, and in those two cities, the extremes of heat can vary drastically depending on the part of the city. El Paso’s main threat is the scarcity of water, which Paoletta notes is true across much of Texas. And Tucson and Albuquerque, also desert cities, suffer more from what he calls the built environment.

He notes that Phoenix would not have experienced its explosive growth — five million people spread over 1,200 square miles of sprawl — without the advent of air conditioning.

“Air conditioning allowed for the kind of importation of a lifestyle from the Midwest, from the Northeast, right into this extremely hot place,” he says. “What we’re living with now is the consequences of that, of using that technology to overcome the heat. Most of the electricity in Arizona comes from burning natural gas. There are people who spend $500 a month on their electricity bill in the summer.”

It could seem that there’s no limit to the growth of air conditioning units, as a 2018 report from the International Energy Agency predicts that greenhouse gas emissions from A/C units will nearly double over the next 25 years. Does Paoletta see any alternatives to the refreshing – and sometimes life-saving – use of air conditioning?

“If you think about the classic building in the Southwest, it’s an adobe structure made of mud, which is an incredible climate adaptation tool because it stays quite cool during the day and quite warm at night,” he says. “As much as we can just be changing the built environment using these more sustainable methods, we can be lowering how much electricity we use for air conditioning.”

“We need a wholesale reorientation of how we think about living in the desert,” he adds.

On the topic of water, Paoletta describes Las Vegas, one of the hottest and most populous of the desert cities. He writes:

The transformation of this arid anyplace into a global destination has always felt like a nifty trick. As if the whole city were a pop-up ad the country didn’t mean to click on.

However, Las Vegas also has one of the nation’s best-managed water systems.

“They have some most efficient water recycling system in the country,” Paoletta says. “They’ve managed to double the population without using any more water than they did in the 1990s.”

Paoletta tells the story of Patricia Mulroy, who was the head of the Las Vegas water utility responsible for overseeing the water system’s realignment. With shrewd political maneuvering, she began the process of recycling the water that the county took out of Lake Mead as the population exploded. This led to the creation of the River Mountains Water Treatment Facility, which can treat upwards of 300 million gallons of water per day and is partially run on solar power. She also led the construction of a “third straw” pipe near the bottom of Lake Mead to pump out water that, in times of scarcity, could otherwise not be reached.

But some people still believe that nature’s bounty is endless. A few years ago, Paoletta spoke to a real estate broker in Phoenix after the governor had instituted a moratorium on new residential construction that relies on groundwater.

“I remember calling her, and I think three times she told me, ‘I know the governor did that, but we’re not going to run out of water,’” Paoletta says. “And I had to say, there’s hydrologists who have looked at this and there is a limited amount and she said, ‘We’re not going to run out.’ And it was just like she was affirming that to herself. It was instructive to me of how deeply ingrained the belief is that we can just keep doing whatever and it’ll work out.”

American Oasis is a deeply researched look at the American Southwest from numerous enlightening angles. It seems appropriate to leave the final words to Paoletta, from his afterword:

As the climate crisis has drained away the Southwest’s stockpile of Colorado River water, the so-called bathtub ring around Lake Mead has become a Paleozoic metaphor for scarcity… what remains to be seen is what we do now that recycling and conservation technologies are making it possible to return to a system of living that respects the limitations of the landscape.

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