A race against the car.

• Author: Hubbard, Neutopia aka Libby
• Position: Biodevastation - 'Making Sense of Place - Phoenix: The Urban Desert' - Movie review

Our government is conducting a war against drugs, is it? Let them go after petroleum. Talk about a destructive high! You put some of this stuff in your car and you can go a hundred miles an hour, run over the neighbor's dog, and tear the atmosphere to smithereens. --Kurt Vonnegut From the documentary film, "Making Sense of Place--Phoenix: The Urban Desert," there is much to learn about what the future could hold for this region of the world if developers continue to bulldoze the precious Sonoran Desert. The film's narrator stated that within the next 10 years, Phoenix will draw 1 million new people.

At the time the 2003 film was made, one acre per hour of desert land was being bulldozed to accommodate this massive growth. There were 3,300 new homes per month being built and 150 lane-miles of road being constructed each year. Phoenix is a car-dependent city which, of course, means it is a city dependent on foreign oil.

Phoenix now has a total of 3.3 million people, making it the 6th largest city in the United States. To cover all the water requirements of this megalopolis, a canal system was engineered to divert 1/8 of the Colorado River for its needs. Even though urban growth seems limitless, the resource of water is not. But the limited future of that resource doesn't seem to faze developers, and the politicians who support them, as colossal growth continues.

What attracts people to Phoenix is partly its sunny climate and the advertisements of developers like Del Webb who have manufactured a lifestyle of "resort style desert living" as part of their marketing propaganda. Using marketing research, they found that most people everywhere want the same things: good schools, quality parks and fun things to do. They don't just build houses; they build communities. Their newest development, Anthem, has 50,000 homes built on virgin desert, and is 35 miles from downtown Phoenix.

This is called leapfrog development. Developers go where the land is cheap. They get subsidies from the government for the cost of building the infrastructure needed to construct communities in new areas of desert. Since the federal and state governments also subsidize water costs, water bills are still misleadingly low for this arid environment. And since migrant labor is inexpensive in Arizona because of the illegal Mexican labor force, developers can continue to build and make huge profits. In developments like Anthem, golf courses are designated as open spaces. People move from parking garage to parking garage, commuting an average of two hours a day, never having time on a daily basis to get in touch with the desert.

Even though the Sonoran desert is the second most diverse ecosystem in the world after the rainforest, housing patterns continue to ruin the land. People want direct access to the Sonoran desert and this pushes developers to seek land on the city's edges to give homeowners the open space vistas that they want. But what happens, of course, is that since everyone wants this connection with the desert, the fringe eventually becomes new suburbs with traffic jams. Thus, everyone loses the natural treasure. Architectural critic James Howard Kunstler writes in The...