Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Removable and Place-Based Economies:
Alternativ e Futures for America's Deserts
Kim Sorvig
CONTENTS
16.1 Ghost Towns and Their Beneficiaries ........................................................................... 287
16.2 Sustaining the Desert? .................................................................................................... 288
16.3 Resources versus Places .................................................................................................. 289
16.4 Wholesale History ........................................................................................................... 289
16.5 Amenity Migrants and Resource Refugees ................................................................. 291
16.6 Place-Based versus Extractive Communities ............................................................... 293
16.7 Removable versus Place-Based Resources ................................................................... 295
16.8 Mining, Munificence, and Maintenance ...................................................................... 298
16.8.1 Ajo, Arizona .......................................................................................................... 298
16.8.2 Yuma, Arizona ...................................................................................................... 300
16.9 Exporting the Sky for “Green” Energy ......................................................................... 301
16.10 “Exportive Economics” Elephant .................................................................................. 303
References ..................................................................................................................................... 306
16.1 Ghost Towns and Their Beneficiaries
Two telling photographs, from very different desert locations, introduce Wescoat and
Johnston's Political Economies of Landscape Change . 1 The contrasting images form a sad
and eloquent summary of removable-resource regions. The resource in question in these
visual case studies is, unsurprisingly, water (Figure 16.1a and b). Figure 16.1a shows a
ghost town called Roan Creek in the upper Colorado River drainage basin. From this
vicinity, water has been removed, and along with it, human life. Wescoat's photo shows
the abandoned Roan Creek Community Center, its surroundings eroded by footsteps
of a vanished population, its backdrop a towering mesa that must have been a land-
mark even to casual visitors. This was a Place, but exporting its resources has led to its
abandonment.
Figure 16.1b shows the beneficiary of the removal of Roan Creek's water: Las Vegas,
Nevada. Here, a city-block-sized fountain forms the foreground for an entirely artificial
place: a mishmash of architectural borrowings, simulated boulders, and imported palm
trees. If the casino landscape ever had any genuine landmarks or real sense of place, those
have been overwritten by Place-on-Steroids. Las Vegas, emblematic of most desert cities,
is built and maintained with resources—water, gasoline and asphalt, hydroelectricity,
cement, transplanted trees—removed from Roan Creek and a thousand other places like it.
287
 
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