Kyle Paoletta
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Kyle Paoletta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Within a couple of decades, the residential population has grown to the point where they can no longer pump groundwater because they're using the dam water for irrigation. People are drinking pumped water. Very quickly, it becomes silty and undrinkable. So they build a pipeline to the Verde River, which is sort of the next tributary north, and that allows them to expand again
which works until the 1950s when they suddenly need much more water than the Verde can provide. And you actually have a situation where the newspaper, the Arizona Republic, has a headline that is basically, Phoenix is going to run out of water a week from now.
Like, there is a genuine crisis that I believe is actually on the 4th of July when this headline runs that, like, we are imminently going to run out of water. And very luckily, there is a massive rainstorm that follows, and they just kind of luck out of the crisis. But that experience leads them to say, okay, we need to, like... Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.
And this is why today almost all of residential Phoenix used to be farms. And all of that, the water that supplies the subdivisions is water from the Roosevelt Reservoir that was primarily irrigating citrus and cotton. So that allows the next growth spurt. And then we get into the 70s and they recognize again, we're growing so fast, we don't have enough water.
And that's how you get the Central Arizona Project, which is the 300-mile aqueduct to the Colorado River, allows Arizona to take advantage of its share of that river that it broke up with the other states. And that's completed in, I believe, 1993, and it connects both Phoenix and Tucson to the Colorado. And we are now...
for 30 years later have reached the point at which it's like, oh, still not really enough water.
Well, I think Powell is such a fascinating figure because he's the one who first charged the Colorado for the United States and helps facilitate the Arab settlement by saying, here's where the canyons are, here's where Lee's Ferry is, the premier place to cross the river. But after that experience, he gives a very famous speech where he basically says that
there is not enough water to sustain an East Coast-style population here, that this is a very rugged environment with very limited resources. And I believe he gives that speech in the 1880s or the 1890s. It's before the Bureau of Reclamation is founded, and it is very quickly dismissed by the kind of interest of boosters who, you know,
Definitely part of this story is the land grab that was basically made possible all of the settlement of the West, which, you know, we can talk a little bit about the history of Albuquerque, where I'm from, which was very much a... a lot of Anglo entrepreneurs buying up land very cheaply.
And then having done that, they were able to get the railroad to come to Albuquerque and then see a huge profit because they owned all this land that suddenly was very valuable because it was next to a railroad depot.
Yeah. And just to make that point even more, the Homestead Act is rightly very famous for allowing the colonization of Kansas, Nebraska, the Midwest, the Great Plains. But in order to get people to even want the land in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, they have to pass another act that's called the Arid Lands Act, which doubles the amount of land that a homesteader is able to claim if it's arid.
Because it was this idea of like, this is how much the federal government wanted this colonization project to succeed, that they literally were giving away as much land as they possibly could.
And hence why you then have this big federal investment in things like a Hoover Dam, because suddenly you have all these people who sort of are expecting that the government is going to make good of, you know, you wanted us to live here. We need some water now.
Well, and speaking of New Mexico, part of the story there is Spanish colonialism where you have the Spanish first coming and coming in 1598 to create the permanent colony and then Santa Fe is established in 1610. This is 20 years before Boston is settled. This is before Jamestown. And you have this system where the Spanish crown is making vast land grants to Spanish settlers.
And to this day, many of those land grants are still legally valid. And there are families who can trace back to the 17th century that there's this chain. But in New Mexico, it's possible to have these vast ranches. And I would bet good money that that rancher who you met, the origin of his ranch was probably as a Spanish land grant. Yeah. Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah, so I mentioned the cliff dwellings before that are in kind of the highlands of the Colorado Plateau. It's believed that many of the pueblos today are descended from those cliff dwellings, which were initially very defensible kind of positions, that they're in canyons and have very limited entry, but they also have pretty limited water.
If you visit Chaco Canyon today, you will very swiftly realize how dry it is. And so there were some periods of a special aridity that drove a lot of those people to the rivers. And so you have these dozens of villages along the Rio Grande and some of these tributaries. And they practice a style of agriculture that's somewhat similar to what's happening in the Sonoran Desert.
But I think the most important thing is that it's very flexible, that they'll have a pueblo, which if people are unfamiliar, is usually made out of adobe blocks, which is made of mud and straw. It's very much building with the materials of the place that you live in. And those are often quite far from the river or at a real remove from the river.
And then there are sort of irrigation canals and somewhat more temporary farms that acknowledge that there's going to be a flood eventually. All of this land will be submerged. There's no point in building a house here because it's going to get destroyed because it's made of mud. So many of the pueblos are actually a decent distance from the river.
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