For obvious reasons, water conservation is also a big deal in Arizona. Phoenix and Tucson get their water from the Colorado, and we have to share it with Los Angeles. People have sunk so many wells in the last 100 years that formerly perennial rivers like the Santa Cruz are now completely dry except during flash floods, and the ecosystems that those rivers supported have changed radically. The water table is slowly recovering now, but it's nowhere near what it was.
The upside is that things like rainwater harvesting, landscaping with native vegetation, composting toilets, etc., are already trendy here. Grade school children learn about aquaponics. The Tohono O'odham cultivate and sell a variety of bean that is one of the most drought-tolerant crops in the world. And in fact, even a desert city like Tucson could be completely sustained by the rain that falls on it. (Well, maybe not the golf courses.) Until recently, the city treated rainwater as waste to be disposed of as quickly as possible. But that's changing, too.
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The upside is that things like rainwater harvesting, landscaping with native vegetation, composting toilets, etc., are already trendy here. Grade school children learn about aquaponics. The Tohono O'odham cultivate and sell a variety of bean that is one of the most drought-tolerant crops in the world. And in fact, even a desert city like Tucson could be completely sustained by the rain that falls on it. (Well, maybe not the golf courses.) Until recently, the city treated rainwater as waste to be disposed of as quickly as possible. But that's changing, too.