Leopold had no idea that in a mere fifty years from the time he wrote this that the majority of the entire population of the State of Arizona would be living in the left-over mine tailings of a by-gone “extraction-era”, leaving a barren landscape of urban sprawl with little to no solutions on how to support such a monster.

“Because Apaches, Yavapais, and River Humans resisted European and Euro-American conquest so successfully for two centuries, Euro-American impact upon the desert environment was intermittent rather than sustained.

That all changed in the 1880's, when the Era of Extraction began. In 1877, the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Fort Yuma on the Colorado River. Three years later, after its largely Chinese crews had laid tracks across some of the hottest, driest terrain in North America, the railroad steamed into Tucson. At a gala celebration on March 20, 1880, Mexican intellectual Carlos Velasco raised a toast to the "irresistible torrent of civilization and prosperity" that would follow the steel rails. Six years later, when Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles for the final time, the frontier came to an end.

Suddenly, Arizona and Sonora were safe for global capital, which poured in from eastern United States, California, and the British Isles, as the Southern Pacific and other railroads extended their arteries of commerce across deserts and mountains. Both Arizona and Sonora became extractive colonies of the industrial world, their natural resources ripped from the ground and shipped somewhere else for finishing, processing, and consuming. In Arizona, this was the era of the "Three C's," when cattle, copper, and cotton dominated the economy.”

The rest as they say is more history and it isn’t very good.  Arizona and the S.W. USA desert regions were once pristine wilderness regions, only able to be mass-populated and commercially inhabited due to the artificial enhancements of greed driven “simulated luxury”; with the advent of “air-conditioning” in the early fifties, which provided the gateway for millions to access the once inaccessible deserts.

What followed with the installation of an over-abundance of water and energy sucking golf-courses and luxury hotels came the vast urban sprawl that won’t quit until it runs out of breathable air and water.  We already have zero forest lands in the State, other than the artificially planted ‘Babbitt tree farm’ of the Flagstaff region.