By the time Leopold wrote those words in the 1940’s, he knew he was writing an elegy, not a paean.  And this continued in his writings on the same page in the same chapter and went on for fifteen more pages with a two page list of reference materials for the readers continued curiosity.

“The river mighty enough to support a jungle in the desert had already lost its freedom, not to the Gulf of California into which it emptied but to California farmers and the City of Los Angeles.”

Today, we live in an obsolete megalopolis-wasteland of urban sprawl.  The urban sprawl spans across the left over mine tailings of the ‘extraction era’, from the voracious mining of precious metals of gold and silver and the left over industrial corridor of the vast upheaval of Arizona State lands in the ravenous industrial mining of copper; over cattle-grazed and over-chemically poisoned lands from massive cotton field cultivation. 

The net result of which Arizona now has no natural forest lands and is in denial over beleaguered state wide river systems that have all but died;  all from vast cover up of the mining extraction era, and now the unchecked real estate development creating the monstrous urban sprawl of the megalopolis of “Glendale-SunCity-Phoenix-Scottsdale-Mesa-Tucson”.  This has resulted in a deadly cycle of “drought-fire-flood” situations which exists today across the entire State of Arizona. Investors and developers can no longer just say, “We just want to buy land and make money”.

That statement should be carefully guarded these days, when it can be proven that all who live in the great State of Arizona, now live in a State (the State of Arizona) where 90% of what was once lush primeval forest lands, is now ‘a desert of mine-tailings’; we are living in the “remnants of civilized greed” on our way to extinction of our culture (way of life) as we have come to know and enjoy it.

In speaking to the veritable landslide of development that resulted in the largest transformation of land mass in the history of the West, Leopold, in speaking to this “Human Ecology of the Sonoran Desert” points out:

“In 1936, however, a white wall of more than three million cubic yards of concrete rising 726 feet against black rock halted the river in its tracks.  Erected to prevent floods and to provide hydroelectric power, Hoover Dam turned the Colorado into a tame ditch for the last 300 miles of its course to the sea. The Colorado and its tributaries, along with the other major rivers that brought water to the Sonoran Desert, such as the Yaqui and the Mayo, became ghosts of the past, victims of the twentieth-century, carcasses of sand whose lifeblood had been diverted into cotton fields, copper mines, and vast, sprawling cities.