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Originally Posted by Raellus
You've obviously given this a lot of thought and done your homework.
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I have. And I continue to learn. There’s so much to learn…
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Originally Posted by Raellus
Anyway, I don't want you to think that I'm ragging on your work. It's just hard not to think about this kind of stuff when I'm living in S. Arizona farm country and involved in T2K.
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The challenge is so enormous that when I first came up with the idea of having Fort Huachuca survive the Mexican invasion, I threw the whole concept out on the grounds that water shortages would cause the place to fall apart.
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Originally Posted by Raellus
I'm just very doubtful that Tucson could sustain even close to a quarter of its current population without the CAP water.
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I won’t tell you the things you already know, Rae. However, few of our readers have spent any time in southern Arizona, so they should be brought up to speed. The Central Arizona Project is an aqueduct that brings water from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. The Tucson extension was completed by the time I was assigned to Huachuca in ’94, but for reasons I don’t remember Tucson didn’t draw water from CAP at that time. All of Tucson’s water came from groundwater, which is one reason the Santa Cruz River (I think it’s the Santa Cruz) is dry most of the year and has lost its riparian community. Now the city is watered with a mix of groundwater and water from CAP.
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Originally Posted by Raellus
As I drive to work most days, I see farmhands dropping sections of plastic tubing into the canals to feed water to their fields. Once that canal water dries up, I don't see any way for crops out here to survive. Then there's the matter of fertilizer and pesticides. I get buzzed by cropdusters about once a week. It's a pretty cool experience until I remember about all the chemicals that they're dumping just meters away. Once again, I'm no expert, but I've read a few things about farming here in the U.S. in general bemoaning the overuse of fertilizers on large "industrial" farms. I wonder how much fertilizers the farmers here in Marana use. I wonder how much yields out here would drop if they weren't using chemical fertilizer and pesticides.
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Cotton isn’t going to make it. Those fields probably won’t make it, although I couldn’t swear a way wouldn’t be found to get well water to the surface and substitute human labor for everything a combine would do. (Combines are pretty specific, though, aren’t they? I really don’t know how hard it would be to use cotton machinery for wheat or oats.) You’re absolutely right that the fertilizer problem is real. In a nutshell, modern agribusiness feeds each crop with petroleum products. Everything the crop needs except water and sunshine gets sprayed onto the soil. In many places, the soil is so devoid of organic matter that microorganisms won’t grow in it. It’s scary. Industrial agriculture has a lot in common with hydroponics.
Tucson would be up that proverbial creek, except that by sheer luck the city is located near a place with food, good leadership, a large body of armed troops, and knowledge. Okay, it’s not all luck. I’ve taken some of the Tucsonan culture into account. When I was living in Sierra Vista, which is basically from the last year of peace through the nuclear exchange, Tucson was a very different place from Phoenix. Water consumption per capita in Tucson was half that of Phoenix. Half. The city knew it was living in the desert. Setting aside the unsustainable withdrawal of groundwater, the city generally didn’t want to live like Phoenix, which seems to try desperately to have all of the benefits of desert living without any of the consequences.
Bottom line up front, Tucson endures a lot of changes between 1996 and 2001. The pre-war population diminishes by about a third—and that includes in the final tally a large number of refugees from the Valley of the Sun and elsewhere. There’s some large-scale violence during the Feb-Apr 98 period that results in tens of thousands of deaths and the loss of a lot of housing stock. However, the survivors make the adjustment to intensive gardening for essentially the same reasons Sierra Vista does. In the first place, they have to if they want to eat. Secondly, the food stores at Huachuca give Tucson the time to make the adaptation, albeit just barely. On the third hand, the government controls the electricity, the wells, and the rations. The armaments of the populace count for something, but the police and the troops develop itchy trigger fingers that result in a lot of yahoos meeting their maker.
The most important factor might be what happens before the Exchange. Unlike Phoenix, which responds to her vulnerability by ignoring it for as long as possible, Tucson asks uncomfortable questions from the start. It’s a minor cultural thing that pays big dividends. As Fort Huachuca develops her contingency research, planning, and preparations, Tucson takes notice and gets involved. The local media responds to the periodic nuclear scares by running stories on how people will cope. Schools take the lead with intensive gardening projects that receive media attention. The whole idea of Victory Gardens comes back in a major way in Tucson—again, with support from the media, local government, and Fort Huachuca. While the city is in no way, shape, or form self-sustaining at the TDM, the psychological groundwork has been laid in Tucson for using every scrap of land within the city boundaries for hand-watered intensive gardening—and other practices. Without the psychological prep before the Exchange, without the high school projects, civic projects, and Victory Gardens, without the presence of troops (both Army and Air Force), without the food stores at Huachuca, without the seed stores at Huachuca, without the existing groundwater infrastructure, without the ability to adapt to moving drums of well water by hand-drawn carts to gardens, without the very active participation of the University of Arizona, without without without… Without a host of factors, Tucson’s narrow squeak into survival would have gone disastrously the other way. As it is, a visitor from 1994 would find Tucson’s rhythms of life virtually unrecognizable in 2001. About the only things that are the same are the skyline and some of the infrastructure.
A lot of people end up getting moved out of Tucson, by the way. Sierra Vista is cooler and wetter (!). The towns of Cochise County can absorb more people, and there is an ever-present need for the land to be gardened around the small towns.
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Originally Posted by Raellus
For large-scale mortality, the Pneumonic variant is the way to go.
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Consider your suggestion unabashedly stolen. Y’har!