Excerpt
IN the 1880s, the legal and planning institutions of the American Southwest were adequately described by the old adage that there “was no law west of the Pecos.” Over the ensuing century, urban development in the western Sunbelt stimulated deep concern for the quantity and quality of available water. These developments led to public policy supporting prior appropriation rights for apportionment of the resource, designation of national forests to protect watersheds, creation of the world's most elaborate system of high dams for the region's river systems, construction of long-distance canal systems, and innovative groundwater management approaches (2, 4, 13).
Rapid urbanization in the last three decades has brought to light an additional problem: management of the urban structure in conflict with channel and near-channel environments of rivers with unpredictable behavior. In many areas the problem of too little water becomes a problem of too much, or at least too much in the wrong places. Flooding and erosion now are widely recognized water problems in a region heretofore concerned mainly with obtaining as much water is possible.
The western Sunbelt defined
The geographic definition of the western Sunbelt depends upon the user' …
Footnotes
William L. Graf is a professor in the Department of Geography, Arizona State University, Tempe, 85287.
- Copyright 1988 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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