A resilient Tucson will have – at a minimum – the capacity to produce our minimum life support services indefinitely. That is – Water, Food, Cooling, Communications and Emergency Services. To be sustainable in the long run, requires much more. It also requires we don’t stumble at the starting gate.
The modern world is electric. No important aspect of our daily lives can continue to function, if there is no electricity. And that loss will continue for as long as there is no power.
We are unprepared for a power failure that lasts more than a few days. A week without power is a week without water and fuel pumping, A/C and refrigeration for food and medicine, and after 72 hours, the loss of civilian communication and hospitals. The most likely scenarios to cause this include a combination of “aridification”, heatwaves, fires and drought.
What would Tucson be like, after a week without food or water, but with a million guns?
Under our current situation, if we experience a prolonged power outage (≈week), the only basic resources we would have for many days, would be whatever we share with our neighbors. Because if we don’t share, you won’t be able to keep what you have, if starving, armed gangs come looking for food. And we won’t share, if we don’t care for each other. As an emergency, stop-gap measure, this is not so bed – if we can figure out how to care for each other.
Should we care? Yes! Should we plan for collapse? No! We should plan to make sure it doesn’t happen. That’s where the sharing and caring comes in.
What could a sustainable Tucson be like? Some of the biggest determinants are – How much can we do with our water? And what do we choose to do with our water?
If we capture water at the edge of the roof or street, we can capture up to 80% of all the rain that falls in a year. (If we wait until it reaches our rivers, we can capture as little as 5%) Factoring in a much lower percent run off from yards, about 30% of all the rain that falls could be used. That’s about 29 billion gallons over the whole metro area, or about 60 million gallons per residential square mile.
The catch is – we have to use much of it for trees, and store the rest in storage facilities that can store millions of gallons in an hour. There is enough rain in an average square mile in Tucson, to support 5000 desert-adapted street trees both in and at the edge of all residential streets in Tucson. And every neighborhood could also have thousands of conventional fruit and nut trees, by using other local, sustainable water sources (gray- and condensate-water)
Where could we put thousands more rain-watered trees per square mile? In hundreds of traffic-calming chicanes, circles, diverters and pocket parks. We can make our neighborhoods into Beautiful, Safe, Shaded, and Fun Park Neighborhoods that are shaded by a city-wide, rain-watered food forest.
Our future, if we choose not to waste it , is to live in a rain-watered food forest that can transforms Tucson into a network of beautiful, safe, shaded and fun park neighborhoods. It’s entirely up to us.