To grow or not to grow? Take this with a giant pile of salt.

One of the great questions of our time is: shall we continue to grow?

I’m referring to our civilization and its massive, complex footprint, which we can measure in many ways. Will we keep growing our economy, making more goods, services, and money? Will we keep growing our total population? And will we decide to keep growing in areas where growth is very difficult?

I’ve been mulling over these questions for years and have a book proposal to fire off shortly, but today I wanted to share one example for discussion. It’s about the American state of Arizona and how economic and population growth, a/k/a development, is running smack into the natural barrier of not enough water.

(Note: this is a quick post written in haste, as I race between addressing a number of issues and crises. I’m going to touch too quickly and with too much generalization on giant, complex topics. I’ve written about them before and will say more later.)

It’s well known that Arizona is very arid. Big chunks of it are desert. Yet for years people keep moving into the state, putting up buildings, expanding towns and cities, developing and developing on the very knife edge of sustainability. This is well known, I think.