The Deep Ecology of Every Day Water in Phoenix Arizona

Paul Manski
03/17/2008

The Deep Ecology Of Every Day Water in Phoenix, Arizona

“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”

–King James Version, Isaiah 35:1



The vision of the prophet Isaiah was to imagine an abundant flowing stream of living water in the desert. The culture of the desert was a search for dependable water. The story of water in the desert is the story of life. This vision of bounty in the desert was also the vision of the Hohokam people living more than a thousand years ago in the Gila River valley. Hohokam is a Pima word meaning ‘the one’s who have gone’. They built a system of canals to bring water from the Gila River for their irrigated fields. Any one in Phoenix, Arizona is living upon the world of the Native Americans who have gone before us.

This researcher will explore the deep ecology of every day water in Phoenix, Arizona. Deep ecology is a way of understanding life as relationship and process. Our life is an interconnected web with a spiritual component. According to deep ecology a life fully lived is a spiritual life that includes an understanding of a spiritual matrix that exists in the plants, animals, birds and watersheds and the humans who participate in that life.

According to a story in the New York Times by Sam Roberts, March 20, 2008, “Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes Phoenix, swelled by 102,000 since 2006, making it the biggest gainer numerically.”…by population, in the United States. These 102,000 people are coming to live in an area that averages just 8 inches of rain in a year with daily maximum temperatures over 100 degrees from April through October. These people coming whether Latinos from Mexico and points south or Anglos from the north are coming to a place that is home to non-human life. Water is not only hydrogen and oxygen, it is the blood of mother earth.

Water is the most basic of human needs. The water that sustains life in the Valley of the Sun arrives here not by accident. This water flows by the ingenuity and vision of human design. Though this water flows by human design it still is to be regarded as sacred. This vision of life in the desert is built upon some of the same canals used by the Native Americans living here hundreds of years ago. The purpose of deep ecology is to develop a reverence and respect for this water even though it flows in a concrete man made canal.

The water arrives because it is stored in a series of dams along the Gila River Watershed. These dams built in the early1900’s along the Gila supply 20-25% of the water needs for the valley. This system of ground water pumping and storage facilities supplied the Valley’s growth through the early 1960’s. The majority of water for the valley’s 100,000 annual net growth population comes from a 337 mile system of dams, water pumping stations, tunnels and canals called the Central Arizona Project.

It was late 1980’s when water first arrived from the Colorado River flowing 300 miles to the west along the California/Arizona border.
The Valley of the Sun’s story begins 900 miles away in Wyoming at the foot of Down’s mountain. Snowmelt in the spring gathers in a series of lakes on the west side of the continental divide. The first of these lakes is Green River Lakes. According to deep ecology visualization of the watershed pathway leads to a realization of the spiritual component of water. So when bathing or showering imagine the path the water took to get here. You are without question washing your face with Wyoming snow melt.

These streams and mountain lakes come together to form the Green River which feeds into the Colorado. The Wind River range in back of Pinedale, Wyoming is the home of bear and elk. Their spirit to paraphrase Dogen is in the water. Practice feeling these beings and forces in the water.

The Central Arizona Project takes its water from a lake formed on the California/Arizona border. This lake is formed by a dam built across the Colorado River. This water travels in a man made canal across the state of Arizona to Phoenix and on to Tucson. This water though traveling in a concrete ditch is still earth juice. It is like bathing in the spiritual flow of joyful tears. It is a spiritual embryonic fluid that causes all life to quicken and sing. When one perceives the true nature of water the perception is understanding the true nature of the self.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 landmark study Silent Spring is credited with establishing that our human life is enmeshed with the world around us. Her book is understood to be the catalyst for the ecology movement and for helping bring about an ecological consciousness. However according to deep ecologists 1962 was not in any way significant.

Deep ecological insights are more like the revelations of Lord Sri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. In the Gita it is said that whenever the forces of darkness are greatest then in that moment will Lord Sri Krishna incarnate himself into the world. This is exactly the same as Christ as the Logos taking flesh and dwelling amongst us. The darkness today is an ecological darkness and the evil is to view the earth as a series of chemical relationships. The risen Christ is the living earth. As Dogen said, “Study the stone Buddha giving birth.”.

According to deep ecology this knowledge is always making itself known because the earth itself is the Christ. The earth is a living being. As the Dine people say, Nahasdan Nadle, the Changing woman, the white turquoise shell woman; These are names for your mother. These insights later were condensed by Bill Devall and George Sessions into a way of looking at the world called deep ecology. This researcher will examine the life blood of Phoenix, Arizona –water, from the perspective of deep ecology with respect to the ecological self. This researcher will trace the path of water as it flows from Wyoming and Colorado’s high peaks into the south west and its meaning from a deep ecological perspective. According to Dogen the mountains and waters are constantly walking.

This historical review will describe the insights and techniques of deep ecology. It will apply them to a specific bioregion and ecosystem with regard to water supply. It will focus on Phoenix, Arizona.

Deep Ecology is a term first used in the writings of Arne Naess. It was later brought to the attention of a wider audience by sociologist Bill Devall and philosopher George Sessions in their1985 book Deep Ecology:
Taking its name and approach from Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess' 1972 article on "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," deep ecology holds that the reform environmentalism of the 1970s and 1980s dealt only with legal and institutional fixes for pollution and resource depletion, rather than fundamental changes in human relations with nonhuman nature. (Merchant)

So for the deep ecologist the notion of analysis of the ecosystem into lifeless component parts is a fundamental error. Ecosystem is a word that means ‘house’. A house is a home. It is a place where one dwells and stays. It is where a person belongs. It is a shelter and a sanctuary. It is a place where one can not help but be. So for a deep ecologist one must bring warmth and light into the medium.
At the same time Deep Ecology was published, Peter Berg was working in San Francisco to communicate the concept of bioregion to a larger audience. Berg began Planet Drum, a grassroots ecological organization in 1972:

There's an interesting set of meanings hidden in the word region. It's connected to the word for king: Latin, rego, and Greek, orego; region, if the king owned it. We know the king lives in a palace but the region is not the palace. Which leads you to the concept of bioregion: a life-place outside of the centralized civilization mechanism which has unique flora, fauna, soils, weather and topology; all these become the basis of boundaries. Watersheds are the organizing principals of bioregions. (Berg)

According to deep ecology, knowing where you are located is an essential activity of being human. The bioregion is the grouping of animals, plants, and song birds that make up a unique place. According to Berg these are the real nations. As Snyder says the real work is learning the sacred geography of these nations. There is a Artemesia tridentata nation –sage brush nation. There is a Larrea tridentata nation –creosote bush nation. There is the Douglas fir nation and the Pinyon pine nation.

Deep Ecologists attempt to understand the question of, “Who am I?", by asking, “Where am I?”. They focus on the watershed as another real place. A watershed is a line that separates streams flowing into different rivers. A watershed is a division. A watershed is not only a geographical place. A watershed is a spiritual entity. Just as when entering a church there is a protocol of conduct and corresponding inner attitude, so when entering a watershed there is a reverence that must be taken. There are songs and stories that are as much the river as the fish that swim and breathe the water.

The water for Phoenix, Arizona begins as snow falling in the Wind River mountains near Square Top Mountain above the Green River Lakes in the state of Wyoming. The lakes are home to cutthroat trout. They have orange firm meat like a salmon. The lakes as they head south form the Green River nourishing moose along the river. The moose graze in the shallow river bottoms eating the aquatic plants along with willows and aspen. Further along the Green meets two large dams one forming the Flaming Gorge Reservoir along the Wyoming/Utah border. The river as it flows south is joined by rivers and streams from Colorado and Utah. The river changes names and becomes the Colorado bringing more snowmelt from the Colorado Rockies to meet with the Green. Dams and man made impoundments are continuous on the river as it heads south.
Below Glen Canyon Dam the river becomes the Grand Canyon and makes a wide turn west forming the border between Arizona and California. Near Parker, Arizona a another dam backs up the flow and from Lake Havasu a pumping station and concrete lined canal 337 miles long takes the water across Arizona to Phoenix and on to Tucson, Arizona.

This constellation of insight drawing from ecology and philosophy was broadcast to the world by American poet Gary Snyder. Snyder read his poem “A Berry Feast” at The Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Besides being the birth place of an American school of writing called the ‘Beats’, this historic poetry reading also gave birth to the patron saint of deep ecology, Gary Snyder. Snyder was the last poet to read that night in San Francisco 1955. He followed Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg read Howl that night for the first time.(Silberman) Snyder finished the reading with these lines:

"See, from the foothills
Shred of river glinting, trailing,
To flatlands, the city:
Glare of haze in the valley horizon
Sun caught on glass gleams and goes.
From cool springs under cedar
On his haunches, white grin,
Long tongue panting, he watches:
Dead city in dry summer;
Where berries grow."

(Snyder 87)

Snyder was describing the perspective that would later be called deep ecology. All the motifs of deep ecology are present and accounted for in this poem. There is watershed. There is the life and doings on of wild nature, apart from human life. There are the native plants, springs and patterns which describe a place without reference to political boundaries. Snyder for more than 50 years has maintained a vision and perspective that is rooted in place.

Snyder spoke from the perspective of coyote. Snyder spoke as coyote, “On his haunches”, “Long tongue panting”. Nick Selby says Snyder is ‘writing the land’. Selby says that the insights of Snyder and the deep ecologists are within a historical context that is uniquely American.

A more useful model for reading Snyder's poetry is Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), a text, moreover, that Snyder read during his time as firewatcher at Sourdough mountain in 1953. Both Snyder and Thoreau trace the working of the land in an attempt to critique American ideology, to reground its work ethic.(Selby)

Selby goes on to name Waldo Emerson writing on the east coast in the 1830’s as an early example of America’s fascination with the wild and the sacred. Selby quotes a Gary Snyder poem,
‘Hunting 13', from Myths and Texts:

"Now I'll also tell what food
we lived on then:
Mescal, yucca fruit, pinyon, acorns,
prickly pear, sumac berry, cactus,
spurge, dropseed, lip fern, corn,
mountain plants, wild potatoes, mesquite,
stems of yucca, tree-yucca flowers, chokecherries,
pitahaya cactus, honey of the ground-bee,
honey, honey of the bumblebee,
mulberries, angle-pod, salt, berries,
berries of the one-seeded juniper,
berries of the alligator-bark juniper,
wild cattle, mule deer, antelopes,
white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, doves, quail,
squirrels, robins, slate-colored juncoes,
song sparrows, wood rats, prairie dogs,
rabbits, peccaries, burros, mules, horses,
buffaloes, mountain sheep, and turtles."(Snyder 53)

Here again there is a description of place in terms of that place. Snyder says where he is without naming nation, state, county or geographical area. He is naming his bioregion by paying attention to the things that are in that place or bioregion. He is using a descriptive mode of being. This is in contrast to a prescriptive mode. The prescriptive mode would say what should be, the descriptive mode describes what is present.

One key to understanding the role of spirituality in deep ecology is to understand that according to Snyder prayer and meditation do come not from a tradition of religion. Spirituality comes from the tradition of hunting. It is perhaps in this light that the death and resurrection of Jesus hint at this insight. Jesus as the sacrifice is the animal hunted. This hearkens back to the Paleolithic hunter tradition where the hunter using simple tools would have to wait for long hours silent. It is not the killing of the hunter that is key to this equation, it is the expectant silence with which the hunter waits. Snyder saw this connection while studying Zen Buddhism in Japan in the 1950’s. The role of the deep ecologist is to cultivate this awareness of the landscape and develop ways that others can perceive the world around them from a perspective of deep ecology.

So the task of this researcher is to examine the element of water as it ebbs and flows through Phoenix, Arizona from a perspective of deep ecology. Where does the water come from in a land of little rain? Phoenix, the city whose water comes in man made canals via the Central Arizona Project: How does the water get into those canals? Where does it start? Whose idea was it to bring it here and why? How can the insight of Snyder and the deep ecologists be applied to water in the Valley of the Sun?

Deep ecology is a way of understanding and points out the work to be done. According to pioneers such as Gary Snyder, Dolores La Chapelle and Peter Berg the bioregion and watershed are the boundaries of our place.(Berg) It is within this watershed that our work is done.(Snyder) Work in this way is realizing the self.(Dogen) The realization of self is working with the energies that flow in a specific place.(Selby)

The energies in a specific place are ocotillo and brittle brush. They are gambel’s quail and coyote. They are palo verde and creosote bush.(Nabum) If you want to find one plant that speaks for the watershed that is Phoenix, Arizona, that plant is the saguaro. The Gila River watershed is defined by the saguaro in its lowest elevation.

The Gila drains the Mogollon rim up to Flagstaff by way of the Verde River. It drains the area from Tucson up to Phoenix by way of the San Pedro. It drains the area of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico and heads east joining the Agua Fria and the Salt river gathering the Valley of the Sun and meeting with the Colorado near Yuma.(Folk-Williams)

This portrait of watershed is made complex with the addition of a 337 mile concrete canal which by way of tunnels and pumping stations brings water west to east up, over, and across from the Colorado River. This concrete lined canal is the Central Arizona Project. It creates a loop, an ox bow dumping water back into the Gila system. This water is also used to recharge the underground aquifer at various points in the valley.(Johnson)

The learning of deep ecology is a listening and observation of natural processes in a specific place. A lot of the real work involves learning the names and listening to the stories. According to deep ecology one listens so that the songs can be heard and understood.

The deep ecology of water in Phoenix, Arizona is made difficult due to the existence of a man made river flowing winter and summer. It is a challenge to feel the belongingness of water coming 337 miles by way of a concrete pipe.(Devall) Along this artificial watershed there are no trees or riparian areas because the Central Arizona Project is designed for efficiency. It delivers water from point A to point B. A river is more like a process. It nourishes the earth along the way. The CAP is not a river. It is a water delivery system.(Johnson) This difficulty in sensing the spirit of an anthropomorphic construct is precisely the importance in developing a deep ecological understanding of water in the Valley of the Sun. It is imperative that residents of Phoenix develop love, respect and gratefulness for the actual life lived here.(Berg)

Peter Berg offers us the idea of bioregion and the challenge of reinhabiting the place where we live. Our nature as humans is urban. Our nature is communal. Our fate is drawn up together. The Hohokam and Pima lived as we do, close. By understanding the nature of the water we use we can develop an intimate relationship with that water. Knowledge is powerful. The mighty Colorado, the snow melt of Green River Lake can not be wasted.(Fradkin) We are called upon as stewards of the land to honor a sacred compact to love and cherish this water. Dolores La Chapelle goes so far as to entitle her book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep:Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life. Deep Ecological Insight is powerful and liberating because it involves all the senses.

Deep ecology is fun. Understanding who and what you are is fun. It is a journey of sitting naked with saguaros overhead in a hidden hot spring following the water course home. It is inching up a vertical slope of gneiss hiking on the last glacial remnants of the Pleistocene in the Wind Rivers searching for a drip that becomes a torrent in spring blood like the rich mucous flow of a female in heat above Moab, UT. It is taking mud baths along the Paria.(Powell) It is rich and frothy and completely beyond control like our inner flow of thought.(Snyder)

According to La Chapelle, Berg and Snyder it is precisely this interface between the sacred and profane that offers us a graceful exit from this quagmire of seeing that blocks our entrance into a sustainable culture. According to these icons from the 1960’s joy is the antidote for the deathsong played and playing at your local movie theatre. Written in the 1940’s, the black hole of neurotic fear that Henry Miller warned of in The Air Conditioned Nightmare is not the birthright and heritage of America. This kind of fate can only be draped on the flag of our destiny because the children don’t know the four directions.(Bear) They are making choices without knowledge. Real knowing must include information.(Merchant) Information must be accurate. Knowing must be informed by where we are. That knowing is the earth and the wilderness.(Abbey) A man can not be considered educated unless he knows the first flower of spring. The prerequisites of guilt and his shakti depression are the deficiency of natural experiences in daily life.(Kidner)

The earth mother like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita reincarnates herself amongst us to bring us to the light:

"Whenever the balance of the universe is disturbed by external interference from any of its parts, then I reveal Myself as the Power of eternal balancing. For the protection of those who are in harmony, and the rectification of everything disharmonious, I incarnate Myself at every juncture of time."-Bhagavad Gita(Krisnananda)

She is speaking and calling a generation to see, feel and happen what is right underneath your toes and fingers. Underneath your tongue are the inner fluids of a virgin. She is Nahasdan Nadle called down by Neve Jensen from a bundle of stones wrapped in a badger pelt.(Frisbe) Called the Logos by the early Christian church she is Sophia. It is a truth that takes form and sustains us from the inside out. It is water. It is the deep ecology of everyday water in Phoenix, Arizona.

In the report on the deep ecology of everyday water in Phoenix, Arizona Gary Snyder, Dolores La Chapelle and Peter Berg are cited as positing that the boundaries of a place are natural features such as watersheds. The state of Arizona has as its southern boundary the Gadsden purchase and on the north and east arbitrary lines that in no way refer to watersheds or geographic features. The idea that the boundary of a place is somehow determined by things like watershed, rivers or plants is a romantic notion. Only science can inform the modern citizen of a complex democracy like the United States of America.

We must have a global perspective. We are living in a complex political landscape and can’t allow issues like bioregion to “inform” us. Our information comes from the internet and television what could a saguaro cactus teach us?
While it is true that the modern state of Arizona has as its north, south and eastern borders lines drawn by politicians without regard to land forms. It is equally true that the entire western border of Arizona follows the Colorado River. So the watershed does in fact help form the boundary of the state.(Berg) This same watershed via the Central Arizona Project nourishes the agriculture, recreation and drinking water of the 13th largest metropolitan area in the United States.

Furthermore, the city of Phoenix relies on a system of canals many of which were first used by the Hohokam people. Much of the current water delivery system is but an elaboration of the Hohokam/Pima canals. The future is built on the past. To understand the present situation of water in Phoenix, Arizona we must understand that the water has a point of origin and a spiritual component. One only has to look at the automobile license plate of the state of Arizona to see the saguaro. This represents the place, the bioregion and the ecosystem of Phoenix, Arizona. This totem plant better than anything else says who we are and what we are doing here.
Some might say, “Sitting naked with saguaros overhead in a hidden hot spring”, doesn’t seem like a way to gather information about sustainable culture. What is required are data and facts. This resembles some one trying to escape from the real world into a personal fantasy. While it is true that spending time in wild natural places may seem like a waste of time experts disagree. David W. Kidner, senior lecturer in psychology in the humanities and Communication Studies Programmes at Nottingham Trent University, writes in Critical Psychology that lack of time in wild natural places is a major cause of clinical depression. Kim Krisberg writing in the The Nations Health informs us that, “In a September 2004 study published in APHA’s American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that exposure to natural settings helped reduce the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.” Spending time in wild natural places is a prerequisite for anyone wanting to walk in balance.

The 1960’s and the hippie rhetoric of peace, love and going back to the land was already dated when it was new. We have moved so far beyond that paradigm. The idea that joy, love or kinship with nonhuman life can address today’s issues is a waste of time. Information is a mouse click away and that’s something the hippies could not imagine.

Yes that is completely true. The idea of returning to the land was dated in 1969. It was dated then because it was always dated. The idea that love and joy can transform experience is a dated concept. These types of view points remain dated because they are perennial truths. They will always be dated. They will always be rediscovered. Their wisdom informs us of who we are and what we have the potential to be.

In 1969 a republican president was in the white house. In 2008 we also have a republican president. In 1969 thousands of American soldiers were at work liberating Southeast Asia. We were liberating, freeing people who wanted to be free to pursue their own destinies. Fortunes were made by corporations who manufactured the tools of freedom; bombs, planes, helicopters, guns, ammunition, gasoline, herbicides –freedom has quite a cost and quite a profit.(La Chapelle) In 2008 we again have hundreds of thousands laboring to bring freedom to Mesopotamia. Forty years later

again the people want to to be free. Again they want to be free to pursue their own destiny. Fortunes are again being made by corporations who manufacture the tools of freedom; bombs, planes, helicopters, guns, ammunition, gasoline –freedom again has quite a cost and again quite a profit.

History doesn’t move in a line. History is a circle. History is the Ouroboros or Oroboros, a snake in the form of a circle eating its own tail:

"….emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece represented with its tail in its mouth continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself. A Gnostic and alchemical symbol, Ouroboros expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation."

(Encyclopedia)

And so therefore there is a mountain covered with snow in the Wind River Mountains called Square Top Mountain and below you’ll see Green River Lakes. If you see the girl with the wild black dog along the Green River, tell her I said hello.
The solution is to sit with your feet on the ground and see the mountains walking. The water is constantly flowing and the mountains are constantly walking. There is a girl who conceived of a child in those mountains. Her child was made in the land of the grizzly bear. Her child walks along the canals of the Central Arizona canal. When the winds blow hot with fire you can feel gratefulness for water. You can listen to mountains with snow melted and glistening.

From the corner of your eye you can see the spirit of the spring. You can make a spring in the desert and walk near slick rock mountains. You can study to be true to yourself. You can allow the deep ecology of every day water in Phoenix, Arizona to be flowing in one continuous stream. You can begin with a giving spirit and open heart. Some one will hear you dreaming of rain.


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