Listen and subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform:
There’s maybe a more practical way to look at it, which is just understanding water as a communal resource, as something that is necessary to share rather than this thing that we divide up and profit on
Kyle Paoletta, author, “American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest“
Kyle Paoletta opens his recent book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest, with a claim similar to the one on which Ten Across is based: the Southwest “already looks like what the rest of America is becoming.” Every year the country at large grows hotter, drier, more urban, more diverse. The desert cities got there first. His view of what lies ahead for the Southwest—and by extension, for the rest of the nation—first required a deeper understanding of the fundamental nature of the place.
That is the case for treating this region as a preview rather than an exception, and it is why the Interstate 10 corridor is worth watching closely. What arrives here arrives everywhere, eventually.
Kyle is a journalist who grew up outside Albuquerque and left for the East Coast, where he found that almost no one knew the place he came from. Years later, his book takes the five largest desert cities, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Tucson, and El Paso, and weaves them into a single story of people who learned to live where water is becoming more scarce.
In this conversation with Duke Reiter, he explains how a magazine called Arizona Highways and a relentless chamber of commerce sold the Arizona desert to the rest of the country, a playbook similarly run in Texas and Florida. He points to Las Vegas, which added hundreds of thousands of people without increasing its water use, and to El Paso, where the country’s first direct-to-distribution water recycling plant opens in 2028. He discusses Tucson’s heritage of architecture designed for heat—knowledge the rest of the country is beginning to need—and argues that the short renegotiation cycles for Colorado River water may be a feature rather than a failure.
Ultimately, Kyle’s reflections on where the story of the Southwest is headed next may not be what you expect.
American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest is available from Pantheon.
Relevant Articles and Resources
- Native American Tribes Came Together to Secure Their Rights to Colorado River Water. Four States Are Stalling the Deal (ProPublica and KJZZ News-Phoenix, June 2026)
- TSMC Announces Additional $100 Billion Investment in Arizona (Arizona Commerce Authority, July 2026)
- Judge blocks Arizona water rule that halted new housing developments across the Valley (Arizona Mirror, April 2026)
- El Paso Water breaks ground on the nation’s first direct-to-distribution water reuse facility (February 2025)
Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts
- Understanding Groundwater Risks in the Southwest with Jay Famiglietti
- Latest Deadpool Projections Inject New Urgency into Colorado River Negotiations
- Debunking the Water Myths of Western Cities with Grady Gammage Jr.
- Checking in on Tense Colorado River Negotiations with Anne Castle and John Fleck
Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler
Guest Speaker
Kyle Paoletta is a journalist, essayist, and cultural critic whose reporting and criticism have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Columbia Journalism Review, where he is a contributing writer. He earned a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Columbia University and worked for several years as a fact-checker at GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and New York Magazine before becoming a full-time writer in 2020.
He grew up in New Mexico and now lives in Maine, where he is at work on a new book about the nation’s relationship to the natural world, Out to Pasture: How Reviving the Wilderness Can Save America From Itself. American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest is his first book.
