You don't address CAP or Active Management Areas. You can't talk about Arizona water without talking about CAP and AMAs. There is a real issue of water usage ou

You don't address CAP or Active Management Areas. You can't talk about Arizona water without talking about CAP and AMAs. There is a real issue of water usage outside of the AMAs. There has been since I left AZ in 2007. But yes, it is correct that the vast majority of water in AZ goes to agriculture. California has a similar issue. Developers are required to provide 100 year water plans before moving forward. Another thing at play that would surprise a lot of people is that just 18% of land is private. I guess I would say... True, Arizona and California produce massive amounts of produce and other agricultural output for the US (it's sunny, the climate is great, other than the lack of water). But what is it costing the environment? We all know what it is costing the environment. No one is protesting. Sadly. To say that Arizona shouldn't exist (that we shouldn't have population centers in the middle of the desert) is laughable. Ok, Las Vegas is cancelled. Cities north enough that require massive amounts of fossil fuels to stay warm enough to be livable are cancelled. While where at it, flying for vacations (or anything not of existential importance) is cancelled. Ocean freight is cancelled. My first job out of college was as a management and lobbyist assistant in Coconino County (Flagstaff). I read this from cover to cover when I started my job (I still have the marked up copy on my bookshelf): https://portal.azoah.com/oedf/documents/08A-AWS001-DWR/Center_et_al/Exhibit%20404%20Arizona%27s%20Water%20Future.pdf https://portal.azoah.com/oedf/documents/08A-AWS001-DWR/Cente... Water use is very, very carefully considered and scrutinized in AZ. > "...it's a calculated risk and choice by the people living here whose lives are built on agriculture. " Sorta. It's calculated by a subset of all stakeholders. Water rights in Arizona are slowly being purchased by developers to meet the 100 year water plan requirements. This reflects the state's move from primarily agricultural toward a more common mixture of agriculture, industry and residential. That mix doesn't have any impact on the amount of water available for use. The legal rights to CAP water, the legal rights to ground water, are already fixed and are now just being transferred from one party to the next. As AZ becomes less agriculturally productive, you can no longer argue that "we've chosen this to farm". And the shortcoming of lack of regulation of water usage outside of AMAs is still not addressed. Which I think is the point of the article.