NEAR FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Standing on the top of Deadman Butte, the damage spreads as far as the eye can see.

Across the broad, parched plain below, stands of dead pinyon pine trees mingle with still-living junipers, grey death amidst green life.

“This used to be a pinyon and juniper woodland,” Neil Cobb, an ecological research scientist at Northern Arizona University, remarks sadly. “Now it’s just juniper.”

To the south and west, the San Francisco Peaks are slashed and even denuded from forest fires, which have been increasingly intense and numerous in recent years. 

A bleached ‘bathtub ring’, the result of a six-year drought that has dramatically dropped the level of the reservoir, shows on red Navajo sandstone formations near Last Chance Bay at Lake Powell on March 26, 2007 near Page, Arizona. Lake Powell and the next biggest Colorado River reservoir, the nearly 100-year-old Lake Mead, are at the lowest levels ever recorded.

Two items on the inventory of a decade of drought in northern Arizona: stressed trees that are succumbing to beetle infestations — die-off, it’s called — and tinder forests at risk of fire. Every year it gets worse.

This is not simply a question of a local ecosystem at risk. These dead, scrubby Arizona pines are ecological mine canaries, early warning of the consequences of an imminent, permanent water shortage threatening all of the southern states, which are the very magnets of the country’s population and economic growth.

Nor is it just the Southwest that could be drying out. The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that 50 per cent of the United States is currently experiencing unusually dry or drought conditions.

More than anything else, lack of water could define the limits to America’s future growth.

globeandmail.com