Once a week, the editorial board of the Arizona Republic forces me to wade through the sophistry of Professor Koppell in the search for his nuggets of wisdom. This week's is how our "capacity for collaboration" brought about our ability to "settle the harsh Western wilderness." Here was I thinking it was because of building dams to harness water and the invention of air-conditioning. He suggests that early settlers learned from the natives they encountered. Most of the historical evidence suggests that we fought them; sometimes murdered them by poisoning them with sweetmeats, treated them as subhuman, separated children from their parents and tried to make them into little replicas of ourselves at special Indian Schools. Some resisted to the end. Geronimo! We seized their most valuable land, herded them onto reservations, and proceeded to make money from the three Cs, cattle, citrus and copper. Perhaps this is what the Professor means by "pragmatic orientation."

The idea of the rag tag of characters that found their way to Arizona in the 19th century being motivated by noble ideals of constitutional government and a two party system of politics is beyond my imagination. Judging from the prostitution, the gambling, the shooting, the family feuds, the epidemics, the disgruntled miners in Bisbee being bundled at gunpoint on a train and left in New Mexico, making a living for ordinary people was harsh and challenging. Land and business owners controlled politics. This has always been a Republican state!

The "heterogeneous fighting forces" Koppell refers to so idealistically were the sharp end of the spear when it came to settling the frontier and quelling any dissent from Native Americans. The troops were capable of acts of mass murder for which they sometimes were given medals (Wounded Knee). Many of the soldiers, recruited from those fleeing the famine in Ireland were glad of the job. Whatever poverty they were escaping from, without the dream of wealth, be it gold, or copper, or land or cattle or farming, the America we know would not have existed. The story of the founding of America is the story of the seizing of the land and its resources and exercising the power that came from the wealth it created. The Arizona Territory, which both Professor Koppell and I love and enjoy, is one of the fruits of the Mexican American War.

Professor Koppell is correct is his description of the present divided nature of our society but wrong in his suggestion that somehow pragmatism or "a deal with the devil" is the solution. We need an agreed upon vision for Arizona, a twenty/thirty/forty year plan. The present haphazard system of advancing the welfare of society by exploiting raw materials and the burning of fossil fuels, and the overuse of the natural resources without reference to sustainability cannot continue. Phoenix, built around fossil fuel burning cars, in a challenging climate zone, is environmentally and structurally one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States. We all need to think about the legacy, which we wish to pass on to our children. We need to plan now for the best ways to survive the consequences of global warming. We only have one planet. There's no great continent left to run to and start over again.