About Joseph Wood Krutch and the tragedy of land development, Margaret Regan wrote the following in the Tucson Weekly:
An eloquent naturalist from New York City, Krutch had retired to Tucson in 1952 to live in the desert he so prized. It didn't take long for him to become dismayed by the city's eastward gallop toward the Rincons, by the tract houses sprouting up all over the flat desert valley. In a speech in 1956, he took the boosters of the Rotary Club to task.
"Whenever I see one of those posters which reads 'Help Tucson Grow,' I say to myself, 'God forbid,' " he said. "I suggest that the Rotary Club adopt a new motto: 'Keep Tucson Small.' " Krutch's sentiments were so rare in those boom days that The Arizona Daily Star reporter on the scene was bewildered. Perhaps, the reporter wrote, Krutch was "speaking more or less in a humorous vein."
Comedian Krutch was not. He was one in a long line of resisters to Tucson's growth, said historian Michael F. Logan, who told the Krutch story in a lecture last week at the Arizona Historical Society. Author of Fighting Sprawl and City Hall: Resistance to Urban Growth in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press, 1995), Logan said that Tucsonans have been arguing about change and development almost as far back as the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, when they bickered more about military outposts and acequias than about zoning and owls.
"I look at communities as being in flux," Logan said. "They're always contested terrain."
The contested terrain of Tucson, of course, continued to fall to the bulldozer despite Krutch. The anonymous tract houses of his day are now in the city's inner ring, and what was pristine desert then has given way to seas of pink-tile roofs and taco-deco strip stores. The naturalist's own piece of desert heaven now lies beneath the Crossroads Festival shopping center at Grant and Swan, Logan said.
To read all of Regan’s article, click here:
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