NAU sociologist Janine Schipper was about to travel to India, to do her dissertation on sustainable communities when she found the opposite in Phoenix.

The year was 1996, and developers were turning the desert surrounding the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation into housing at a rate of about an acre per hour.

Nationwide, the pace came to 200 acres developed every hour.

At the same time, the community of Cave Creek had voted overwhelmingly to buy a large parcel of land from developers and tax themselves, instead of allowing in a new resort, golf course and 665 homes.

Schipper, then of Boston, began a dissertation that eventually led to a book questioning much of what the Valley of the Sun has become, and whether the Sonoran Desert is at risk.

In "Disappearing Desert: The Growth of Phoenix and the Culture of Sprawl," she questions what is next, and supposes that society at large will eventually oppose pollution, loss of land, traffic, and other ills of the metropolis enough to end urban sprawl.

"The change is going to happen as our values change," said Schipper, now a professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

She looks at the post-WWII rise of the Southwest as based on cheap labor for defense contracts and cheap land, with growth abetted by government-backed airports, dams and highways.

And she asks whether homeowners who have bought into master-planned communities in search of the American dreams of freedom and home ownership have really won what they sought if they are told what color to paint their home or where to park their car.

"To end sprawl," she writes, "We need more than political, legislative and economic policies; We need entirely new ways of thinking and relating to the land."

She proposes clustered housing, and eco-villages of 50 to 150 people living with an emphasis on renewable energy and local food, as some possibilities.

She often met the feeling that development was inevitable.

"Even the most avid environmentalist," she wrote, "says that his job is merely to stop the D-9 bulldozers for one more day. The powerful forces of land development, he concludes, will eventually conquer these lands."

When the Salt River flowed

Schipper also spent three months going down from Flagstaff every weekend to visit the Salt River Pima, while pregnant with her first daughter, who is of Dineh descent.

Members of the tribe told her they remembered when the Salt River flowed, before it was diverted, and about how some had made tough choices to sell land to make room for a freeway.

They welcomed her into their homes.

The tribe still had much agricultural land, but it is farmed by outside companies, partly because the price of irrigation was too high, Schipper wrote.

Likewise, she spent weekends visiting housing developments, including Catalina Bay, in Gilbert, with a manmade lake and boating.

Schipper is the second Northern Arizona University faculty member to publicly question how the Valley of the Sun is developing, which comes amid projections that the Colorado River will not be able to supply all of the states that have a claim to it.

Last January, another member of the NAU faculty, Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments Gary Paul Nabhan, proposed dismantling metropolitan Phoenix by perhaps bulldozing subdivisions to make room for green space.

"I am not merely proposing limits on its growth; it needs to be downsized and de-constructed," Nabhan wrote in a newspaper guest column.

He went on to say that local food production should be a high priority for the land, and that having Arizona State University be the state's largest university and a supposed hub for sustainability wasn't feasible in the desert.

Schipper ends her book after admiring trees in a dry wash north of Phoenix.

"Had I walked 10 miles west, I would have come across a fleet of tractors that scrape these lands 'clean' to make room for a new subdivision. And when I witness this, I feel great pain. The earth bleeds and I too feel uprooted, displaced."

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.