Last July, Arizona's state water board approved a large new development in Sierra Vista that would pump 3,300 acre feet of groundwater per year -- despite evidence that such pumping could decrease flow in the San Pedro River, one of the West's healthiest desert rivers.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, along with landowners and environmental groups, have appealed an Arizona Department of Water Resources decision to approve a Los Angeles real estate company’s request to pump roughly 3,000 acre feet of water a year from state land near the San Pedro River--the last big, free flowing river in the southwest. The real estate company plans to use the water for development, but opponents argue the company would be intercepting water that would have otherwise flowed to replenish the river and the surrounding San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, which contains nearly 57,000 acres of federal land.

Despite the slowest start to a wildfire season in a decade, the head of the U.S. Forest Service said Tuesday his agency is preparing for another busy year, but with fewer firefighters.

If cities were stocks, you'd want to short Phoenix. Of course, it's an easy city to pick on. The nation's 13th-largest metropolitan area crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. And it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

A development, planned by Los Angeles real-estate company Castle & Cooke Inc., is at the center of a fight over water rights that pits the federal government against Arizona's water authority. It is one of thousands of conflicts across the West, where states generally issue water rights on a first-come, first-served basis.

At a time when many cities and states in the West are grappling over water, a south-central Arizona Native American community has found itself in the enviable position of having rights to more water than it can use. The Gila River Indian Community established along the Gila River faced severe water shortages after the river was dammed upstream in the 1920s.

An array of groups are urging Arizona regulators to deny water permits needed for a major resort, commercial and residential development at the small community near the entrance to the Grand Canyon National Park’s South Rim.

Federal, state and tribal officials gathered Saturday in western New Mexico to break ground on the massive Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project. The 280-mile, $1 billion pipeline project will serve more than 43 Navajo communities in New Mexico and Arizona, the city of Gallup and a portion of the Jicarilla Apache Nation in northern New Mexico.