Yeah, Tucson takes this sort of thing seriously for a number of reasons, 1) it is small enough (and relatively isolated) that there is a sense of community 2) people are willing to experiment 3) the people that have lived there the longest care deeply about the environment 4) the environment can kill you easily if you are not attentive (lighting strikes, flash floods, africanized bees, and dehydration to name a few) and 5) it gets really freaking hot for 8 months of the year