House of cards - waste in Las Vegas, Nevada - includes related article on carrying capacity

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1995 by Mike Davis

It was advertised as the biggest non-nuclear explosion in Nevada history. On October 27, 1993, Steve Wynn, the state's official "god of hospitality," flashed his trademark smile and pushed the detonator button. As 200,000 Las Vegans cheered, the 18-story Dunes sign, once the tallest neon structure in the world, crumbled to the desert floor. The dust cloud was visible from the California border.

No one thought it the least bit strange that Wynn's gift to the city he so adores was to blow up an important piece of its past. This was simply urban renewal Vegas-style: one costly facade destroyed to make way for another. Wynn, the proprietor of the Mirage and Treasure Island, had promised a new super-resort on the Dunes site with lakes large enough for jet-skiing. He did not bother to explain where the water would come from.

By obscure coincidence, the demolition of the Dunes followed close on the centenary of Frederick Jackson Turner's legendary "end of the frontier" address to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where he meditated on the fate of the American character in a conquered and rapidly urbanizing West. Turner questioned the survival of frontier democracy in the coming age of giant cities and monopoly capital, and wondered what the West would be like a century hence.

Steve Wynn has the depressing answer: Las Vegas is the terminus of western history, the end of the trail. At the edge of the millennium, this strange amalgam of boomtown, world's fair, and highway robbery is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States. While Southern California suffers through its worst recession since the 1930s, Las Vegas has been generating tens of thousands of new jobs in gaming construction, and related services. As a consequence, nearly a thousand new residents--half of them Californians--arrive each week.

Some of the immigrants are downwardly mobile blue-collar families desperately seeking a new start in the Vegas boom. Others are affluent retirees headed straight for a gated suburb in what they imagine is a golden sanctuary from the urban turmoil of Los Angeles. Increasing numbers are young Latinos, the new bone and sinew of the casino-and-hotel economy. This spring Clark County's population passed the million mark, and demographers predict it will grow by another million over the next generation.

The explosive growth of southern Nevada can only accelerate the environmental deterioration of the American Southwest. Las Vegas long ago outstripped its own natural-resource infrastructure. Steve Wynn's hydro-fetishism (he once proposed turning downtown's Fremont Street into a pseudo-Venetian Grand Canal) sets the standard for Las Vegans' prodigal overconsumption of water: 360 gallons daily per capita versus 211 in Los Angeles, 160 in Tucson, or 110 in Oakland. In a desert basin that receives only four inches of annual rainfall, irrigation of lawns and golf courses, not to mention artificial lakes and lagoons, adds the equivalent of another 20 to 30 inches per acre.

Yet southern Nevada has little water capital to squander. As Johnnie-come-lately to the Colorado Basin wars, it has to sip Lake Mead through the smallest straw. At the same time, reckless groundwater overdrafts in Las Vegas Valley are producing widespread and costly subsidence of the city's foundations. Natural conditions dictate a fastidiously conservative water ethic. Tucson, after all, has prospered on a reduced water ration; its residents actually seem to like having cactus instead of crabgrass in their front yards.

But Las Vegas disdains to live within its means. Instead, it is aggressively turning its profligacy into a kind of environmental terrorism against its neighbors. "Give us your water, or we will die," demand Clark County water officials of politicians grown fat on campaign contributions from the gaming industry. What Las Vegas cannot buy from Arizona farmers, it seems determined to divert from the Virgin River (a tributary of the Colorado) or steal from the ranchers in Nye and Lincoln counties. Over the next decade, it may desiccate central Nevada and southwestern Utah as thoroughly as Los Angeles did the once-lush Owens Valley on the eastern flank of the Sierra, when it stole its water 80 years ago (an act of environmental piracy immortalized in the film Chinatown).

Southern Nevada is as thirsty for fossil fuels as it is for water. As Clark County's transportation director recently testified, the county has the "lowest vehicle occupancy rate in the country" in tandem with the "longest per person, per trip, per day ratio." Consequently, the number of days with unhealthy air quality is dramatically increasing. Like Phoenix and Los Angeles before it, Las Vegas was once a mecca for those seeking the curative powers of desert air. Now, according to EPA reports, Las Vegas ties New York City for fifth place in carbon monoxide pollution. Its smog already contributes to the ochre shroud over the Grand Canyon, and is beginning to reduce visibility in California's new East Mojave National Recreation Area as well.