I am a fan of filmmaker John Waters and his humor. I hope he was only joking, however, when he claimed recently as a guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, that he had driven around the US and there is plenty of room! “Come one come all we can handle it”, he jested. What an unfortunate statement for many will ingest this notion and save it for arguing to promote for keeping our gates open and our population growing.
That seems to be the philosophy of the constant development going on in and around Las Vegas. There is room, after all, so why not just keep adding buildings and homes? The Las Vegas Nevada area is on track to add 30-35,000 homes this year, never mind that it is being built in a desert with its major dwindling water resource, Lake Mead, which is already suffering from too much demand. Added to this unsustainable story is the way the climate is warming, destabilizing the amount of mountain snow melt from the Upper Colorado River Basin Lake Mead. 90% of Las Vegas depends on this water resource making the push for more development somewhat of a suicide mission.
The downtown Vegas strip is growing taller and the outside suburbs are growing wider in this city where anything goes. This leads me to assume that the city planners a) never took an ecology class b) don’t plan on trying to live there in the bleak future that is in store for this city of fountains in the desert.
Room for growth is an optical illusion. It looks like you can build because the space is there. But when you do not have a reliable source of water, building up or out is a recipe for disaster with a capital D which also stands for DRY and a future ‘D”eserted city with over the top luxury buildings and plumbing that is there just for decoration.
The latest edition of Outdoor America, Isaac Walton League’s (IWL) national magazine, claims that says at current rates of consumption and pollution we will run out of water by 2040. That sobering news should be no surprise to those who read similar issues in the past. Concerns over water pollution was why IWL was founded. The type of pollution has changed but not the threat. It has gone from sewage issues to microplastics and nitrates, but the danger remains the same if not worse. We who get it can only shake our heads at the flippant attitude toward our precious water supply which is exemplified by seeing sprinklers watering lawns in the middle of a rainstorm.
Water is precious, life-giving and we are both using too much of it and wasting so much of it. Yet no article on water that I can find even mentions human population increases and what that does to our limited water supplies. IWL started in 1922 when anglers and hunters became concerned about water pollution and knew that in order to be enjoy their recreational pursuits they had to have a healthy and viable outdoors.
The number that these articles in Outdoor America should be focused on is 110,049,000, for that was the population of the US when these IWL founders started fighting to protect the great outdoors. The fight for fresh clean water is deeply attached to the fact that the US now has over 336 million water consumers and growing every year. You wouldn’t know it by these articles who say they are concerned about the future of water in the US. The headline of this article should have read, “Because we have tripled our population since the beginning of IWL we are going to run out of water in the near future.” Even if we could prevent industry from dumping pollutants in our rivers, lakes and oceans, fresh water cannot recharge as quickly as we are using it.
We are now primarily growing by adding people to our country from other countries. They go from needing water in their country of origin to needing to use the fragile and limited water supply in the US. Water is local and comes from either rivers, aquifers or mountain snowmelt, all of it in limited supply especially with our climate succumbing to our current atmospheric composition of 427 parts per million of carbon. When it doesn’t rain, rivers run dry. When not enough snow falls in the mountain reservoirs run empty.
Adding consumers to the desert cities in our country when they are already experiencing persistent threats to both clean and plentiful water doesn’t make any sense. It ignores the limits we need to be putting on our growth at the most critical place, our increase in population from immigration.
It's great that next year Las Vegas will ban lawns for residential areas even though commercial and municipal areas will still be allowed this water wasting landscaping choice. But it is the growth of population which needs to ring the alarm bell. In 2024 Vegas is projected to add a whopping 30-35,000 residents. No matter where they are coming from, they will not be bringing their own water with them.
There is much displacement going on in the country. Population pressure, some of it from immigration, displaces local residents. Others come from other states. Residents of Los Angeles whose population is made up of 33% immigrants, have started to migrate to places like western Colorado and Las Vegas.
Energy is also being used as if it is endless.
Las Vegas is a city that never sleeps demonstrating its enormous appetite for electronic signs, shows and fireworks. Arrays of solar panels have plenty of room to be built but have their own set of problems. This includes the destruction of wildlife habitat as well as the organic problem of needing fossil fuel to build them and the waste they cause when they are at the end of their lifespan.
Driving all of this unsustainable growth is a demand for housing from the newcomers seeking a better life or drier climate for their
health. These newcomers must be fairly well off for the median home price is now 450k. Another downside of growth is that high demand and low supply results in higher prices.
What is driving all of this growth? Demand to live where the air is dry, the jobs from the tourist industry are solid and overcrowding in other cities makes driving in Las Vegas seem like a breeze, it’s not LA ( not yet) with its crippling all day 7 lane traffic jams. And then there are all of the shows where you can drop a good chunk of change to be entertained while the city marches towards a world where faucets become artifacts of the past.
Immigration is certainly a part of this story which is a national story, driven by national policy. Ironically there are tools in place to slow growth from the border, but they clash with our American story of being a country built on immigrants. Bill Maher wisely critiqued our policy in a recent Real Time show that we never seem to ask the question, “How many is too many? And when the answer isn’t ‘Infinity’ you are labeled a racist. But at the heart of growth from immigration is sustainability and in the center of that is water.
We must anchor our policies in the ecological reality of water. All the conservation practices in the world cannot make up for the demand of more and more consumers of water. Everything we do must spell an end to growth and encourage lowering our numbers with every tool available. Scaling down is a life saving strategy and it needs far more attention from the media and our political leaders. Adding more people to help with one problem will just create more.
When land developers see open space they salivate at the prospect of making money. They can count on taking home six figures to carve up the desert landscape with brick, mortar and plumbing all to cash in on the growth boom that is this gambling metropolis.
Even National Geographic blames human population growth for the threat it spells for delicate desert habitats. They point out that demand for land removes areas where desert creature try to survive, among them the desert tortoise and the Amargosa vole. But no resident of Vegas is going to hold up protest signs demanding a future for the Kangaroo rat, they should however look at their own future of water and get busy setting limits to growth. How about a sign which says, Save Las Vegas, Stop Growth. Could Las Vegas lead the way? That is doubtful, there is too much money involved. Growth needs to be taken off its pedestal for it for all the room in the world and all the fancy casinos and money cannot make up for running out of life’s most precious liquid. Perhaps a better sign would be
“Stop Growth because you can’t drink money.”