Back in Las Vegas again, the place we lived for 4 years (2003-2007), I noticed that it’s much bigger now, the population having doubled since we left, which I find frankly alarming, given the steady loss of water resources in the area due to climate change. Vegas keeps growing despite the record heat (regularly over 50°C now) and dwindling water supply, mainly thanks to air conditioning and piped water, stolen from other parts of Nevada. It’s not going to end well. But it shows how stubborn and contrarian people can be. When we left in 2007, I confidently predicted that Vegas would be a ghost town within a decade or two. The place was already becoming stinking hot (see my 2005 photo below) and Lake Mead (i.e. the Hoover Dam) was drying up. But here we are, nearly 18 years later, with twice the population! Holy hell! As the saying goes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent” (attributed to economist John Maynard Keynes).
Drive-by Begging
In America, nobody gets out of their cars if they can possibly avoid it. You have drive-through banks, drive-through fast food stores, drive-through pharmacies, drive-by shootings, and now drive-by begging as well. I was walking to my car in a Walmart parking lot when a young black woman, seated in her newish small car, called me over. When I got to her, sitting in the driver’s seat and talking through the slightly open car window, she basically begged me for money. I quickly declined and walked off, so she then drove her car to a new spot in the parking lot, ready to accost other shoppers returning to their vehicles. It amazed me that this is happening in the US now. I never saw it when I lived here before. Only in America!
Buried Treasure!
In 2006 my wife and I buried a little sumpin’ sumpin’ in a PVC tube in the Nevada desert, not far from Vegas. It’s called “geocaching”. Some of my readers will know what’s in the PVC tube. Now, 18 years later, I returned to the same GPS coordinates to see if it’s still there. I struggled to find it, but yes, it’s still there, watched over by the skeleton of a huge Bighorn Sheep ram (a wild animal that lives in Nevada) that must have died in the intervening years.
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead
The pictures speak for themselves. The southwest is slowly dying from climate-change induced drought. It’s the work of man, our own doing. Yet everywhere I see giant vehicles barrelling along at breakneck speeds, oblivious to the burning of oil that powers them forwards. As my wife once said “humanity is affecting the planet like a slow-motion asteroid impact”. Here’s what’s happening:
Near to Vegas there are two lovely parks in Nevada’s Mojave Desert: Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, where my late wife and I would frequently go hiking, and the Valley of Fire State Park. That’ll be the subject of my next blog entry.
