The Atomic Resort
THE ATOMIC RESORT:
RHIZOME AND BOUNDARIES OF LAS VEGAS AND THE NEVADA TEST SITE
LESSONS FROM THE BONEYARD
North of the Las Vegas Strip the history of the city lies stacked in an empty parking lot. Towering dead neon signs, some dating from the building of the first neon temples in the 1950s, are lined in a labyrinth of rusted metal and broken glass bulbs, silently baking under the arid desert sun. This Neon Boneyard is the work of an enterprising non-profit group determined to salvage something of the history of one of the most transitory and changing urban places in the world.
Each sign has its own history, vividly recounted in any number of historic photographs where they make a prominent statement: a neon oasis specifically built upon twin pillars of spectacle and self-gratification. There are any number of symbols and icons to be found here, from the rusted, hulking metal body of a fifteen-foot tall pool shark to the impossibly large pirate skull that once served as the entrance to the Treasure Island Resort and Casino on the famed Las Vegas Strip.
The shifting nature of place and time swirl through the rows of stacked signs here. Echoes of how the Cold War was translated in Vegas vernacular periodically emerge from the rusting metal, strange reminders of a time when the city and burgeoning global atomic age were intimately connected. Sixty-five miles to the north of Las Vegas, the Nevada Test Site offers a haunted legacy of an ideology and weapons program that fundamentally shaped life across the planet in the latter 20th century.
On their surface Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site couldn't appear more divergent places, one marked by its open boundaries and willingness to readily adapt to need, the other a closed and protected space, guarding terrifying secrets buried in the dust. But digging deeper this surface reality is quickly challenged. Both places have fully emerged in a postwar context and are emblematic of the massive 20th century changes spurred by globalization, western reclamation, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the increasing toxicity of environment associated with the atomic and chemical ages. Both Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site of southern Nevada offer vivid lessons in the permeable and unfixed nature of boundary lines, a truth that is vital in understanding the subjective human experience of place construction and place ethic.
SOUTHERN NEVADA RHIZOMES
Conceptions of place are as difficult to pin down as the dry dust that blows across a Great Basin playa. Place can paradoxically vacillate from the terra firma beneath our feet to something more ephemeral and malleable. That human beings clearly delineate place, and that those boundaries become important in rooting and orienting us is clear. But what is too often taken for granted is just how permeable the boundaries between place and space are. Place boundaries too often become fixed in our mind and take on an aura of permanence, a construct that is fundamentally at odds with the transitory, unstable evidence of the world in motion and process all around us. In his introduction to the Rhizomatic West, Neil Campbell broaches these issues of place based theory in cultural conceptions of the west. Campbell suggests that while cultural conceptions of the west have been founded in a model that draws primarily on ideas of rootedness and frontier, the actual history shows a dynamic area in much greater flux. The rhizomatic west of Campbell is one in which boundaries are constantly transgressed and redrawn. It is a place where routes (and not roots) are critical, as are the countless human (and non-human) exchanges that take place along said routes. This conceptualization makes room for the countless social, cultural, biological and economic exchanges that constantly occur when place boundaries are inevitably transgressed. For Campbell, this new conceptualization offers us something vital in the transnational and globalized world in which we dwell, a place where ideas, commodities, and cultures are constantly moving and in dynamic flux. In approaching traditionally held constructs of the west from this new perspective we might find a deeper and more meaningful sense of place that isn't inherently exclusionary and more cognizant of the inevitable changes that inform, disrupt, and remake place. It is a place where boundaries are permeable, assumptions are dangerous, and binaries can be quickly undermined. This rhizomatic west is a nuanced place that might help us better orient ourselves in a world of seemingly countless routes and exchanges.
Building on the work of Campbell, this study attempts to imagine and reconceptualize a crucial western topography in a way that might offer a greater degree of insight into place (and human activity in creating/remaking it) in the context of a post-industrial and globalized planet. Focus falls on the ecotone space that exists between the high, cold Great Basin desert and its southerly neighbor, the Mojave.Human activity in this region, particularly in the 20th century, reveals much about our society and the ways in which we classify and value space. The examples offered by both Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site (NTS) offer a pertinent example of Campbell's rhizomatic vision. Both are 20th century branches growing from the same tangled roots, places with a very distinctive, shared DNA. At the surface level the two places seem marked more by their differences than any similarities, as witnessed by the closed and guarded boundaries of NTS and the ever permeable, open boundaries of Las Vegas. But upon closer analysis, the history underlying (and ultimately uniting) them is inherently shared and critical to a better understanding of the transnational nation we currently occupy. Both are crucial in revealing the impermanence of boundaries that rigidly govern our lives. While at first glance the NTS may seem a dark shadow of Las Vegas, the two are actually two sides of the same coin, each with a face that tells us something crucial about our culture, where we have been, and where we are going. The first stop in attempting to untangle the rhizomatic roots linking Las Vegas and the NTS are to dig into the Great Basin soil itself and consider the critical component pieces that laid the foundation for its 20th century transformation.
PREPARING THE SOIL
Geologically the Great Basin is a world in the flux of deep geological change, impossible to comprehend on the limited human scale. The crash of plate tectonics has created a world of basin and range, a vast arid desert where the perpetual rain shadow of the Sierra-Nevada Mountains keeps the land dry and open. It is also hydraulically set apart as a vast interior bowl on the north American continent, where any water that does fall is destined to stay trapped until evaporation separates hydrogen and oxygen molecules from the heavier salts and minerals that leave the earth dry and cracked. At different points this amount of water has varied dramatically, as evidenced by the physical evidence left behind by the two great lakes of the Great Basin, Bonneville and Lahontan. Thousands of years ago, during the Pleistocene Era, these two lakes stretched for hundreds of miles across the expanse of the Great Basin. Today their ghostly traces are left as visible shorelines that once lapped quietly against a sea of mountain ranges, as well as the dry dusty playa lake beds that are scattered across the region. These are hallmarks of Great Basin geography, a sometimes alien world full of limitless space and strange light that William Fox claims may be responsible for a deep cognitive dissonance in the human mind. Fox’s insight may help explain how the Great Basin has been shaped, ordered, and used in the 20th century. However, such an idea must be reconciled with the fact that the Great Basin has been called home by human beings for thousands of years.
Today the Paiute and Shoshone tribes of Nevada serve as a direct link to past indigenous populations who have long called the inhospitable environment of the Great Basin desert home. Petroglyphs on rocks found in the Nevada Test Site reveal that for eons people have lived on this land and constructed their own deep sense of place. It is a sense that has left them in the role of deep opposition to much of the 20th century activity that has taken place here. It is their voice that continues to sound out in protest when the Military-Industrial Complex informs plans that will forever change land and topography (as in the case of Yucca Mountain). Like Indian groups across America, the story of Great Basin indigenous populations is one of displacement and reorientation post-contact. It is a change that has come swiftly, like the detonation of an atomic explosion deep in heart of a forgotten desert.
The first Anglo-American known to have crossed the Great Basin was Jedidiah Smith in 1827, but it wasn’t until 1843-1844 that the area was mapped and brought into the burgeoning American frontier consciousness by John C. Fremont's expedition. The purpose of Fremont's journey was to discover the mythical Buenaventura River that was alleged to serve as a direct outlet from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Instead of a vital arterial river Fremont's party discovered its paradox, a place where all rivers flow inward and the land refused to give up its waters to the ocean.
The Great Basin may have been virtually unknown by the new American nation in 1844, but by 1848 it would become a land of heavy traffic as over 25,000 individual crossings took place that year alone (up from a mere 250 in 1845). The impetus was the California Gold Rush which effectively served to link the new nation from coast to coast. And that spread of Americans from east to west introduced ideas and culture that would radically transform the Great Basin and American West. This change was well under way before the first white settler stepped foot on dusty Great Basin desert. As Alfred Crosby explains in Ecological Imperialism, the processes of colonization and imperialism come with a host of unintended consequences that manifest well in advance of the arrival of the invading party. These changes are fierce and work to fundamentally reshape Earth's environments. Change comes through the spread of disease into indigenous populations (who have their own land management practices interrupted with that contact), as well as the spread of flora and fauna that move in and act to disrupt ecosystems. This process of ecological imperialism and associated change was a pervasive agent in fundamentally reshaping the North American environment after the time of contact in 1492 and helped set the stage for the arrival of whites who would carry with them a host of ideas for how to live on and manage their new landscape.
The first crucial construct to consider in laying the foundation out of which both Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site would emerge in the 20th century is the pervasive grid that has come to dominate the American landscape. Born of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the aggressive tendency of settlers to push further west on the continent, the grid was meant to serve as a means of efficiently dividing up the nation’s newly-acquired territory. The acknowledged policy guiding the grid for much of the United States 19th century history was the rapid transfer of government-managed public space to private interests for economic development. Much of the Land Ordinance is rooted in the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson who stands as the principle architect behind its construction. For Jefferson the future of the country and its democratic virtue was fundamentally bound in a form of agrarian utopianism that relied on farmers having access to their own land. By dividing up the landscape and parsing it off in 160 acre squares it was believed that these agrarian yeomen would be able to sustain themselves and their families, and remain free enough from market influences to maintain their own sovereignty and practice the virtues of democracy. By dividing resources among many different interests Jefferson's vision placed inherent limits on the size of government. What Jefferson didn't predict is the way in which this grid would move across a western landscape under the direct control of an increasingly centralized and powerful federal government.
Nowhere is the rise of the federal government (particularly in western issues) more pervasive and easily traced than in the issue of water in the west. The great deserts of the North American West (including the Great Basin) are inherently arid and limited in the forms of agriculture they can sustain. John Wesley Powell, who first mapped the Colorado River before serving as the first director of the USGS, recognized this fact and issued a prophetic warning that development of the west would have to emerge along lines completely different from the more humid east. Powell's vision called for a nuanced survey of available water resources and the creation of small states based on the availability of water within designated watershed districts. In this way certain areas would be acknowledged as having greater agricultural prospects and others would be recognized as simply too arid to farm. What ultimately emerged in the west, however, was a system based on rapid expansion that completely contradicted Powell's recommendations. Instead of the small states Powell advocated, the modern west is marked by large states with straight boundary lines, demarcations that are clearly oblivious of topography and natural features that might otherwise play a role in the development of western resources. Today the state of Nevada (comprised mostly of arid Great Basin desert) is the seventh largest state in the union as well as the nation’s driest.
In addition to bringing the grid west and stretching it across the landscape the federal government's expanded presence in the region is clearly seen in the development of irrigation systems and hydraulic construction. These massive hydraulic undertakings are crucial to understanding the growth of the region, as well as foundational to the emergence of Las Vegas and the NTS. With the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902 the federal government set itself on a trajectory that would both increase federal presence in the west as well as fundamentally reshape the landscape through the sequestering of water to serve the demands of emergent western agriculture. The Federal Reclamation Service was established in 1902 (and later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923) to direct federal efforts in literally reclaiming western lands from a recalcitrant nature. As Donald Worster explains in Rivers of Empire the mindset guiding western reclamation was one of domination. It was marked by massively guided efforts bent on rationalizing and reorganizing the natural environment in ways that would better serve human needs (above any and all secondary considerations such as inevitable impact on local ecosystems). While reclamation efforts began slowly, by the 1930s they were a pivotal symbol on the landscape of increased federal efforts (beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation package) to help pull the nation out of the spiraling economic ruin born of the 1929 stock market crash and deepening Great Depression. It was this era that would produce massive hydraulic efforts including the 1931 construction of Hoover Dam, which is crucial in better understanding the rise of Las Vegas and NTS. The construction of Hoover Dam set precedents in terms of shared economy and increased federal presence in the region that would fuel the rhizomatic growth of both. If the grid helped prepare the land for their inevitable rise, it was the water of federal spending and federal presence via the Hoover Dam (and eventual growth of the Military-Industrial Complex) that would bring both to flower.
TOXIC BOUNDARIES: NEVADA TEST SITE
The Nevada Test Site was born in 1951 when the Department of Energy was allowed to carve out a portion of federally controlled land at the Nellis Air Force, approximately 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. This ecotone space between the Great Basin Desert and the more southern Mojave desert was chosen after a survey of numerous federal land holdings to determine the best place to locate a domestic testing range for the country's newly emerging atomic weapons program. After cracking the atomic code in Los Alamos in 1945 the U.S. government conducted over 100 tests in the Pacific before the high costs and potential security risks involved pushed the government to look for a domestic home for the nation’s emerging atomic program. After surveying a variety of locations including Alamogordo, New Mexico, Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, and Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, it was determined that the space of Nellis in southern Nevada fit the criteria most sought after to continue testing. While the official reasons cited included the relatively sparse human habitation of the area as well the enclosed nature of the place (a byproduct of the basin and range providence that naturally created mountain barrier walls around the test site), another reason may lie in the pure aesthetics of the Great Basin itself. This idea is confronted by Rebecca Solnit in Savage Dreams where she contrasts the apocalyptic west hewn out at NTS with the idyllic garden of Yosemite. Her project suggests a recurring tendency of the human mind to construct the world in binary systems that may not have any firm foundation in the natural world. One would be hard pressed to imagine a government plan calling for the building of a test site in a place like Yosemite, but the Great Basin desert is another story altogether (in spite of the fact that people have called it home for thousands of years). In framing the issue Solnit evokes imagery that grounds this issue of aesthetics along religious lines. The garden of Yosemite is balanced against the howling winds and barren wilderness of Great Basin Desert, effectively predetermining the use of each environment within American land use practice. As Solnit suggests, this arbitrary delineation and use of space not only speaks to the danger of choices based on transitory aesthetics, but also directly challenges the troubled myth of a need for restorative wilderness (which can come at the cost of sacrificing less desirable places for a variety of questionable interests).
With the designation of the Nevada Test Site in 1951 bombing tests began in earnest. Between 1951 and 1963, 100 above-ground atmospheric atomic tests were carried out on the broad, open playas of the test site, before testing was taken underground with the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1962. Between 1963 and the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1993, 828 atomic tests were conducted below the surface of the NTS. Aerial images of Yucca Flat confirm the fact that in the space of forty two years the Nevada Test Site was transformed from a high desert to an alien landscape that holds the unfortunate designation of being the most bombed space on Earth. The ground in former testing areas today is cratered and pockmarked with depressions resulting from the caving in of earth that was displaced with the unreal force of each underground test.
In conceptualizing what the Nevada Test Site offers in a place study the best point to begin is in the small military town of Mercury, which serves as a threshold space between the Nevada Test Site and reality. Built in 1950 to accommodate the personnel stationed at the Nevada Test Site and resting on the foothills that must be traversed up and over to enter the site, Mercury looks like almost any other small Great Basin town from the highway. Throughout its history Mercury has served as the security checkpoint for those who want to enter the Nevada Test Site. Built with an ethic of “extreme form over style,” the town at its peak contained approximately 12,000 inhabitants. These communities (comprised of DOE employees, government personnel, and private contractor staff) hewed out place in this government town that contained the usual amenities one typically found in similar military base installations across the country. It is an interestingly surreal post-war example of a type of intimate space Gaston Bachelard describes as foundational to human place conceptions, precariously balanced on the edge of potential nuclear oblivion. Today the bowling alley, cafeteria, and movie theater sit mostly empty as the population of Mercury has plummeted. This speaks to the deeper trends that currently mark the NTS as a space in transition. With the global moratorium on nuclear testing that began in 1993 the government has been looking at new ways to utilize this space. Paramount among the possible options are leases to private contractors who can conduct the kind of field tests that might prove too dangerous or controversial in more residentially packed places. Rugged isolation has long been one of the hallmarks of the NTS, but even as the government works to transition the space to an area of profit, the town of Mercury is one branch on the NTS limb that is withering. As more potential residents choose to live in Las Vegas and commute to Mercury the population of the town has plummeted to approximately 2,000 temporary residents. And without human community to ascribe meaning and value to it, the town is drying up in the arid desert air, ruins of the atomic age at its zenith.
The Mercury site is also notable because of the presence of the Peace Camp that neighbors it, a visual symbol of one form of public reaction to the space and the abuses to the land that have transpired here in the latter 20th century. While the protests may have dwindled since the 1993 moratorium, it isn't difficult to imagine this place once again catching fire and resonating with opposition. For most of its history the Nevada Test Site stood because of what it could offer in terms of seemingly limitless space and few occupants. With the explosive growth of Las Vegas this line of reasoning is no longer as sound. Currently the atomic fires at the Nevada Tests Site are an increasingly distant memory, but the potential for new fires lie in the land like dead branches doused with kerosene. All it will take is the right combination of public need and political will to set a spark that could once again set the desert to burning.
The potential for reawakening our nuclear demons are greatest in the southwest corner of the NTS, in the playa desert known as Jackass Flats. Here, in the Nevada Research and Development Area (NRDA), ideas flavored with the atomic are still tested out. Massive MX Missile silos litter one area of the flats, the last vestiges of a government plan under Presidents Carter and Reagan that would have cost upwards of $100 billion at setup and effectively weaponized over 25,000 acres of Great Basin Desert. The idea driving the MX project was that through a hugely complex underground relay system, U.S. enemies wouldn't know exactly where the nation’s missiles were housed. Seeing this logic through, it would mean the complete annihilation of the Great Basin in order to safely destroy the entire stockpile stored there, leaving the enemy open to a counter attack from other secret sites hidden elsewhere on the continent. Had the federal government pursued these plans, the MX missile system would have been the largest construction project in the history of humankind, effectively priming the land as an area of sacrifice. Plans for the MX system eventually went by the wayside with the advent of the equally cost-prohibitive and illogical Star Wars missile defense plan. Today unused MX missile silos remain above ground at Jackass Flats, converted into massive storage lockers. They serve as one small example of how space at NTS is forever transitory, holding the potential to be endlessly reoriented and re-purposed.
Jackass Flats is also notable because of the presence of Yucca Mountain, which sits on the southwestern end of the NTS. Visible from the town of Beatty, Nevada (only 59 miles northwest of Mercury), Yucca Mountain may be the most important piece of topography at NTS in terms of bridging the site’s atomic past with a potentially toxic nuclear storage future. Current U.S. policy calls for all high level nuclear waste created in the country (most commonly at nuclear power plants) to be temporarily stored on-site. This temporary designation has become a de facto permanent storage reality as there has yet to be devised a way to properly store the hottest material (which happens to take the longest to cycle through its protracted half-life). The storage of low-level waste material is taking place in other parts of the Great Basin desert (most notably at the Energy Solutions facility in Clive, Utah), a process that involves cataloging the waste in question and simply burying it in the Earth until it measures “safe.” Much government effort, time, and money has been spent on looking for solutions to the high-level nuclear waste problem, and much of it has focused on the potential of a hollowed-out Yucca Mountain serving such a purpose. This has made Yucca the epicenter for protest and action against what Richard Misrach (who photographed military destruction further north at the Fallon Naval Test Range) has deemed the American military's "ongoing war on the west." Central to these protest efforts has been the voice of the Western Shoshone tribe who maintain that the US military’s ongoing use of the land violates the agreements established between the tribe and federal government in the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. For the tribe, Yucca Mountain is a sacred site rising above a homeland that has been set fire by atomic apocalypse. Yucca Mountain is problematic not only in the ongoing tension of who designates space and how it is utilized, but also in opening much larger questions of the door that has been opened into deep time at NTS. The materials proposed for storage at Yucca Mountain would be the highest level waste created in U.S. nuclear power plants and weapons facilities, some that are scheduled to remain volatile and toxic for the next 50,000 years. This is a number so far beyond the realm of recorded human history that it creates its own form of cognitive dissonance (not unlike the void of desert space upon which NTS is situated). Simply put, how does a species newly arrived on the evolutionary scene effectively store and manage such hazardous material over such a broad expanse of time, particularly in the face of inevitable changes to the boundaries of language, culture, and society? How will the stories surrounding Yucca Mountain be manipulated to recast the place from holy shrine of the Shoshone to a spectral atomic graveyard? Couple these human realities with the moving, dynamic nature of the Earth itself and the Yucca Mountain seen in 50,000 years will not be the same place we know today. In 2010, President Barrack Obama halted plans to proceed with construction at Yucca Mountain, but that doesn't end the issue. As the nuclear meltdown that occurred in the wake of 2010s Japanese tsunami shows, disaster potentially lurks around every corner. A similar catastrophe on North American soil (not a distant possibility in light of increasingly aging nuclear power plants) may once again reopen the doors to Yucca Mountain and force us into directly confronting our nuclear demons. But it isn't Yucca Mountain only where the seeds for this reckoning have been sewn. The very soil and dust of NTS holds toxic secrets and an atomic legacy that provides a dark insight into the impermanence of boundaries, both those we construct as well as the physical boundaries of our bodies which provide constant contact and interface with our planet.
To the east of Jackass Flats lies the vast open playa of Frenchman's Flat. This space marks the ground where the majority of the NTS atmospheric tests were conducted by the DOE between 1951 and 1963. Here the sky would periodically light up, even at midday, creating an unexpected tourist attraction for neighboring Las Vegas. Further north, the playa of Yucca Flat became the setting for atomic testing when the tests were moved underground in 1963. With a majority of the 828 underground tests conducted at NTS taking place on the broken topography of Yucca a new terrain has been born, one that bears only passing resemblance to the Great Basin and Mojave desert ecotone that surrounds it. Massive craters and depressions scar the landscape of Yucca Flat, owing to the massive displacements of Earth that took place underground with each test. The largest, called the Sedan Crater, was created on July 6, 1962 as part of the military's Plowshares Program. The ideology of the Plowshares Program was that a potential peacetime application for nuclear weapons might lie in the kind of massive construction projects that seem to grow in the imagination bound in such vast, empty desert space (not completely unlike the Hoover Dam). The 104-kiloton bomb that created the Sedan Crater was detonated 635 feet below the surface and displaced over 12 million tons of Earth in one millisecond. The blast created a crater so alien that it was later used in 1970 by the Apollo 14 astronauts to practice for their eventual moon landing. Today the Sedan Crater is the only feature at NTS that is listed on the National Historic Register. But the legacy of toxic soil, air, and groundwater is the true historical legacy of NTS that will resonate and mark this as distinctive space far into the future. It is the poisoned ground of NTS that will provide a historic legacy of human attempts to unlock and harness the crushing energy of the very sun itself.
With each test at NTS radioactive materials were created in abundance. Radioactive chemicals such as strontium, cesium, and plutonium are born in the vector and vortex of a mushroom cloud before catching in the wind or settling on the constantly moving dust of the Great Basin desert. Down winder events have emerged across the globe in any number of places where the radioactive dust of nuclear fallout has been carried on the breeze. The down winders of Utah and Nevada have gained a degree of national attention because of the implicit role the government played in effectively lying to its citizens about the potential dangers that might result from atomic testing at NTS. Communities scattered across the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau soon learned that the atomic winds blowing west from Nevada carried a very different story than the one promulgated by government authority as cancer rates and birth defects began to spike to levels completely out of alignment with the small demographic populations. And while the story of the down winders often serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of limitless power, the risks to which they were exposed have hardly left us. Today the NTS sits atop 200 million Curries of radioactive waste that was buried beneath the subsurface after each bomb test. Simply burying this material and hoping that it would remain buried is the height of wishful thinking in a shifting landscape. Today a fence marks off an area nicknamed Little Feller I, the site of the last above ground atomic test at Frenchman Flat conducted in 1962. While small by the standards of other tests, the Little Feller site continues to grow with a fence line that is proving troublingly unfixed. It is almost as if the ground itself has been struck with a metastasizing sore that is spreading with time. Putting a fence around such an elusive and moving target marks a human tendency to build space and designate behavior accordingly. But slowly the Little Feller site is offering a vivid example that toxins have no regard for our boundaries and are easily carried in the circulatory system of the atmosphere and the arterial network of groundwater. The fact that these chemicals can enter our bodies and wreak similar havoc on a microcosmic scale seemingly acts to undermine any cultural construction that separates the human body from its environment.
The moving fence lines, geologically active surface, and potential fallout that can contaminate bodies (both human and non-human) speak to the powerful lessons NTS has to offer with regard to the impermanence of constructed boundaries and the ways in which these boundaries are powerfully transgressed. In her environmental history of California's Central Valley, Inescapable Ecologies, Linda Nash explores the ways in which human views on the nature of environment and the body have changed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. For many who entered the western landscape in the 19th century the new environments they encountered were powerfully linked to their health. The fields of medical geography and medical topography rose in response to this, and attempted to chart the ways in which landscapes, topographical features, and miasmas played a role in changing and shaping the human body. With the advent of germ theory in the late 19th century this assumed vital connection between body and environment was displaced as the newly emergent specialization of bacteriology began focusing in on specific germs and toxins that could permeate the skin “barrier” and impact the health of a body. In this intellectual paradigm shift the skin of the body changed from active membrane in constant contact and interface with its environment to protective barrier that could only be penetrated and transgressed through specific pathways (which 20th century specialists set about to discover). And while public health specialists still conceived of an important connection between the body and environment, it wasn't until the postwar period that another vital intellectual shift would occur that would provide a powerful insight into the connection between body and environment,. Recognition of this connection between bodily health and environment fundamentally challenged any assumed binaries that attempted to separate human beings from the larger world around them. The toxic dust of NTS was to play a crucial role in this change.
With the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, Rachel Carson sounded an alarm that resonated throughout American society about the dark side of the chemical and atomic revolutions that had emerged in resplendent force in the postwar period. Carson's contention was that the chemicals being sprayed indiscriminately to underwrite intensive industrial agriculture (as well as the atomic fallout being created to protect national defense) were paradoxically working against their desired aim to secure national interests. Instead these chemical agents were actively undermining the health of American citizens. By appealing to an idea of a balance of nature being deeply disrupted by postwar human culture, Carson not only reconnected body and environment but offered a stinging critique to the massive projects aimed at rationalizing and reshaping the natural world to fit human demands (projects like the Hoover Dam and the Nevada Test Site for example). Subsequent science has born out the truth of Carson's contention to the degree that we now know that the boundaries of our bodies do not act as hardened shields against the environment, but that rather we are active agents consistently meeting and interacting with the world around us. Today the reality is that industrial societies are industrializing human bodies as well. The deluge of toxic chemicals that enter into environments and bodies is spelled out by Phaedra Pezzullo in her study of environmental justice, Toxic Tourism when she writes:
According to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) 2001 Executive Summary Report, there are approximately 650 toxic chemicals and chemical compounds that facilities currently must report to the EPA. That number represents less than 1 percent of the approximately 75,000 chemicals manufactured in the United States. From this same data, the government admits that more than 5.5 billion pounds of toxic chemicals enter into the national environment annually, including 75 million pounds that are recognized carcinogens and released by no less than 20,000 industrial facilities. (55)
In such a potentially dangerous and fluctuating environment, it becomes central that decisions are made that includes an acknowledgment of a scarred and polluted Earth. Sadly, the twin rhizome of Las Vegas suggests that such concerns aren’t central to our current national values. Turning our gaze to the south, towards the humming neon glow of Las Vegas, we can see the shared connections that bind NTS and the city. Sin City also offers a separate, more permeable boundary, which allows for change and exchanges that deeply inform our culture. Though the rigid boundaries of NTS and the completely open excesses of Las Vegas may seem on the surface completely disparate, the truth is that they grow from the same rhizome, and each in their own way provides pivotal clues about who we are, where we have been, and where we might be going.
BOUNDARIES IN PROCESS: LAS VEGAS
In its own, wholly unique style, Las Vegas has much to say about the impermanence of boundaries and emerging post-West space as the Nevada Test Site. While human use of “the meadows” upon which Las Vegas now rests dates back centuries with Paiute use, the first white settlement in the region came in 1855 when Mormon settlers constructed a fort near the modern day downtown Las Vegas Strip. Their twin mission was to convert the local Paiute tribes and build a needed conduit between Salt Lake City, Utah and San Bernardino, California. When these first Mormon settlers were called back to Utah in 1857, the area regained its quiet isolation until 1905 when new settlement emerged with the construction of railroad lines through the desert. The city that emerged and incorporated in the arid desert space in 1911 can claim a unique status as one of the nation’s few 20th century metropolises, with powerful ties to the same rhizomatic roots that created the Nevada Test Site.
If you fly into the McCarran International Airport today the first aerial feature of Las Vegas that dominates the view is the pervasive grid, which is in the process of claiming and reordering an arid piece of desert situated east of the imposing Spring Mountains (which effectively serve as one of the southern borders of the hydrological Great Basin). The same elements that have given rise to neighboring Sunbelt metropolises in Los Angeles and Phoenix are in the process of gridding this space and remaking the desert into one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. Between 2000 and 2010 Las Vegas experienced a surging 41.8% growth rate as the population spiked from 1,375,765 to 1,951,269 permanent residents. And much likes its Sunbelt neighbors, a crucial spark in flaming this population growth is found in the 20th century story of reclamation in the west.
When construction began on the Hoover Dam in 1931 the local leaders of Las Vegas made every effort to convince dam planners and federal agents to base their operations out of the city. It was at this moment that the seeds of modern Las Vegas were planted. As Eugene Moering notes in Resort City in the Sunbelt, 1931 was the hallmark year that the state of Nevada lifted the prohibition on gambling that had been in effect since 1915. Coupled with the state's already loose marriage and divorce laws the new gaming industry helped fuel an image of Nevada as an outlaw state (which is actually paradoxical as more than 85% of Nevada's lands are under federal control, the most of any state in the union). Ultimately the Bureau of Reclamation decided against basing construction operations out of Las Vegas, instead building the infrastructure for the entirely new Boulder City 25 miles southwest (closer to the Black Canyon dam site). However, the massive influx of both federal spending and federal presence that came in the form of dam personnel had an immediate vitalizing effect on Las Vegas. It provided a new, crucial artery of capital that the city was able to utilize in building the formative infrastructure that would mark its emergence and growth in the 20th century. When completed in 1936 the Hoover Dam became vital in supplying both the city and region with a new, nearby source of hydro-electric power - essential to constructing and powering a city that never sleeps.
The immediate post-war years of Las Vegas are remembered in the popular imagination as the era when the first major casino resorts (several of which were backed by organized crime) began to spring up in the former Las Vegas “meadows.” These resorts offered the first vision of the post-industrial tourist Mecca that the city was destined to become. Central to this next wave of growth was again the federal spending poured into the region, but this time in the form of the Nevada Test Site. Among the most haunting images of the above ground nuclear testing era (1951-1963) are the numerous historic photographs documenting how close the blasts were to the growing city. It became fairly common practice for many of the cities casinos and local businesses to set up observation areas on their roofs so that tourists could take in the nuclear sublime, a powerful lesson in the spirit of spectacle that has come to define the city. Today the boundary lines of the NTS itself impose clear limits on the expansion and shape of Las Vegas’ northwestern boundaries.
As Las Vegas historian Hal Rotham explains, the Las Vegas of the immediate post-war decades became an oasis in the desert, a place where the rules were knowingly celebrated as lax. The desert can absorb much, and Las Vegas served as a needed release in a world undergoing rapid and explosive change seen in a burgeoning chemical and atomic age, the Cold War, an expanding Military-Industrial Complex, and the birth of a new form of globalized capitalism. By the 1980s the reputation of the city was not held high in the public mind, as it had come to fully embrace its “Sin City” moniker. But in a testament to the casualness towards boundaries that the city seemingly holds deep in its DNA, another important reinvention took place with the construction of the Mirage Hotel Resort by Steve Wynn in 1989. The Mirage marked another evolutionary turn for this chameleon city, this time as the ultimate desert dreamscape, a place of spectacle for all ages. It is this manifestation that has helped Las Vegas fully emerge as a true post-industrial city, a place where the economy isn't rooted in the manufacturing of any physical goods, but rather the production of experiences and spectacle. In this way Las Vegas seemingly validates the notion of place-based theorists such as Nigel Thrift and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who argued that “place, then, needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world. Places are constructed by people doing things and in this sense are never 'finished' but are constantly being performed” (Cresswell 37). Today the boundaries of Las Vegas are hyper-permeable, with a flow of bodies crossing in and out in a never-ending plethora of social, cultural, and economic exchanges. Las Vegas has become an international symbol of a new American West for the globalized Internet Age, and it has much to say about where the west is currently situated in a post-war, post-modern, and post-industrial context.
That Las Vegas is a flowering symbol of a 21st century American post-West is evidenced by the fact that it couldn't reasonably exist without the trappings of a modern industrialized society. In a brutally harsh and arid desert the cheap power from Hoover Dam subsidizes the cost of air-conditioning casinos and powering the flashing extravaganza of lights and stimuli that never pause and never sleep. The cultivated image of Las Vegas is perpetuated and transmitted globally through both popular culture and the process of relentless cultural and economic exchanges that take place here. On its surface Las Vegas appears to be offering its own inverted notion of the American Dream: an ethos of pure fantasy and individual gratification, conditioned on a seldom seen premise of getting rich quick and having one's every need easily met. But in another sense the permeable boundaries of Las Vegas are creating another, more solid economic reality, one with roots running much deeper in the American soul. The service industries that have expanded in the city have given rise to a variety of new jobs and new realities that are born out in its shifting demographics. Today a large segment of Las Vegas’ non-tourist population is comprised of retired whites who have escaped into the perpetual sun, but those same demographic numbers also reveal a large contingent of non-white, periodically illegal groups who are migrating into the region to fill those jobs (that simultaneously support white retirees and the omnipresent Las Vegas tourist industry). According to Rothman, this trend has effectively made Las Vegas one of the few remaining American cities where the middle-class dream remains attainable. The modern myth of the American middle-class has been in slow decline since the early 1970s, as most Americans have had to fundamentally restructure their working lives just to break even and maintain the standard of living that frames so much of the myth of America's immediate post-war years. And while the economy of Las Vegas has been just as hard hit by the economic downturn of the early 21st century, the open boundaries of the city still offer an oasis that people rush towards, only to emerge with stories and experiences that build the legend of the place and act to consistently reinvent and reinforce its utterly unique image (both nationally and on the global stage).
The dynamic and shifting nature of Las Vegas is just as clearly seen in the active physical changes consistently seen in the city’s structures and reoriented spaces. The city is clearly a creation of the globalized era of capitalism that emerged in the latter 20th century, an economic engine that manufactures needs that only it can fulfill (while also proving voracious in changing space in the attempt to standardize natural processes and rationalize the inefficiencies of nature). Las Vegas has become adept at creating temples of consumption and individual gratification. This process started in the first casinos that sprang up in the post-war era, but has reached its zenith with the massive resorts that have become the iconic symbol of this new, transnational western space. William Fox explores the liquid boundaries and ever shifting spaces of Las Vegas in the Desert of Desire, where he elaborates on the ways in which the permeable spaces of Las Vegas have effectively blurred traditionally held boundaries (such as private space and public space as well as for-profit and non-profit economic exchanges). Step foot into the interior space of any hotel-casino and this surreal reality becomes quickly apparent. While the gaming areas of these spaces remain somewhat generic, each resort specializes in offering individualized spectacles and experiences that cater to the cult of the individual and ultimately end up leaving each casino-resort distinctive and unique in the minds eye. Each of these places brings their disparate images into a whole around some unifying concept, whether it is the miniaturized version of New York, the faux-Parisian of the Venetian, or the historical interpretation of Ancient Egypt at the Luxor. In effect the open nature of these private spaces become public corridors consistently entered and exited by an incessant stream of human bodies. The threshold spaces of dusk and dawn take on a different pallor in the dry Las Vegas air as well, blurred with the relentless lights and kinetic, frantic mayhem of neon signs and huge LCD monitors that consistently interface with the human traffic, blaring out images and information. Similarly, the traditional cultural element of major urban spaces take on a different flavor in Las Vegas, again further blurring boundaries in this utterly unique post-West space. One is just as likely to find an art collection or zoo in the private holdings of a casino as in the art museum or publicly funded places seen elsewhere in the country.
Ultimately the lessons of Las Vegas are not that unlike the NTS, even if their purposes and surface boundaries couldn't be any more divergent. Both show evidence of being born in the same historical moment and context, ephemeral dreams in the desert that could only exist in this one unique moment of space and time. Both are in constant process and reinvention, and both illustrate the kinds of permeable and transgressed boundaries that are only understandable in a post-West, transnational context. The rhizomatic west can mean many things in many places, but in Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site the clear evidence of twin rhizomatic branches with a deeply interwoven history is readily apparent.
WINDS IN THE DESERT
Today the atomic legacy of the Nevada Test Site is passing into cultural memory. No longer do Las Vegas signs advertise imagery of mushroom clouds or make any mention of the lonely place that sits 65 miles to the north of the city limits. Seemingly the rhizomatic connection that led to the growth of these two utterly unique desert spaces is changing. But looks, particularly in places of such spectacle, can be deceiving.
Currently Las Vegas' growth is outpacing the available water resources in the area, a fate that is becoming increasingly more apparent in the west as the promises of reclamation slowly begin to give way in the face of natural pressures and realities. To satiate the thirst that can no longer be quenched by the depleted water resources that once sat under the Las Vegas meadows, the city is turning its own gaze elsewhere. One consideration that has been studied is the potential of tapping the deep and plentiful aquifer that rests under the Snake Range Mountains (home of Great Basin National Park). The uncertainty that surrounds the proposal is disturbing and acts as a powerful reminder of the connections, between Las Vegas, the Nevada Test Site, and the entire planet.
As human settlement spreads we are acting in ways that are powerfully changing the face of our planet. The depletion, and pollution, of groundwater resources is one such example which, when coupled with the effects of a warming planet, is leading to the slow growth of human-made deserts. This process of desertification sees the spread of new desert lands into old, creating new ecotones and thresholds where new possibilities will be played out. It has been suggested that the effects of this process in the Great Basin Desert could lead to an even further desiccation of the already potentially dry Earth. In a place where over 200 million Curries of radiation lay buried just below the subsurface such realities give pause and reveal that the world of the atomic has not left us, but is merely taking a brief hiatus, ready to reignite with the right spark.
The desert winds that blow through Las Vegas and the Nevada Test Site connects these rhizomatically bound twins with larger realities. Their crucial lessons in the openness of boundaries and unreliability of human constructs offer insights into where we have been, where we now stand, and the unknowable future where neon dreams and atomic dust commingle in the desert air.
SOURCES
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Campbell, Neil. The Rhizomatic West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
Coolidge, Matthew. The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to America's Nuclear Proving Ground. Los
Angeles: The Center For Land Use Interpretation, 1996.
Cresswell, Tim. Place – A Short Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
Fox, William L. In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle. Las Vegas:
University of Nevada Press, 2005.
Misrach, Richard. Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990.
Moehring, Eugene P. Resort City in the Sunbelt. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1989.
Nash, Linda. Inescapable Ecologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
Pezzullo, Phaedra C. Toxic Tourism. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.
Rothman, Hal. Neon Metroplois: How Las Vegas Started the 21st Century. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Rothman, Hal. Playing the Odds: Las Vegas and the Modern West. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 2007.
Solnit, Rebecca. Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West.
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1992.