 chemicals or metals than by quarrying for gravel and gypsum used to make concrete and wallboard. To the east, Pabco Gypsum can produce more than one billion square feet of wallboard annually. (This quarry, featured in the James Bond adventure Diamonds Are Forever, can send a daily convoy of up to 200 truckloads of wallboard over the geological Great Unconformity, on the way to construction sites in Las Vegas and beyond). To the west lies the James Hardie gypsum quarry, site of a proposed community of 8,400 units of upscale housing. A seemingly efficient transition from extraction to development, the plan is arousing controversy because the site encroaches on the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. 16 To the south, gravel and other aggregates are being extracted from the Sloan Quarry, located on a hilltop looming over new housing below. And to the north, yet another immense gravel quarry yawns between Lone Mountain and the Le Madre Mountain Wilderness; once far from the city, this too is being overtaken by mid-scale housing. While these quarries aren’t as formally impressive as some (as those photographed by Edward Burtynsky, for instance), they are striking in their proximity to new residential developments. 17 Such juxtapositions of source and product are jarring, yet Las Vegas, fixated on a seamless vision of total spectacle, turns a blind eye toward such uneasy contrasts.
Consumption and contamination coexist uneasily in a land of quickly strained resources; the vastness of the Nevada desert can obscure the scars of disruption. Military installations are among the most disruptive and contaminated sites: spaces “unhindered and unregulated” into which the Department of Defense has hurled generations of munitions. At the start of the Cold War, Nevadans welcomed the violent appropriation of federal land in the interests of patriotism and economic boon: the monetary benefits of extraction and destruction are not dissimilar. But the dichotomy of the desert sublime and the destruction visited upon it is as difficult to reconcile as the tension between extraction and construction.
Off-limits to unauthorized personnel, military sites preclude public monitoring. Like an arid counterpart of Joseph Conrad’s heart of darkness, hidden landscapes such as Area 51, locally known as “Dreamland,” remain disconcertingly blank on many maps. Yet the military exercises taking place on these sites profoundly affect the organization of the landscape and the lives of inhabitants. In The Tainted Desert, Valerie Kuletz describes the desert landscape as shaped, bifurcated and compartmentalized by fifty years of military experimentation, by an infrastructure of “high-wire fences, radar antennae, massive satellite communications dishes tilted up toward the stars, sonic booms, stealth aircraft, well-maintained roads in the middle of ‘nowhere’ leading to various ‘installations’ … guard towers and fencing and more fencing, and everywhere government signs that read ‘DO NOT ENTER.'”18
These are what Kuletz calls the “zones of sacrifice” stretching from New Mexico to California, and they include bombing and artillery ranges, nuclear test sites and abandoned uranium mines. More than 80 percent of Nevada is federally owned, much of it dedicated to military use. Just north of Las Vegas is the Nellis Air Force Range. Once used to train pilots for combat in Korea and Vietnam, the desert base is well suited for simulating missions in the Middle East. Comprising nearly 5,500 square miles (roughly the size of Connecticut), Nellis contains the Nevada Test Site, 19 where above-ground nuclear testing was carried out during the Cold War, and where the apocalyptic “Survival City” was built to study the effects of atomic explosions on buildings. In his book about this strange city, Tom Vanderbilt calls it the “embodiment of all towns, an architectural stunt-double for the American way of life.” 20 The New York Times reported that it “stood up surprisingly well against the wallop of a big atomic blast,” with the most serious damage occurring to the city’s “Doo