msday Drive.” 21 Another blast vibrated buildings in the town of Pioche, 100 miles distant, while the “mushroom cloud rose rapidly to more than 35,000 feet and moved eastwards.” 22 During atomic testing, residents of southern Nevada and Utah were termed “downwinders” and given radiation badges to monitor accidental exposure to radiation. In a letter to “people who live near (the) Nevada Test Site,” the test manager at Camp Mercury wrote: “Some of you have been exposed to potential risk from flash, blast, or fall-out. You have accepted the inconvenience or the risk without fuss …” 23
Today the proposed nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain provokes great controversy. The prospect of vast tracts becoming depositories for the detritus of destruction reminds us that the desert was appropriated with the belief that it “really wasn’t much good for anything but gunnery practice — you could bomb it into oblivion and never notice the difference.” 24 The results of test bombing resemble the results of mining: an often radical reshaping of the desert, a landscape contaminated, littered with industrial or radioactive debris.
Today the desert is being reshaped not just by mining and the military. Now it also accommodates tourism and the lifestyle economy. Scenic highway tourism, which flourished in the early 20th century, focused mainly on the visual consumption of the landscape. The postwar era shifted the emphasis to recreational tourism. All-terrain vehicles like demilitarized jeeps, dune buggies, motorcycles, snowmobiles and jet skis are hugely popular. So are mountain biking, skiing, kayaking and rock climbing. Protecting western landscapes from over-recreation can be as difficult as protecting it from test bombing.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 granted the federal Bureau of Land Management the authority to set aside lands as wilderness, defined as “area[s] where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 25 But transient use can be as harmful as permanent occupation. In 1976 Science News raised the alarm about the “Fragile Desert” in a report on the annual 150-mile Barstow–Las Vegas motorbike race across the Mojave. According to the report, the race had destroyed more than 9,000 acres of desert, obliterating plant and animal life, as well as archaeological sites. 26 The race no longer happens, but big increases in both population and ATVs have meant increased stresses on protected lands. Today “more than 28 million homes” are located “less than 30 miles from federally owned land that millions of people increasingly view as their extended back-yards.” 27 Engine noise and emissions add to the problem, as do issues of accessing public lands through private property.
Off-road recreation remains a booming business, and urban marketing firms are riding the trend. Seeking to diversify Nevada’s entertainment profile, R&R Partners, the firm behind the “Only in Vegas” advertising campaign, developed the “Nevada Passage Adventure Competition” in 2003. This reality-show competition showcased rural Nevada as a premier destination for outdoor adventure; 20 people were selected to participate in competitive rock climbing, jet skiing, off-road driving, mountain biking, sandboarding and kayaking. Critics describe such transformations of Old West into New West as the creation of a theme park or “leisure colony” for the privileged. 28 In which case we might argue that the theming of Las Vegas and the theming of the Mojave have in a sense merged, blurring the distinctions between the spectacular Strip and the elemental landscape. “What plays in the Mojave, stays in the Mojave” might be the fitting slogan, as the vast sublimity of the desert gives way to a recreational utopia dotted with golf courses and crisscrossed by ATV tracks.
More than 20 years ago, in Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner described great desert civilizations that flourished and collapsed, suggesting that in the American West, “where water is concerned, logic and reason have never figured prominently in the sch