rcent of Nevada’s population. Plant buildings still exist, and today this brownfield is being converted to commercial uses, including a strip mall.
Today little remains of this era except ghost towns and industrial debris — many of the mining sites are marked by substantial tailings (mostly radioactive sand) and acid mine drainage (which contaminates ground water and runoff with sulfuric acid). The director of the Mining Life-Cycle Center of the Mackay School of Mines, at the University of Nevada at Reno, estimates that “5% of abandoned mines cause some kind of environmental damage,” and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about “40% of watersheds in the western United States” are affected by mining pollution. 12 As mineral wealth gives way to real estate wealth, the sites of extraction haunt contemporary urbanization in disturbing ways.
Nevada is home to between 225,000 and 310,000 abandoned mines, about 50,000 of which pose hazards to the public. Some are physical. In 1996 two bodies were found in an abandoned mine that had carbon dioxide pockets and was posted with the sign: “Keep Out – Bad Air.” 13 In 1999 a girl plummeted 180 feet down a shaft north of Las Vegas. Following this, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Mine Safety, J. Davitt McAteer, reported that “Nevada’s past and present are bracing for a collision,” underscoring the increasingly obvious point that suburban sprawl and abandoned mines are not easily compatible. 14 The old mines pose environmental as well as physical hazards. As part of a metropolitan effort to conserve water, many new developments feature xeriscaping, a form of landscaping using stone, gravel and drought-resistant indigenous plants. But in some cases the stone and gravel for xeriscapes were hauled from abandoned mines. Laden with sulfide minerals, these materials can cause heavy metal contamination through dust inhalation or touch, and still more harm if they enter the municipal water supply. 15
Today the desert around Las Vegas is marked less by mining for precious 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 d