ifficult 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 “Doomsday 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 p