Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Robert Redford, however, was a superstar supporter who was hard to refute. He made intelligent films about the modern West, owned a ski resort in Utah, had married into a Mormon family, founded the Sundance Film Festival for independent moviemakers, and was an outspoken environmentalist and board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His pedigree as a liberal activist included raising money for progressive Democratic candidates such as Arizona’s governor Bruce Babbitt—later a presidential candidate and secretary of interior in the 1990s—and making public appearances for Mo Udall, then chair of the US House Interior Committee, and Stewart Udall, former secretary of interior. It was impossible to imagine him on the side of extraction and energy corporations. Symbolically, having Redford on the stage with Abbott Sekaquaptewa validated the Hopi version of events. And that was what the television cameras and the newspaper reporters recorded.

  If, however, I had not moved on to the Scottsdale art gallery for the evening cocktail party, my doubts might have slipped away. The reporters from the afternoon press conference were explicitly not invited. But if they had been, they too might have come up with a few other queries. They might have noticed the vice president of Peabody Coal chatting with a vice president from the Bechtel Corporation, the largest engineering and construction company in the world. Peabody Coal was strip-mining those same Navajo and Hopi lands on Black Mesa, extracting close to 15 million tons of coal a year—at the time it was the largest strip mine in the country—that were feeding two Bechtel-built generating stations. Bechtel was also in the process of constructing a three-hundred-mile open-air aqueduct that would pump water from the Colorado River up over three mountain ranges into arid Phoenix and Tucson. Unimaginatively named the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the aqueduct and its fourteen pumping stations were the most expensive federally financed civil engineering project since the Hoover Dam. Observant reporters might have identified a vice president from New York–based Equitable Life Insurance, the single largest financier of mineral exploration in the country.

  If the other reporters had done a little corporate research, they might also have discovered that Equitable Life along with Bechtel were owners of Peabody Coal through a private holding company. Not only did the Peabody Holding Company not have to report profits because it was not a publicly traded company, but each of its constituent entities (Newmont Mining, Boeing Corporation, Equitable Life, Bechtel, and Fluor Engineering) had a large public relations department that issued its own press releases about the “good” Hopi and the “bad” Navajo. As Susanne Page later observed to me, “That was probably the only time these men were ever assembled together in one room.” No photographs allowed.

  “Barry, come out and join us,” Governor Bruce Babbitt called to a white-haired man hovering on the edge of the terrace during the $500-a-person cocktail reception. Senator Barry Goldwater was Arizona’s most famous politician, the man who almost single-handedly had taken the Republican Party away from eastern moderates and put it in the hands of states’ rights, small-government, no-tax, individual self-reliant western conservatives who had elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. Our little group included the Arizona governor, several of his aides, and Mary Wedge, a friend of mine from Phoenix who was active in local politics. Everyone, including me, congratulated Senator Barry Goldwater on looking so healthy after being only three weeks out of Ted Dietrich’s clinic for open-heart surgery. “And who is this?” Goldwater turned to me, peering curiously through his heavy black-frame glasses. Governor Babbitt repeated what he had been told, that I was a former congressional speechwriter, former environmental assistant secretary in Massachusetts, and currently on assignment for the Atlantic Monthly. Goldwater was smiling and about to shake my hand when he registered what the governor had said. His smile vanished, his face hardened, and he turned on his heel and walked away so rapidly he left me with my arm extended in midair.

  “Wow,” breathed a shocked aide to the governor. Everyone was speechless, even the unflappable Governor Babbitt. But as I retrieved my dangling arm and watched Barry Goldwater’s rapidly retreating back disappear into the illuminated dazzle of the gallery, I had a thought of great clarity: there is something here that Barry Goldwater doesn’t want me to see.

  When I looked around the room with new eyes, I saw a scene of corporate money and power. It looked like a Washington fund-raiser. The men in the room represented a significant cross-section of Wall Street, Washington, and the West. The Indians were not the major players. The real story was about energy and resources, about how coal was going to be used, and about who would make money. I had unintentionally intruded on the people whose companies were in the process of creating a new Hoover Dam, and with it the water and energy infrastructure that would fuel the next thirty years of metastasizing growth in the West. The irony was that the few people at the time who understood the implications of burning 15 million tons of unfiltered coal a year were the Indians, both Hopi and Navajo, whose traditional people had a very different point of view from the tribal council members. They saw the boundary issue as having been manipulated in order to remove the people who lived on top of the coal and therefore in the way of the strip mining. They knew that coal dust caused pollution and health problems, turned water toxic, pumped out groundwater in the desert, and caused drought. But those Indians couldn’t get to the microphone.

  Northern Arizona might seem remote, but it is a spot where five cultures come together—Hopi, Navajo, global energy corporations, Mormons, and assorted US government agencies. The question that I, like many others, did not ask was why were Robert Redford, Barry Goldwater, and corporate executives from giants like the Peabody Holding Company together at a fund-raiser for the Hopi Tribe? The movie that had far greater relevance to the Phoenix gathering than The Electric Horseman was Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s 1974 moody thriller about how money and power shaped the way that Los Angeles obtained its water supply in the early twentieth century. Based on true events, the story revolved around the men who set up dummy land companies to buy out the ranchers and farmers of Owens Valley, a rich valley two hundred miles to the north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevada foothills, with a lake and a river and constant groundwater from the mountain snowmelt. Future plans involved pumping the water from the valley into Los Angeles for municipal use and surrounding valley lands for agricultural development. Real estate development became the source of the city’s great fortunes. Although the Owens Valley–Los Angeles aqueduct was built in 1913, the movie placed those events in the 1930s.

  In the 1930s Phoenix and Las Vegas were just waking up. They were still tiny towns surrounded by scorching deserts. Las Vegas, in the Mohave Desert, had a population of five thousand and Phoenix, in the Sonoran Desert, forty-eight thousand. But they had seen the template for growth. It involved water, electricity, air-conditioning, and, most important, federal money. In the 1930s the federally financed, but privately built, Hoover Dam was under construction only thirty miles from Las Vegas, and most of the water and hydroelectricity would go to California, making it the wealthiest state in the country. The formula required political power in Washington. As Joan Didion wrote in Where I Was From, about political attitudes in California where she grew up, the local mythology of individual self-reliance was not the real engine of wealth. “The California settlement had tended to attract drifters of loosely entrepreneurial inclination, the hunter-gatherers of the frontier rather than its cultivators, and to reward most fully those who perceived most quickly that the richest claim of all lay not in the minefields, but in Washington.”

  By the 1960s Los Angeles needed more electricity. Phoenix needed more water for agriculture and the housing developments that Del Webb was building. They needed to replace the groundwater that had been pumped out in such quantities that large cavities were opening up at the edges of highways. As the fastest-growing city in the country, Las Vegas doubled or tripled its population every decade. It too had subsidence as groundwater was pumped out. Although the small-governm
ent, individual-responsibility culture did not believe in bureaucracy, the casino owners knew they had to plan for water and electricity. In short, the urban Southwest was not a desert miracle, but required another new Hoover Dam to produce more inexpensive electricity and water. The key word was inexpensive.

  Although the struggle over Black Mesa lands continues to be described as a local issue or a “centuries-old land dispute” between two tribes, it is actually an example of a global phenomenon in which giant transnational corporations have the power to separate indigenous people from their energy-rich lands with the help of host governments. What is not so well known is how it happens in America. Black Mesa is a domestic example of a global syndrome.

  If a group photograph had been taken at that Phoenix reception in 1982, it would have included not only Barry Goldwater and Robert Redford, but also the executives from the five corporations of the Peabody Holding Company as well as the heads of twenty-three utilities who needed the water and energy equivalent of a new Hoover Dam.

  This is a story of how they got it. And how they are losing it.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  EVERYONE COMES FOR THE MONEY

  “Two years! Two years in Las Vegas!” Bette Midler was lamenting. It was January 2010, in the last week of her two-year run at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. “Who could believe it? I’m exhausted.” Then she lay down flat on the stage and called out to the wings, “Celine, come back. All is forgiven.” The forty-three-hundred-seat Colosseum had been built for Celine Dion, who was the headliner there for several years before Bette.

  “Donny and Marie, cross the street! Help me out!” she yelled, pointing in the direction of the Flamingo, where Donny and Marie Osmond’s digitized twelve-story portrait filled the facade. She sat up and looked accusingly at the audience. “I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably saying to yourself, ‘They couldn’t PAY ME ENOUGH to play Las Vegas for two years.’ Well-l-l-l . . . ” She held a three-second beat before she singsonged, “YOU’D BE WRONG-NG-NG-NG-NG.”

  The entire audience simultaneously experienced a thunderclap of recognition and exploded with laughter. We knew what she was saying. Las Vegas is all about the money. Everyone comes for the money.

  Unlike Marie Osmond, who makes her home in Las Vegas, Bette Midler is a quintessential New Yorker, famous for her public commitment to environmentalism and green space, a commitment that is of little interest in Las Vegas. For one thing, there is no green space or even much public space in the city. The best way to stop a promising conversation is to use the word sustainability. Environmentalism is viewed as an affectation of people from the East. Las Vegas is not a community-building kind of place. Las Vegas is a place where people come to avoid reflection, start new lives, make their fortunes, gamble on the mathematics of chance. The go-it-alone individualism of the culture, however, did not stop the Divine Miss M from bringing to the audience’s attention a recent catastrophic event of nature. A week before this performance, on January 12, 2010, a massive collision of tectonic plates had occurred twenty-nine hundred miles away in the Caribbean. The island of Haiti had been devastated by the accompanying earthquake.

  “The Caesar Salad Girls will be in the lobby as you leave,” she trilled to the audience after her multiple curtain calls. “They will be collecting money for Haitian relief. I will personally match every dollar you contribute.” Statuesque chorus girls in sequins, five-inch high heels, and full stage makeup moved majestically through the crowd as their baskets were filled with poker chips and bills of many denominations. They represented another world from the fragile island in the Caribbean where a magnitude 7.0 earthquake had toppled 280,000 buildings, killed 220,000 people, and left more than 1 million people homeless.

  Las Vegas is a city divorced from nature—and proud of it. Located in the middle of the Mohave Desert, it gets four inches of rain a year and has a climate like Baghdad. As a chef at one of the better restaurants put it, “Don’t talk to me about sustainability. Las Vegas is like putting a man on the moon. It has no water. Nothing grows here. And half the year, it’s over a hundred degrees.” It was a testament to the artistry and personality of the Divine Miss M that most in the audience reached deep into their wallets and gave to the victims of Haiti’s geologic misfortune, probably thinking something like that could never happen in Las Vegas.

  Las Vegas has no real downtown, no civic spaces, no historic buildings, no public parks, and no commemorative plaques—no public history. It is known for its philosophy of round-the-clock Fun and a No-Limits sensibility. City leaders—a small group of gambling oligarchs—promote the glamour and spectacle of Las Vegas as a classless neon metropolis where anyone from any economic background can live like royalty, as long as he or she has a credit card or a lot of cash. Las Vegas is designed to alter perceptions: gambling substitutes for income, night is interchangeable with day, the scale of excess refutes the idea of scarcity. As an international destination with 39 million visitors a year and fourteen of the largest hotels in the world, the city attracts more tourists than all of Great Britain. It is home to Steve Wynn, sometimes known as the Medici prince, who created an eight-acre mini Lake Como on the Strip, complete with computerized fountains that dance to Broadway show tunes. Wynn also conceived of Shadow Creek Golf Course, a 350-acre tournament-level course in North Las Vegas that was transformed into a piece of Scotland with lakes, waterfalls, and emerald-green fairways. But a curious visitor might have questions: with six months of summer temperatures over one hundred degrees and annual rainfall of four inches, where does the water come from to keep its lawns and golf courses green? Such a question confirms that the questioner comes from the Land of No Fun, or, in my case, Massachusetts.

  The geologic fate of Haiti, however, was a reminder that nature is always with us and that Las Vegas is more vulnerable than it may appear. Water is a problem. As temperatures rise, more than two degrees over the past three decades, drought is an ongoing problem and air-conditioning is required for longer periods. In its own way, Las Vegas has stretched its natural resources to the limit. If a visitor starts driving around the desert bowl in which Las Vegas is located, another arrangement of nature starts to suggest itself. Behind Hoover Dam is Lake Mead, from which the townships of Las Vegas valley get 90 percent of their water supply. In January–February 2010 Lake Mead was at its lowest level since the reservoir was filled, with strange objects poking out of the water. Large peninsulas of rock and dry inlets began to appear where water used to lap the shore. At what used to be the Overton marina, cracked hardpan that used to be former lake bottom stretched as far as the eye could see, even though a sign from the long-vanished marina still announced “Boat Slips Available.” And what about all that electricity that lights up the desert sky so vividly that astronauts 285 miles in space can see the Strip? (The only other man-made object that used to be visible from space was the Great Wall of China, but when I was in China my guide said air pollution from China’s use of coal has occluded the Great Wall.) What fuels that electricity?

  Coming up over Railroad Pass at night, 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, a visitor sees a panorama of 100 square miles of shimmering orange lights, one of the most concentrated illuminated displays in the world. The lights appear to dance because of convection currents coming up off the desert floor. The orange color comes from high-pressure sodium lights. At Railroad Pass, desert optics make a visitor think that the illuminated city is only a few miles away and surrounded by empty desert because of the abrupt darkness at the outer edge of city limits. But a visitor couldn’t be more wrong.

  Las Vegas is like an atomic particle, with a bright nucleus surrounded by dense dark matter. The dark matter contains some of the most militarized real estate in the world. Nellis Air Force Base has individual parcels that are equivalent in size to Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. There is some irony that the premier city in a state famous for its no-tax, small-government, hyperconservative political culture exists within
an economy that is buoyed by billions of dollars from the federal budget, spent by personnel from many government agencies. The Nevada Test Site, for example, is run by the US Department of Energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission), with offices in North Las Vegas. The atomic test site begins 65 miles northwest of the city limits and covers approximately 1,350 square miles. Some old-timers who were children in the 1950s still tell stories about how their families woke up in the predawn hours on test days and sat in lawn chairs in front of their trailers (no housing was being built) to watch the atomic blasts light up the sky. In an effort to make atomic tests seem more benign, the government called them “events,” as in “Event Annie.” Rather than watching a lethal nuclear blast of a weapon that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, locals viewed the test as a dramatic spectacle and a tourist attraction. The Flamingo offered women guests an “atomic hairdo” for $75. The Desert Inn served an “Atomic Cocktail.” Casinos like Benny Binion’s took guests up to a spot on Mount Charleston that overlooked Frenchman Flat to watch the blasts. “Wear sunglasses,” everyone was told. The governor redrew the state seal to include a mushroom cloud.

  The curious visitor might ask about the water supply and wonder about the shrinking Lake Mead, from which Las Vegas gets 90 percent of its water. The visitor might also speculate about why more than the average number of supermarket aisles are lined with plastic gallon jugs of water. Has the fallout from underground nuclear tests reached groundwater? “Oh, no,” old-timers say. “That radioactive groundwater is flowing toward Death Valley. Our drinking water comes from Lake Mead.” Still, they urge you to drink bottled water. The level of Lake Mead has dropped 130 feet, so much that it has triggered laws that require the Southern Nevada Water Authority to seek new sources of water. Presently, the authority is following the Los Angeles–Owens Valley model and has bought water rights to a valley 200 miles north of Las Vegas that has a high groundwater level from mountain snowmelt. The authority has received permission for a right-of-way across federal land and plans to pump the water south to Las Vegas by pipeline.