Las Vegas is located in the geographic center of the Mojave Desert and the greater region
includes the Sonoran and Great Basin Desert ecosystems. This vast and complicated
bioregion has tested the human capacity to adapt and sustain for thousands of years. Las
Vegas is also the city at the convergence of the Virgin and Colorado Rivers, the two most
important water sources for the American southwest. Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, just
thirty minutes from town, provide water and power for over thirty million people.
Understanding the relationship between public history and environmental sustainability
in our unique place was the founding goal of UNLV’s public history program. Our
location in the southwest, the historic circumstances of the region, the relentless and
obvious imperative for sustainability and strong multidisciplinary interest in
environmental humanities at UNLV ensured an early integration of environmental and
sustainability issues into our public history program and shaped our work in several core
areas.
My primary public history methodological background is in historic preservation
so using historic preservation classes, projects and a specially developed in-house statewide
historic preservation organization, Preserve Nevada (created in partnership with the
National Trust for Historic Preservation and Nevada SHPO) became the primary way
we’ve worked to integrate environmental sustainability into public history education and
training. Between Preserve Nevada and the rest of the program we completed over forty
national register nominations and cultural landscape documents across the region. All of
these projects were lead by students and all were designed to link the environmental and
the cultural toward sustainability.1 We’ve ranged pretty far afield but Las Vegas and
southern Nevada have always been a special focus of our work.
People often assume that Las Vegas has no real history prior to Bugsy and the
Mob building casinos in the middle of nowhere for no good reason starting sometime
around 1940. Further, Las Vegas is currently a metro area with over two million people
and much of what is visible to the casual observer was built over the past fifty years and
much of this development seems to be in spite of the environment and not obviously
sustainable at all. This is not necessarily true but an important perception to
acknowledge as it explains the pervasive misunderstanding of Vegas as a particularly
unsustainable anomaly when in fact it is much more typical of the greater southwest than
most would assume. Mapping the pre-1940 built environment shows a more familiar
pattern of western and arid region growth closely linked with finite natural resources for
much of the history of human occupation of the region. Thus, historic preservation is a
way to unit interests in environmental history, environmental humanities and public
history practice grounded in place while searching for sustainable practices in a place
known for excess. Simply by revealing the deep patterns of sustainability or lack thereof
in the region public historians can contribute to contemporary efforts to live wisely in an
unforgiving place.
Research by public history students and a greatly expanded community of
regional preservationists in our community has revealed new evidence of early efforts
toward vernacular and climate-sensitive design and sustainable building reflecting this
deeper and more familiar past. Sites such as the Old Mormon Fort and Las Vegas Springs
Preserve demonstrate the connections between nature and culture in a place that
historically looks more typical of the American West than exceptional. Understanding the
history of successful living in the Mojave Desert gained even greater importance in the
early years of the twenty-first century when historic drought in the upper Colorado River
Basin started to drain the water supply for the 70 million residents of the lower basin.
Awareness of global warming and its effects came early to our town because the margins
of sustainability were obviously thin and have been for centuries. For those that look
closely it becomes a little harder to use Las Vegas as the “other.” In ways that some
might find horrifying, Las Vegas is at most only an exaggerated version of where you
live. It is easy to picture Las Vegas as a two-dimensional stage set out in a blank desert
but, no surprise to historians, the reality is more complicated. Our crazy town is an
excellent place to study twentieth-century history and evolving understandings of
sustainability and Las Vegas is a wonderful laboratory for students who work at the
intersections of western, environmental, and public history.
For places where environmental activism and historic preservation were
traditionally separate enterprises, linking the parallel tracks can be challenging. In the
American southwest, however, tying rapidly evolving understandings of environmental
sustainability into public history education and linking efforts in historic preservation
with environmental research and activism has an intuitive logic. The southwestern model
of public history, the types of public history classes taught in this region and the varieties
of multidisciplinary sources we rely on to do our work in the field can be useful for those
elsewhere working to development best practices for integrating suitability and public
history practice.