Big Bad Boom: Radioactive Deja Vu in the American West

In the American West, we take global warming personally. Like those polar bears desperately hunting for dwindling ice flows, we feel we’re on the frontlines of the new weather regime.

The West is drying up. For example, canyon-hugging conservationists and jet-boating gear-heads have argued for several years about whether to “drain” Lake Powell, the 200 mile-long reservoir that once drowned the redrock Eden which was Glen Canyon. But a funny thing happened on the way to debate — Mother Nature drained it herself. Almost. The Utah reservoir is now reduced by half and the prospects of it ever reaching “full pool” again are less than dim. A recent Natural Resources Defense Council report suggests that Lake Mead, an even bigger reservoir downstream that feeds Las Vegas and Southern California, may be emptied by 2050.

Many desert denizens now view abandoned archaeological ruins like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde in the Southwest as more than the remnants of a collapsed, long-lost Anasazi civilization. They increasingly look like haunting hints of our own possible fate as global warming continues to bake the already arid West.

Ghost towns are nothing new in our boom-n’-bust history, of course, but imagine some future tour guide ushering visitors through the awesome ruins of Las Vegas’s Circus-Circus, the Bellagio, or the Luxor Hotel. “They didn’t understand the limits of the landscape that enfolded them,” she might say, while holding up a golf-ball excavated from the ruins for the crowd to see. “When drought pushed them across the threshold, they didn’t see it coming, they couldn’t cope, and it all fell apart.”

Smirking Chimp