Sustainable Las Vegas

It’s a gamble…

Areas in need of obvious improvement:

Transportation

Hunger

Energy

Education

Water

Transportation

Bike Paths 

City of Las Vegas would implement safe bike paths—perhaps elevated, walled, or even by using this electroluminescent paint on the bikes—along major foot traffic areas, such as the Strip and Downtown. Self-checkout Bike Stations would be available along the path where bikes could be rented by the hour or day with a credit/debit card or smart phone. Some bike options for children and trailers would be available, also. Each station would have a rent/return option or an option to securely store bikes while shopping/dining touring the hotels. Trained, paid bike patrol “guides” would ride the route to help with mechanical and safety issues, tourist questions, and all-around hospitality.  Initial costs would come from bond tax and hotel taxes, revenues would go to fund city parks and recreation, and enlarging the bike program to eventually include other recreational areas such as Red Rock Canyon, Mount Charleston. Lake Mead, Valley of Fire, and other bike baths for residents. 

This would cut down on fuel consumption and motor vehicle traffic, and increase healthful, family-oriented recreation on the Strip and Downtown.

Hunger

Hotels and the Homeless

Implement an on-site gleaner program for each hotel

Serve homeless or hungry residents the extra from hotel restaurants on a daily basis (perhaps a soup kitchen type setup somewhere behind the strip, with resources there to talk to people about getting back on their feet, and training for culinary jobs), or at least arrange pick up of extra food from each hotel and take it to the homeless shelters. 

Incentive: Hotels would get tax credits for participating. 

Homeless/poor could be employed to do the gathering, preparation, and delivery of food, getting job skills, experience, and contacts for full time employment.

Greenhouses In Schools

Each public school would have a greenhouse. Starting in grade school, students would learn to plant and grow a garden, using the greens in the school lunch program. This would begin a lifelong education in healthy eating, growing organically, nutrition and commerce. Extra food would go to homeless shelters, to families of kids in need, or sold as a business.

Best practices would be taught, such as building for energy saving (earth berm greenhouses, solar panels, windmill water pumps, recycling garden water into fish tanks, compost leftovers) Kids could also raise chickens for eggs, as an excellent source of protein, while letting them care for other living things and teaching them responsibility.

Students could actually spend after school hours doing something enjoyable and productive. Community members could volunteer for after-school supervision. Many older people have skills, such as canning foods for storage, that will be lost in a few decades if younger people are not taught in schools. The program could grow to include other animals, such as dairy and beef cows, goats and horses, pigs, and even raising bees, making soaps, cheeses, candles, selling honey, and pursuing money-making skills. 

This program would eventually pay for itself in terms of healthful living and employable skills, while building a real sense of community, and honoring and passing on the knowledge of elders.
You can learn more about school gardens and how they work from watching this video.

Education

Eliminating GE requirements at UNLV for some degrees

Offer degrees at UNLV like they do in European Universities. Concentrating on majors, students could show a set degree of competence in general education, either by testing out or showing high school competency scores, thereby allowing skipping two years of generals and getting degrees faster, saving on loans and student debt, while attracting more enrollment, at faster turnover rates. 

This article in Salt Lake Tribune addresses the idea of shortening the time it takes to graduate.

On Retaining Excellent Teachers

Teachers would be required to maintain a level of excellence which would attract enrollment. Adjunct professors that show high promise would be encouraged to get their terminal degrees and continue on as teaching staff.  UNLV would offer full-ride scholarships to selected adjuncts that commit to teaching at UNLV for four years after graduate school.

Energy

Reduce energy consumption on hotel lights

Solar Cloth parking lot covers

Solar panel cloth could be stretched over hotel roofs,  some walkways and bike paths, and large parking lots in Las Vegas, harvesting the abundant sunlight while shading pedestrians, bikes and cars, reducing interior air temperatures in locked, parked cars, which saves on air conditioning. The energy from this new technology of solar cloth could be put into a city wide grid, providing energy during peak hours to hotels and residential areas. Power for hotel lights would come out of the grid when houses are not using as much, reducing stress on the power grid and paying for the extravagant lighting Las Vegas is known for. There should also be designated down times, thereby encouraging some night sky viewing, without all the light pollution. Who really needs to see the Strip 100% lit up at 4am?

Tax credits could be a huge incentive for hotels to install this product, while selling excess energy to the city makes sense in order to get a reduced rate for energy when it is needed.

Bonus topic—Because talking about sustainability for Las Vegas and not mentioning water would be lax.

Water conservation

Not so long ago in the desert, people were grateful to have a well and be able to pump water, which was carried to the kitchen, the garden, and for other needs.The struggle for water in the southwest is not going to be won in the courtrooms, or by spending billions in tax dollars to pipe water from one drought-stricken area to another. That is only going to make lawyers and water districts rich, and taxpayers pitifully overburdened. 

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

—Edward Abbey         

The answer has to come from conservation. It has to be a sea change in the way we live. No more convenient single-serve disposable plastic bottles (outlaw them now). Yes, turn off the water while brushing your teeth. Plumb houses so that clean gray water, like rinse water from dishes and laundry, goes directly into storage used to irrigate the family garden. These are old ideas, that could sustain our quality of life. Build houses that are oriented to the seasons, requiring less heating and cooling resources. It's not about maintaining the status quo, but changing it.

Water Appreciation Day/April 1st

One day a year, all water to residential areas should be shut down. People should have to store/carry their own water for just one day, in order to create empathy with the people all over the world that have to haul their own water every day. Conservation would boom.

Landscaping

ALL shallow evaporation ponds should be required to be maintained as wildlife refuge areas, or filled in and used for water-wise organic community gardening.