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Chapter 3FROM PERSPECTIVE TO PURPOSE: eROI AND THE THREE PHASES OF SUSTAINABILITY

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

—The Cheshire Cat (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)

Las Vegas is a land of paradox. Let's begin with its name, which literally means “the meadows.” Few to none of its 32 million visitors in 2021 would have described Vegas as anything like meadows as they peered over a parched land of sand and rock and wiped the sweat from their brows. The city got its name from the early-nineteenth-century explorers who found a grass-filled valley fed by local springs.¹ In 1905, those springs would entice the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake railroad to choose Vegas as a water stop for its steam engines. A town was born and Las Vegas became a haven for gambling, drinking, and the sex trade from its earliest days. The city's population exploded, and the core of modern Las Vegas took shape in 1931 when the US government completed the hydroelectric Hoover Dam.

Cheap electricity fueled the growth of the famous Strip over the decades, which currently features at least 12 million lights and costs casino operators a half-billion dollars a year to operate. And those 32 million guests (it was 42 million before the pandemic in 2020), make the Las Vegas Strip the third most visited site in the United States.² Those visitors stay in one of 150,000 hotel rooms (the city has 14 of the 20 largest hotels in the world!), dine at one of 4,337 ...