The Relationship Between Urban Growth and Decrease in Adjacent Natural Resources

Recently I have been scavenging the web to re-discover a post I saw a couple of months ago that talked about the relationship between the growth of Las Vegas and the decrease of the levels of the Las Vegas Lake at the outskirts of the city. What was really interesting about this post was the interactive map that showed side by side the time-lapse of these events and their inverse relationship.

Although I was unsuccessful in finding the original article, I still managed to find relevant information to portrait this idea:

Source:https://projects.propublica.org/las-vegas-growth-map/

It is clear that the water levels have exponentially decreased as the city boomed in size and population, although it can’t really be determined if this was a direct effect of the city wrongly using the natural resource, pollution, global warming or all together.

What is clear is that cities and resources of this kind have a negative relationship in today’s world and that policies and the overall mindset of how we use and take care of them needs to change for the sake of future-proofing or cities for the decades to come.

Find relevant information:

• https://earthshots.usgs.gov/earthshots/Las-Vegas#ad-image-2-0

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdxHAggOmB4

• https://satellites.pro/Nevada_region_map#35.994674,-114.849701,10

• https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/45945/water-level-changes-in-lake-mead

• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10932785/The-race-to-stop-Las-Vegas-from-running-dry.html

Donate to support the fight against the reduction of the water on the lake:

• https://projects.propublica.org/las-vegas-growth-map/