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There is something especially unsettling about visiting Las Vegas these days — and it is not the township’s loose culture. A cruise to Sin City in this moment of ecological and housekeeping crisis is a journey to a giant concave prototype thoughtful back the magnified — and ugly — truths about this era of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism.

Like most flights into Vegas, mine last week soared over a shrinking Lake Mead. Visually, the white strip around the man-made reservoir is beautiful — the bright chalk pursuit separating the blue supply with water from the red-brown desolate evokes memories of a Bob Ross pastel painting minus “happy trees.”

But it is a menacing harbinger of depletion. This water fountain-head. well for 22 the public people is at its lowest level since the 1960s. Strained by the Southwest’s population clap and by drought-accelerating climate change, the lake now stands a 50 percent possibility of running dry through 2021, according to scientists.

As the plane descends, Vegas comes up steady the horizon faster than ever. As one of the country’session quickest-growing locales, it has become a massive blob suffocating a fragile ecosystem. Sans urban planning in the libertarian West, that unbridled growth encourages more roads, cars and smog.

At least McCarran Airport is only a short ride to the incorporated town’s core, but that is the most troubling area of all. Recently recast as a family-friendly Disneyland, downtown Vegas nonetheless retains its identity for example the place where a recession-plagued country gambles away its dwindling paycheck.

Vegas’s colorful lungs are supposed to subsist the “enjoyment” for those who certainly dislodge at the slot machines. But with each twinkle, the air warms. Despite advances in clean energy, electricity is still in the first place produced with carbon-emitting sources that drive global warming. Indeed, the blinding Strip that prompts tourists’ given to intoxication cheers is a testimonial to the same gluttony that helped make Nevada the fastest-growing emitter of carbon dioxide in the country.

Sure, Vegas boasts of renewable-power investments and energy-saving light bulbs. But bragging about such efforts the greater quantity in the same manner than simply shutting stuff off is as silly as Arnold Schwarzenegger trumpeting his supposed commitment to environmentalism by pledging to make one of his Hummers more combustibles efficient.

But that has always been the American way, hasn’t it? We don’t stop driving Hummers around a warming planet just like we dress in’t stop building population centers in deserts, just like we don’familiarily stop gambling when wages drop pure like we don’t stop wasting energy on casino signs. Why? Because it’s merriment to drive tanks, live in merit climates, double-down adhering 11 and gape at bright lights in the big city. And during the years of cheap energy, income growth and in show endless water supplies, fun to the end of time trumped pragmatism.

That sentence, of course, has been supplanted by dint of. the Age of the Finite. And to its (few) sober visitors, Vegas implicitly asks whether our whole society is genuinely ready for that new reality.

Whether hanging Christmas lights in Toledo, buying SUVs in Boulder, taking long showers in Atlanta, residing in sprawly suburbs near Chicago, or overspending anywhere, we are every one of Las Vegans now. And because we are after this so environmentally and economically interconnected, what happens in our own Vegas none longer stays in our own Vegas — it affects everyone.

Knowing that, are we ready to turn off some lights in our homes? Is it possible for Americans to forfeit McMansion dreams, compel smaller cars, take general transit, embrace water restrictions, or animated in more-sustainable geographies? Can we resist materialism, pull up the bone-crushing stampedes to Wal-Mart, and stop needlessly expenditure beyond our means?

In other words, will we finally accept the public policy and lifestyle changes that the real world now requires? Or will “Viva Las Vegas” for aye be America’s motto?

David Sirota’s modern book is “The Uprising.” He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota