The slob museum

Machines have moved most of the earth beside Alto Avenue, a road that bisects a mining operation before rising east toward Sunrise Mountain. The dirt falls off sharply on either side, leaving craters that hold nothing but the dozens of tires that have settled on the floor like soggy Cheerios in the bottom of a bowl.

"Those will get buried," says Amy Irani, environmental health supervisor with the Southern Nevada Health District, as we creep up the hill in her truck. She points to the backhoes and shrugs. What are you gonna do? There are bigger messes to attend to after all, messes that aren't going to get covered up or hauled away without her intervention.

Like the pile of garbage waiting at the end of the road, which goes to gravel at a point marked by the fiberglass hull of an abandoned boat. At this spot, right at the foot of Sunrise Mountain, the trash rises faster than the elevation.

Las Vegas's shady slob subculture has made this spot its own. They've carpeted it with old clothes, glass shards, sheetrock, yard spoils and furnished it with mangled couches, broken microwaves, plastic dollhouses and scrap wood riddled with nails. It's a monument to carelessness, waste and utter disregard for Mother Nature planted flat on the desert sand outside the city.

Irani pulls up a fistful of split rubber tubes -- the remains of copper wire theft left out to rot like a modern-day mob hit. It's not the only evidence of crime in this stretch of desert. Every piece of trash piled up out here illegally is punishable by a fine of up to $5,000. Irani's people have staked out this road, hauled in illegal dumpers and ordered them to clean up their mess. But nothing seems to slow the eruption of trash from the valley below.

"I truly feel that people know what they're doing when they do this kind of stuff," Irani says. "But for whatever reason, they think it's appropriate."

It's not appropriate, by the way. This is desert tortoise habitat, one of the few areas that hosts the rare bear poppy and my introduction to the mountain ranges ringing Las Vegas. And it's all been completely trashed. Uglified. Vomited upon by the poor excuse for civilization below.

Las Vegas has a dumping problem and it's getting worse. Irani and her team have answered 1,611 illegal dumping calls in the first nine months of 2008 compared to 1,640 in all of last year.

"There is a collar of waste around the entire city," says Doug Joslin, project manager for Don't Trash Nevada. "Very few people are actually doing the dumping, but those people have a huge impact on the environment."

Joslin would know. He's had his proverbial fingers in Las Vegas's solid waste for the last eight years. For the last three, he's been in charge of Don't Trash Nevada, an initiative that recruits volunteers for weekend desert cleanups. Before that he worked for the Southern Nevada Health District, the agency that issues permits for landfills, inspects restaurants and prosecutes illegal dumpers. Las Vegas's trash police, in other words.

That's where Irani works, where she came after she moved up from Beaumont, Texas in 2003 to become one of the first female inspectors in the fledgling solid waste program. The city of Beaumont didn't have an illegal dumping problem, she says, at least not to the same extent as Las Vegas.

"What surprises me is how many businesses are doing it. Pool contractors. Construction companies. Lawn services," she says.

Then there's the attitude of the folks who make their home here, many of whom see the vast Mojave Desert as some sort of glorified shooting range. The hills around the city are dotted with bullet-riddled appliances and the glassy remains of assassinated bottles.

In fact, if you venture into the shrinking ring of desert that separates Las Vegas from the mountains around it, you'll find trash. Lots of it. In almost every crevice, wash and undeveloped lot.

And it's not just ugly, it's toxic. Cleaning crews routinely run across lead acid batteries, pesticides, paint thinners and other hazardous chemicals. Vehicles abandoned in the desert don't fade benignly into oblivion -- they leave behind a host of poisonous environmental ghosts.

"Where you have the storage of an engine, the diesel fuel will fissure the caliche and form tiny crevices where it pools. Anytime it rains, that liquid is going to come right off the wash and into Lake Mead," says Irani, who has an undergraduate degree in environmental chemistry. "Once it's there, we fish in it, swim in it, shower in it, make baby formula with it."

Whenever she and her inspectors come across a leaking vehicle, they have to dig out and dispose of the contaminated dirt beneath it.

"If you dump it into the ground, it ends up in Lake Mead," Joslin says. "There's no magical scrubbing plant inside the storm drains."

Sometimes the rain water doesn't make it to the reservoir. All the furniture dumped in the desert -- the sectional sofas, loveseats and recliners -- can clog up the gulleys, leading to flash flooding in the valley below.

The junk poses other dangers as well, and not just to the tortoises. The trash attracts rodents, insects and other unwanted wildlife -- "disease vectors," in solid waste parlance.

"Water collects in abandoned tires," Joslin says, "which allows mosquitoes to grow."

An area afflicted with illegal dumping will see its property values plummet, which is the last thing Las Vegas needs now, given its astronomical rates of home foreclosure.

But the most immediate impact is aesthetic. Anyone in the valley with a Republic Services account can take his junk to a transfer station for free. All you need to do is show the attendant your bill. It's free and it's easy.

There are other places to take your stuff, too. Goodwill accepts furniture, clothes, old toys, the kinds of things that pave the ground near Sunrise. So why take your stuff out here? Because you've always wanted to flip Mother Nature the double bird?

Solid waste professionals don't have much opportunity to speculate on the motives of illegal dumpers, but they sure do fashion some opinions on a culture that tolerates the abuse of our public lands.

"If it's not theirs, people really don't care," Irani says. "They don't realize it's all ours and we gotta take care of it."

Cleaning up

Wendy Scott is built like a saguaro cactus, tall and straight. On a Saturday morning, the Bureau of Land Management desert cleanup coordinator folds herself behind the wheel of a stake bed truck filled with volunteers and takes us up the tail of Lake Mead Boulevard, an area near the Great Unconformity frequented by dumpers and vandals.

Those of us on truck detail will be hauling the big stuff, the furniture and debris that the volunteers armed with grabbers can't handle. For three hours we trundle couches and particle board into the truck bed until it's full, and then return it to one of three rollaway dumpsters. It's hard work. Penance, even, for hiring a moving company to get my stuff to Vegas.

On our final run, we spot four pieces of sectional sofa strewn across a wash. To get to them, we slide down a steep gravel embankment. There's a bad smell coming from bags of animal remains and the decaying corpse of a domesticated dog.

"We've heard rumors that people come out here to leave dogs that have died during dogfights," Scott says.

The bureau started its illegal desert dumping program two years ago, and Scott took the reins in February through a contract with the Great Basin Institute. Before that, the agency fielded desert dumping calls through its air quality department.

Scott has worked a variety of jobs at national parks and research stations. She monitored vegetation, conducted impact studies and spent half a summer pulling weeds on Mt. Rainier in Washington.

These days she works with an invasive species of another kind -- trash.

"I've never seen illegal dumping like they have out here," she says. "I know that to a lot of people it looks like ugly brown hills out here, so they feel OK about dumping. I think it's beautiful, but I guess it's all a matter of perspective."

Why do people dump? Because they can and because other people do it. They see the trash on the desert floor and assume it's OK to add to the mess.

"It's kind of like if you had a kid who said, 'I don't want to clean my room; I'm just going to close the door.' You have to teach that kid to be responsible, that the mess doesn't just go away because you can't see it."

The kids in this case happen to be grown-ass adults, but luckily they have Scott, who, along with Joslin and Don't Trash Nevada, schedules groups of do-gooders to clean up what the bad folks left behind. If it doesn't seem fair, well, it probably isn't. But if there's a silver lining to the illegal dumping epidemic, it's that it has given rise to countless Eagle Scout projects.

"The Sunrise area just constantly gets trashed," Scott says. "We've got volunteers out on the weekend, we've got Bailey Middle School doing cleanups, but people just keep dumping out there."

This begets more dumping, of course, and creates a new ecosystem in the process.

"I've seen a lot of critters who like to live in the trash actually," Scott says. "Rats and bugs get in there. What it really boils down to is an ethics question: What do you want your public lands to look like?"

Evidently the people of Las Vegas want theirs to look like a junkyard.

Day in court

The Southern Nevada Health District offers a $100 bounty to anyone willing to act as an eyewitness in an illegal dumping case. Six years ago, the Solid Waste Management Authority created its own hearing system -- trash court -- that meets once a month in the health district's Clemens Conference Room and circumvents the district court system, which is bogged down with traffic and other cases.

The court only hears cases related to solid waste infractions like the theft of dumpster services, blighted properties and illegal dumping. The October docket includes 18 cases of operating a disposal site without a proper permit. That's the standard charge issued to anyone caught dumping, whether it be in the city or the desert. The charge of illegal dumping is usually added just for good measure, and to increase the fine to a minimum of $1,000, or $500 for each offense.

The hearing officer, Robert Schmidt, sits at the end of a horseshoe table, considering the evidence admitted by solid waste authority attorney Stephen Minagil in the case of Joseph Mackool and Palmetto Tree Service. Unlike most of the defendants, Mackool has decided to mount a vigorous defense based on his belief that the court lacks jurisdiction. Or, as Mackool puts it, "You have no authority over me!"

Mackool is not accused of illegal desert dumping. His case concerns the junked up nature of the lot where he keeps his business. He's ignored several orders to clean up, and has all but decided to take this thing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After declaring his diplomatic immunity, Mackool storms out of the courtroom. In his absence, Schmidt cranks up his fine from $6,300 to $17,000. That's money that could pay for a lot of dumping cleanups.

"This office doesn't take any tax dollars," says Dennis Campbell, environmental health manager. "We get all our money from fees and penalties."

When the office can identify a dumping culprit, that person is responsible for cleaning his mess and presenting the receipts to inspectors. If they can't find the scofflaw, and the dumping happens on county land not owned by the Bureau of Land Management, then the county gets involved. And that can get expensive. Irani, an enlightened sort, can call upon a particularly Nevadan line of reasoning when it comes to this specific issue.

"When people dump, that costs taxpayers money to clean up what other people left behind," Irani says.

And the cleanup can be a long time coming. It takes up to four months for a case to end up before the hearing officer. Then the defendant has another 30 days to comply with the order. If the county gets involved, it will probably put the dump site at the bottom of a long To Do list, unless the case involves raw sewage or hazardous chemicals.

On the hunt

Before the Boy Scouts come in for a cleanup outside Nellis Dunes, Scott has to find some dumpsites for them to assault. We're motoring up a lonely road about 12 miles north of the Las Vegas city limits and she sees her first spot less than a mile off the highway. It's the usual assortment of wrecked furniture, mattresses and scrap wood.

"One of the sad things about the furniture is that I bet Goodwill would have taken that," she says.

We drive out a little further and then turn back. Back when Scott was working directly with vegetation, she could identify most of the native plant species. But all she can point out now are the creosote stems and black brush against the desert sand. These days her attention is consumed by trash and its relentless encroachment on the desert.

But there are some success stories.

"We did a cleanup at the Battlefield Wash near Moapa about six months ago and planted some creosote," she says. "It's still pretty clean out there and the creosote's doing great."

Out here, not so much. From the broken pallets on top of the dunes to the old tires and mattresses clogging the washes, it looks like the Boy Scouts will have their work cut out for them.

"There is way too much trash to be handled," Scott says. "Picking up trash is expensive. It's not cheap to do and it's time consuming. It doesn't take that much time to make a mess, but it takes a lot of time and monetary investment to clean it up."

The solution? Well, we all need to stop making so much trash in the first place, and the trash we do make needs to stay away from the desert. Scott is doing her part to recycle, having already used a tile and part of a broken fountain abandoned in the desert to make a nice table for her backyard.

"Do you mind if I drop you off at your car? I've got a lot of points to take out here," she says.

And she does. The open space around us erupts in isolated junk pockets. She's going to need to mark all of them for the scouts, and so we ride out. As we do, we pass a bright yellow No Dumping sign posted by the health district.

On the other side of the street? Box springs. Broken bottles. Canisters. Michelin tires. Concrete washout. Rusty nails. Cinder blocks. Wheeled coolers. Couches. Pillows. Old clothes ...