We're dying here!

EVEN in academia, necessity still midwifes invention, but when it comes to the big ideas on man's increasingly precarious place in a changing world, it's the UNLV brain trust that've assumed the roles of incubator and caregiver.

The irony of a desert-bound faculty teaching the rest of us to neutralize climate change with new environmental, economic and societal models flows deep and wide. Still, one year after starting the school's efforts to push sustainability -- or keeping human activity from overcoming the planet's limitations -- into the mainstream, one professor is issuing fresh warnings about the need to take care of ourselves, too, as we learn to watch over the planet.

Nancy Menzel is just so unlike so many of her colleagues. Apparently not obsessed with tenure, plainspoken to a fault and seemingly above the savage internecine politics that hamper even the most altruistic aims of academia, the assistant professor of nursing has issued recent findings that calmly, matter-of-factly, deliver word that our civic priorities must change. Much like you imagine she'd break the news of a terminal illness to one of her patients, Menzel says time for mankind to change and renew the environment is running out -- perhaps faster than previously thought.

Why should we care who Menzel is or what she's preaching? Because, as the president-elect of the Nevada Public Health Association -- which brings together professionals from a wide range of public health organizations, including the Nevada State Health Division, local health departments, universities and other licensed health professionals -- Menzel is in a position to use her bully pulpit to great effect. With a sober voice advocating for both an increased awareness of Nevadans' very extant health problems and actions to prevent further erosion of our physical conditions, Menzel says global sustainability starts with us.

How can we reshape and rehabilitate the planet if we ourselves are too ill to make a difference? Change starts with us, both metaphorically and physically, she says. To renew the environment, we must first renew ourselves.

Time is definitely running out for leaders here and across the state to muster the political will to counteract how decades of record population growth and land development here have adversely affected the health of the hundreds of thousands of Southern Nevadans.

The sustainability of our overall health might seem to be a novel concept, she says, but just try to sustain a human population that's so sick it's dying in record numbers. Talk about impossible tasks ...

"We are a young state, but with the right leadership and the right goals, we could reinvent ourselves. We could create an actual healthful environment. But that will take some political will," she says.

That political will won't come cheap. As public sector spending rises in the coming years to meet the increasingly complex challenges of renewable energy independence while shrinking society's collective carbon footprint, Menzel's latest findings on creating a sustainable environment for health predict a high price to keep us all well.

It's been a full two years since the Australian scholar Anthony McMichael warned that sustainable urban environments must "support healthy living now and into the future," and Menzel says benchmarking area population statistics against major health protection goals from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlight the challenges ahead.

Consider the following statistics, based on earlier findings from the Southern Nevada Health District and a range of public health experts:

* The number of locals without health insurance, pegged at 19 percent, is higher than the national average.

* Clark County residents report poorer health status than the rest of the nation.

* Clark County residents have lower life expectancies than Americans in general, with non-Hispanic blacks having the lowest life expectancy.

* Seven of the top 15 leading causes of death are chronic diseases or conditions, with those conditions accounting for more than 60 percent of deaths here.

* Suicide rates here accounted for 2.2 percent of all deaths in 2003 (the most recent year for which data were available from the Southern Nevada Health District), compared to 1.3 percent of all deaths nationwide.

Further, says Menzel, with the majority of local hospitals owned by for-profit chains, a debt-ridden public hospital and the fewest number of general-practice physicians per 100,000 population in the nation, just achieving a parity of health with the rest of America should prove to be a daunting challenge.

It's not as if Menzel hasn't been screaming about Southern Nevada's health needs to anyone who'd listen. According to her firsthand accounts of traveling to Washington, D.C. to lobby U.S. Rep. Jon Porter and U.S. Sen. John Ensign on the need for new commitments to public health, neither lawmaker seemed very concerned. Calls to both Porter and Ensign's offices went unreturned, but Menzel recalls that aides to each politician seemed to consider gay marriage the chief threat to mankind's sustainability.

Other issues, such as health funding, college graduation rates and public awareness of just how ill many locals are couldn't even be broached among the halls of power in our nation's capital.

"They don't want to hear it," she says.

But many Southern Nevadans -- the regular folks -- increasingly want to hear what Menzel has to say. Weekend interviews outside area hospitals -- with taxpayers struggling with a range of economic circumstances -- revealed a very public dissatisfaction with political leaders who seem to take pride in a dearth of social infrastructure and support systems.

Jacquelyn Holtzer, a 30-something mom with a toddler in tow outside University Medical Center, sounded an alarm typical of many residents who spoke to CityLife about the dearth of expansive public health services in the state. "They can build those casinos pretty fast, but if we ask for more money for this hospital we get turned down," she says. "It's like my husband says, 'What are the priorities here?'"

Menzel tells CityLife she believes lawmakers could soon be forced to revisit those priorities, especially as an imploding economy increases the inherent value of every public dollar spent. From taxpayer-funded health care at facilities like UMC to new public transportation networks that can serve a population expected to reach at least 3.3 million by 2026, sustaining public health and public quality of life will likely require a new vision of what government is, and what it should do for taxpayers who foot the bills. It's the one silver lining Menzel sees to this deepening recession.

"Now, people are actually feeling the squeeze. They were insulated for so long, but now they've lost their jobs, they've lost their health insurance ... and it's becoming apparent that the state is not going to rescue them. Now that push has come to shove, the same wave that put Obama in, there will be more call for change. We didn't get a change in gas use until it went to $4 a gallon. We can talk all we want about, but I do think the economic upheaval will drive real change."