Las Vegas is a desert. It doesn’t matter how much money the casinos or home owners spend in an attempt to make it look and feel like an lush, tropical paradise. The sun gets very hot here in the summers and there is not enough natural water available to sustain life effectively. When you drive outside of the city, you will see the way the natural landscape looks, and chances are it doesn’t look much like your yard does. Green and fragile plants cannot survive on the amount of natural water that is present from rainfall here, and as a result we end up with a landscape of plants that are shorter and closer to the ground, as well as not being as beautiful and colorful as we might choose for our personal spaces. No matter if we prefer this look or not, we cannot change the fact that we live in this environment, and the only way that we are able to sculpt it in the way we might like is because of the addition of artificial water supplies. This was created through Lake Mead, and for the majority of time that the Hoover Dam was functioning as a water supply for the valley, we have had plenty to go around. We were able to not only assure everyone that there would be enough public water to drink, but also that there was plenty of extra to feed plants that could not naturally grow here. We were allowed to splurge and remake our landscapes to look like more tropical areas, and we always had enough water to do it. This is no longer the case, and multiple years of drought conditions have caused the water levels in Lake Mead to drop below a safe level, meaning that we are almost to the point where every resident of the valley cannot be assured that there will be enough water to drink. Because of this situation, we have decided as a collective society that we need to restrict our water wasting, and this will usually mean that we cannot waste the water on landscaping. These green plants that we have collected over the years are only decorative, and we cannot waste water feeding them that is better allocated to people and animals.
One of the best things you can do for yourself and your Las Vegas community is to remove your grass and replace it with either artificial turf or some form of desert landscaping. This will save upwards of 55 gallons of water per square foot of grass every year, and if everyone did it would save millions of gallons of water. Artificial turf looks and feels just like real grass, which means that you can have all of the benefits that your real grass had without wasting the water it needs to survive. This will save you money every year, as well as the labor it took to care for it. It will also save thousands of gallons of drinking water for our community.