It’s a gamble…
Sustainability ideas for Las Vegas.
Areas in need of obvious improvement:
Transportation
Hunger
Utilizing waste of hotels for homeless/hungry
Education and involvement in agriculture in school systems
Energy
Education
Water
Transportation/Bike
Paths
City of Las Vegas would implement safe (perhaps elevated or walled)
bike paths along major foot traffic areas, such as the Strip and Downtown, and.
Self- checkout Bike Stations would be available along the path where bikes
could be rented by the hour or day with a credit/debit card or smart phone.
Some bike options for child trailers would be available, also. Each station
would have a rent/return option or an option to securely store bikes while
shopping/dining touring the hotels. Trained, paid bike patrol “guides” would
ride the route to help with mechanical and safety issues, tourist questions,
and all-around hospitality. Initial costs would come from bond tax and hotel
taxes, revenues would go to fund city parks and recreation, and enlarging the
bike program to eventually include other recreational areas such as Red Rock
Canyon, Mount Charleston. Lake Mead, Valley of Fire, and other bike baths for residents.
This would cut down on fuel consumption and motor vehicle traffic,
and increase healthful, family-oriented recreation on the Strip and Downtown.
Hunger
Hotels and the Homeless
Implement an on-site gleaner program for each hotel.
Serve homeless or hungry residents the overages from hotel
restaurants on a daily basis (perhaps a soup kitchen type setup somewhere
behind the strip, with resources there to talk to people about getting back on
their feet), or at least arrange pick up of extra food from each hotel and take
it to the homeless shelters.
Incentive: Hotels would get tax credits for participating.
Homeless/poor could be employed to do the gleaning and deliveries
of food stuffs, getting job skills, experience, and contacts for full time
employment.
In Schools:
Each public school would have a green house. Starting in grade
school, students would learn to plant and grow a garden, using the produce in
the school lunch program. This would begin a lifelong education in healthy
eating, growing organically, nutrition and commerce. Extra produce would go to
homeless shelters, or to families of kids in need.
Best practices would be taught, such as building for energy saving
(earth berm green houses, solar panels, windmill water pumps, recycling garden
water into fish tanks, composting lunch waste) Kids could also raise chickens
for eggs, as an excellent source of protein, while letting them care for other
living things and teaching them responsibility.
Students could actually spend after school hours doing something
enjoyable and productive. Community members could volunteer for after-school
supervision. Many older people have skills, such as canning foods for storage
that will be lost in a few decades if younger people are not taught in schools.
The program could grow to include other animals, such as dairy and beef cows,
goats and horses, pigs, and even raising bees, making soaps, cheeses, and
candles, selling honey, and pursuing money-making entrepreneurial skills.
This program would eventually pay for itself in terms of healthful
living and employable skills, while building a real sense of community, and
honoring and passing on the knowledge of elders.
Education
Eliminating GE requirements at UNLV for some degrees.
Offer degrees at UNLV like they do in European Universities.
Concentrating on majors, students could show a set degree of competence in
general education, either by testing out or showing high school competency
scores, thereby allowing skipping two years of generals and getting degrees
faster, saving on loans and student debt, while attracting more enrollment, at
faster turnover rates.
On Retaining Excellent Teachers
Teachers would be required to maintain a level of excellence which
would attract enrollment. Adjunct professors that show high promise would be
encouraged to get their terminal degrees and continue on as teaching staff.
UNLV would offer full-ride scholarships to selected adjuncts that commit to
teaching at UNLV for a certain period of time after graduate school.
Energy
Reduce energy consumption on hotel lights.
Solar Cloth parking lot covers:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/be put
into a city wide grid, providing energy during peak hours to hotels and
residential areas. Power for hotel lights would come out of the grid when
houses are not using as much, reducing stress on the power grid and paying for
the extravagant lighting Las Vegas is known for. There should also be
designated down times, thereby encouraging some night sky viewing, without all
the light pollution. Who really needs to see the Strip 100% lit up at 4am?
Tax credits could be a huge incentive for hotels to install this
product, while selling excess energy to the city makes sense in order to get a
reduced rate for energy when it is needed.
Bonus topic (Because I seriously think we will
get knocked for ignoring water in Las Vegas)
Water conservation:
Water Appreciation Day/April 1st
One day a year, all water to residential areas should be shut down.
People should have to store/carry their own water for just one day, in order to
create empathy with the people all over the world that have to haul their own
water every day. Conservation would boom.
Landscaping:
ALL shallow evaporation ponds should be required to be maintained
as wildlife refuge areas, or filled in and used for water-wise organic
community gardening.
14/3592449/solar-cloth-parking-lots/
Solar panel cloth could be stretched over hotel roofs, some
walkways and bike paths, and large parking lots in Las Vegas, harvesting the
abundant sunlight while shading pedestrians, bikes and cars, reducing interior
air temperatures in locked, parked cars, which saves on air conditioning. The
energy from this new technology of solar cloth could
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