"They’re living beings that come and go,” Lisa Ortega says, swaying slightly, full of kinetic energy. “And they’re misunderstood. They just can’t be the only answer.” She’s talking about trees, of course. Ortega is the executive director of Nevada Plants, a tree-planting nonprofit she founded in 2021. While environmentalists have long been stereotyped as “treehuggers,” we’ve come to learn that simple acts, such as planting trees, are part of a much broader network of solutions to a more complex set of problems.

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: older Americans overwhelmingly support aging in place in their own homes, with some recent survey data indicating at or over 90% of seniors supporting retirement living in their own homes.

The battle for Red Rock Canyon is lost. The national conservation area is still there, still breathtaking, still red—but it’s increasingly hemmed in by encroaching urban sprawl. It’s tempting to pin the blame on developer Jim Rhodes—who, owing to a protracted legal battle and some unforced errors by the Clark County Commission, now has the go-ahead to build 3,500 homes on the site of a former gypsum mine near Blue Diamond, which is just under nine miles away from Red Rock’s visitor center. But the melancholy truth is that we lost Red Rock several years ago, when nearby Bonnie Springs Ranch—seven miles down the road—was leveled to make way for a luxury gated housing development.

For 300 days of the year, the sun is shining down on the Mojave Desert. Our climate here in Southern Nevada makes us the ideal place to harness the sun’s power through solar energy projects. And while developers have seized that opportunity with big solar plants out in the desert (we counted at least 20 operating in Southern Nevada, with many more on the way), there’s still room for residential and commercial solar power in our urban environment.

Desert summers are becoming more severe, and Las Vegas' urban planning isn't doing it any favors. The expansion of the valley means that the heat is not felt equally in all neighborhoods, especially impacting neighborhoods where more Latinos and African Americans live.

The temperature was already over 100 degrees by lunchtime when Tuyet “Lisa” Phan hauled two cases of water bottles from her white Lexus and dropped them next to a faded blue cooler with “Free Water” written in black marker across the sides.