[Intro]   Let’s talk about pineapples for a sec. They’re delicious, they’re high in vitamin C, and it would hurt your hands if you used one as a football.  So don’t do that. But for today’s discussion, the most important fact about pineapples is that they only grow in warm, lush tropical climates.  Like any other natural resource, there are certain areas where pineapples just can’t be found.  So, say you want a pineapple, like, right now, but you happen to live where they just can’t grow.  You really have one of two options:  One: You could find a way to get pineapples from communities that do grow them, even if those places were very far away. Or, two: You could adapt your lifestyle to be pineapple-free. No more pineapples for you. You just need to learn to live without them. While probably all of us can live without pineapples, there are many other resources that are more difficult to go without. So. How do humans survive when the resources they need aren’t available? Let’s take clean water, for example. Humans need clean water to survive, but it can be hard for some communities to get it. In cases like this, communities have to make significant changes to their environments in order to meet their needs. To better understand this, let’s look at a city that has almost no natural access to fresh water. Las Vegas, Nevada: a town in the Great Basin Desert, in the western United States. Knowing how important water is, we might conclude that Las Vegas couldn’t survive given its location.  But the citizens of Las Vegas are able to bathe, drink, and frolic in clean water whenever they want. Why? Because they live close to a reservoir.  The reservoir is Lake Mead, which is actually the largest reservoir in the country. It’s about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, and it was created by placing a huge dam in the path of the Colorado River.  After catching some of the water into the reservoir, the water is then transported to Las Vegas through a series of human-made structures like pipelines, which can go as far to the west as California.  Without these human-made structures, Las Vegas, and many other desert cities, just couldn’t be located where they are. So, in order to survive in areas where the terrain and climate aren’t really suited for human life -- like because of a lack of food, shelter, or water -- we’ve come up with ways to adapt and transform our environment to get access to the resources that we need.  Now, there will always be some things we can’t change: Like, unfortunately, I can’t grow pineapples in my backyard here in Canada. But still, humans do have an amazing ability to build big communities in places that seem inhospitable.  Viva Las Vegas!