Advocating for the Preservation of Desert Wildlands
Images of Desert Sunlight Project Don't Lie
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The news website MyDesert.com posted a video tour of First Solar's Desert Sunlight project under construction. Once the project is finished, nearly 6 square miles of creosote bush scrub habitat for desert tortoises, kit fox, burrowing owls, and Mojave fringe-toed lizard will be destroyed just outside Joshua Tree National Park. The Sierra Club and other national environmental organizations approved of the project, even though the photovoltaic solar panel technology could have been installed on rooftops or already-disturbed land without destroying wildlands.
Although the First Solar employee interviewed in the video feeds company talking points to the reporter, the images in the background cannot lie. What was once ecologically intact desert on public lands has been bulldozed and flattened. Here are some of the screenshots from the MyDesert.com video, with the video embedded below. The pictures show thousands of steel poles drilled into the ground. The loss of topsoil and native vegetation will take centuries to recover once the project is long gone. And now First Solar wants to repeat this destruction in the Ivanpah Valley for two more projects?
First Sunlight could have built this project on land that was already-disturbed. Instead they found pristine desert next to a Joshua Tree National Park. This is not green energy, and shame on the Sierra Club for pretending that this is a sustainable energy future. Image from MyDesert.com "Tour of First Solar's Desert Sunlight Solar Farm" video.
Nearly 6 square miles will be graded, and new transmission lines will need to be installed, leading to rate increases for electricity customers. Image from MyDesert.com "Tour of First Solar's Desert Sunlight Solar Farm" video.
Thousands of steel poles driven into the desert soil will soon be topped with photovoltaic panels. The same panels could have been placed on rooftops or on land that was already-disturbed. Image from MyDesert.com "Tour of First Solar's Desert Sunlight Solar Farm" video.
Barbed-wire fences installed to keep citizens and wildlife off what used to be public land. Image from MyDesert.com "Tour of First Solar's Desert Sunlight Solar Farm" video.
The Trump administration is again touting the practice of mowing thousands of acres of desert vegetation as environmentally-responsible, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. The draft environmental review of the Yellow Pine Solar project in southern Nevada claims that vegetation mowing - as opposed to bulldozing - will yield positive outcomes that are highly doubtful. This positive framing of the construction practice misleads the public and decisionmakers and ignores decades of scientific research regarding the impacts of mechanized disturbance on desert wildlands. According to the draft environmental review: "Mowing is becoming the standard on large site-type ROWs to prevent permanent impairment of public lands (as mandated by FLPMA) and in lieu of off-site mitigation... Mowing methods are designed to help preserve soils, biological soil crusts, soil seed banks, native perennial vegetation diversity and structure, and cacti and yucca species, and t...
Would you expect that California's desert hosts gives the redwood forest a run for its money when it comes to plant biodiversity? It's easy to take the desert for granted when all you want to do is zoom through it on the highway and get to your destination. But you are passing by an amazing and biologically diverse ecosystem. There are at least 2,450 native plant species found in California's desert, according to a great article by Chris Clarke on desert life , posted at KCET. If you want to learn more about our amazing deserts, join Desert Biodiversity, a new organization dedicated to exploring, respecting and defending the deserts.
The Trump Administration this month released an assessment that concludes that a solar developer can crush and mow vegetation across several square miles of prime desert tortoise habitat, and still consider those lands as viable habitat for the species. The silence of some national-level environmental groups regarding the unconventional and unscientific conclusion appears to signal their comfort taking risks with a species already facing significant peril, as well as these groups' inability to champion more sustainable locations to generate clean energy in Nevada. The biological opinion released by the Trump Administration constitutes the official position of the Fish and Wildlife Service regarding the impacts of the proposed Gemini Solar project; its curious willingness to declare heavily disturbed lands as viable tortoise habitat was necessary for the project's approval because the project would be built on lands that have been identified as a vital habitat linkage sustai...
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