Images of Desert Sunlight Project Don't Lie
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 n