Mojave Desert Blog

John Muir, frustrated by plans in the early 1900s to inundate a beautiful valley for a large reservoir far from its future customers in San Francisco, warned that people were susceptible to view nature as a resource to be plundered, instead of something to be cherished: "...robbers of every degree from Satan to Senators, city supervisors, lumbermen, cattlemen, farmers, etc., trying to make everything dollarable, oftentimes disguised in smiles and philanthropy, calling their plundering "utilization of natural beneficent resources," that man and beast may be fed and the Nation allowed to grow great." John Muir would ultimately be disappointed when close friends he once counted as allies betrayed him and permitted the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley to become a reservoir. His friend Andrew Carnegie said: "John Muir is a fine Scotchman...but for all that it is too foolish to say that the imperative needs of a city to a full and pure water supply should be thwarted

I have never met Carl Zichella of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), but I'm sure he has a history of standing up for what's right for our environment.  But after reading the Desert Sun article on the Department of Interior's plans to allow solar energy companies to bulldoze hundreds of square miles of desert wildlands, I'm convinced Mr. Zichella got lost somewhere on his journey. In a comment meant to belittle concerned citizens and defend renewable energy companies that are destroying our desert landscapes,  NRDC's Mr. Zichella said the following: “There is no impact free energy source,” he said “We need to look at the best sites regardless of ownership.We don't have the luxury of looking at this from a local perspective. Ignoring the best resource areas in the world is not a way to show leadership.” We don't have the luxury of looking at this from a local perspective, he says.  I know he's talking about the urgent need to reduce gl

The California Energy Commission (CEC) on 14 December will meet to consider a proposed decision that would allow solar companies to select whether to submit to local or State (CEC) review when building large photovoltaic solar facilities on public land.  This is important in the near term particularly for the Ridgecrest Solar power project, a proposed facility that would decimate a Mohave ground squirrel connectivity corridor and a robust desert tortoise population.  In the long term, the rule change would give big solar companies the ability to choose what they think will be the path of least resistance to build projects that destroy vast swaths of public land.    Although the CEC has previously opposed the Ridgecrest project, it's approval of several other projects has earned it a reputation as the place where solar companies go for fast-track approval that often ignores environmental and cultural destruction.  It's this reputation that makes people nervous about a regulat

The Los Angeles Times published an article on the passing of long time desert conservationist Elden Hughes.  He worked with others in the Sierra Club to advocate for the California Desert Protection Act in the early nineties, and supported the Wildlands Conservancy's purchase and protection of hundreds of thousands of acres in the Mojave Desert, which are now at the center of new desert legislation .  More recently he brought attention to the destruction of desert habitat by large solar facilities.  Mr. Hughes spoke up against BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.  He was no stranger to Ivanpah.  In 1998 he brought attention to destructive plans to build an airport in the remote desert valley to serve the ever-expanding Las Vegas. I never got to meet Mr. Hughes, but I feel humbled by his tenacity and commitment to desert conservation.   I'm feeling grateful for the efforts of Elden Hughes and others over the years to protect our desert wildla

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

With over 1,000 square miles of destructive renewable energy projects proposed for public lands in California -- mostly in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts -- the California Desert Protection Act of 2011 (CDPA 2011, S.138) appears to be the most extensive proposal to spare desert lands from the prospect of unnecessary industrial development.   Senator Dianne Feinstein actually first proposed the legislation in 2010, but Congress was mired in protracted debate on other issues that year, including health care legislation and last minute deals to put in place a stop-gap budget deal.  Feinstein reintroduced CDPA in January this year, but we are days away from the end of another legislative calendar and the bill still has not moved beyond the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, and Congress is still deadlocked on spending issues. For perspective, it took two years for Feinstein to get her last desert protection bill passed, which was signed in October 1994, and that was with

Tomorrow is 20 November.  A community group called Solar Mosaic declared 20 November as Occupy Rooftops day.  Meaning, find the rooftop of a building in your community where you would like to see rooftop solar, take a picture and send it to Solar Mosaic .  The organization has already used "crowdfunding" to install solar on the rooftop of a community building in Oakland, and is now raising community investment to install solar on other buildings in Oakland and Flagstaff. (I sponsored a solar tile at an Oakland-based food justice organization). Solar Mosaic is a small slice of the rooftop solar pie, but one that is emblematic of how distributed generation -- also known as local clean energy -- can cut greenhouse gasses without asking giant utility companies to devastate desert habitat or mountaintops for big solar and wind projects that are hundreds of miles away from our cities. There is room for utility-scale solar on already-disturbed lands (minimizing ecological destru