David Danelski reports in the Riverside Press-Enterprise:
More than 3,000 desert tortoises would be disturbed by a solar project in northeast San Bernardino County and as many as 700 young ones would be killed during three years of building, says a federal assessment issued Tuesday.
Construction has been halted on about two thirds of the project until a new Biological Opinion can be written by Fish and Wildlife, but it continues on Phase I.
Young tortoises are incredibly hard to find, and many stay underground for some time after hatching. If the BLM now expects about 700 baby tortoises to be killed during construction in total, and if a third of the footprint has now been graded, then logically it seems reasonable to assume that BrightSource may already have killed hundreds of tortoises.
At this point the sane response would be to stop all construction, to go over the Phase 1 area with a fine-toothed comb for evidence of killed tortoises in burrows that have been compacted by construction equipment, and for BrightSource executives to start explaining why they shouldn’t go to jail.
I’ll settle for stopping all construction. There’s a petition to that effect here. If you haven’t put it front and center on your blog, Facebook page, or any other venue you might have, please do so.
Just move the turtles there are thousands of miles of vacant desert for them too live on.We need green energy too save our enviroment if they say these turtles are soo endangered then why are soo many off them being found on this one little piece of desert?Just think about all of the miles and miles of desert in the southwest there are literally thousands of these turtles everywhere.I need this project too go forward soo i can go too work and feed my family there is no construction work going on right now and alot of people like myself are counting these green solar projects too be built for us too be able too pay our rent and our bills and like i said before too put food on the table for our families.For you too say that Bright Source people need too go too jail is just plain ludacris.
tragedy of the commons, or what?