Ancient desert slated for destruction. Laura Cunningham photo.
There is a story that has haunted me since I first heard it, and it comes to mind often these days. It was in the early 1960s, and the Sierra Club — playing politics in order to save one landscape deemed more imporant than others — had agreed not to oppose a gigantic dam on the Colorado river upstream from the Grand Canyon. Not long after that deal was struck, author Wallace Stegner suggested to the Sierra Club’s director, David Brower, that the Club had acted in haste. Stegner invited Brower to visit the place the Club had written off as unworthy of protection. Brower did. He was horrified at what he’d done. When I met Dave some three and a half decades later, he was still upset over his failure to protect Glen Canyon from the dam builders.
I’ve often wondered, especially after getting to know Dave a little, what that float trip must have been like for him: to see the cathedrals, the fern seeps dotted with crimson Epilobium, the tortuous slot sidecanyons and sublime riffles; to know it would all soon be destroyed; to be wracked with knowing that he might have been able to save the place had he more vigorously opposed the plans to destroy it. I’ve thought of that trip, taken back when I was a small child, and I’ve wondered how he must have felt during it.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks, I will be heading to the Ivanpah Valley to find out.
On or around the 15th of September, the developers of the proposed Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System will be granted all the permits they need to proceed with building their nearly 4,000-acre project. As soon as the permits are in hand, the company’s “biologists” — in much the same sense in which the guy spraying your house for termites is an “entomologist” — will walk the site methodically, shovels in hand, looking for burrows. They will dig up every single desert tortoise they find for relocation. About half of those tortoises will be dead in a year, if similar past projects are any indication. Other animals will be evicted as well: kangaroo rats, burrowing owls, desert woodrats and rattlesnakes, kit foxes, desert horned lizards and badgers. The job will be done in a hurry: legally, no tortoises can be “relocated” after October 15.
And then the bulldozers will come. They will come to rip out the hundred-year-old creosote bushes and thousand-year-old Mojave yucca clumps. They will come to scrape the desert pavement that has been protecting the land from erosion since the Ice Age. They will come to evict the pencil cholla and elegant lupine and the honey mesquite, to blade away almost all of the old-growth creosote desert — though they say they will leave a bit of open soil between the mirrors, a sop to those who’ve asked if they might not leave a few square feet of vegetation here and there as a compromise. That compromise will actually make things worse. Unprotected by desert pavement, those bits and pieces will scour away in the first good wind, will provide harbor to invasive red brome and Sahara mustard, whose seeds will then blow into the adjacent Mojave National Preserve.
When they’re finished, the developers will have installed 173,000 mirrors, each one seven by ten feet, over nearly six square miles of murdered old-growth desert. Those mirrors will focus desert sun on boilers atop three 469-foot towers — taller than the great Pyramid of Cheops. The towers won’t last anywhere near as long as the Pyramid: they have a projected lifespan of twenty or thirty years. But in that time they, along with the mirrors that surround them, will produce a white and hellish glare that even the agencies supporting the project admit will pose a serious hazard to drivers and aviators. The project will almost certainly disable sight-hunting raptors. Night lights on the towers will attract disoriented birds, who will collide with the structures and die.
This stake in the heart of the desert, this new gaping wound that will erode the integrity of the desert for many miles around, this industrial project that even its backers admit will cause serious, unmitigable damage to the environment, this project of an “alternative energy” corporation funded by Chevron and BP and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs — this is renewable energy.
There is still a chance to save the site, still a chance that a large green group will sue over violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, and stall the project for a month until it’s too late to relocate the tortoises, which would mean no construction on the site before December 31, which would mean no Federal stimulus funding for the project, which— given the fact that this uneconomical project could not happen without massive subsidies — might kill it. It would certainly buy us more time. But such a lawsuit becomes less likely with each passing hour. The large green groups have turned their back on the Ivanpah Valley. The Sierra Club — eager to play Glen-Canyon-style politics forty years after those politics were forever discredited — refuses to oppose the project. Every single Sierra Club member I know who is personally familiar with the Ivanpah Valley steadfastly opposes the solar plant, but the Club has expressly silenced its own activists. The Sierra Club, and the National Resources Defense Council, and The Wilderness Society, and a number of other prominent groups have decided to offer up the Ivanpah Valley as a token of their willingness to cooperate with the energy industry.
The mistake, of course, as has been amply demonstrated so many times, is that such dealing won’t buy the groups any influence. Ivanpah Valley is merely the first domino to fall. One “acceptable” project after another will follow, on lands the Respectable Greens deem uninteresting: at Ocotillo, in the Amargosa Valley, at Bullard Wash and Palo Verde, in the Granite Mountains. Hundreds of thousands of acres will fall to the bulldozers, a mistake to dwarf the damming of Glen Canyon, and the damage will multiply, will blow off the sites of each project as plumes of dust.
Not long hence — as the projects go wrong, catch fire, break down, prove unprofitable and are abandoned, and as society turns to actual, practicable solutions to climate change — a new generation of people who care about whatever fragments remain of the desert will ask hard questions. They will ask why we did not stop these projects.
They will ask Carl Zichella and Carl Pope and Michael Brune of the Sierra Club: “Where were you when the wildlands needed you?”
They will ask Johanna Wald of NRDC: “What on Earth did you think you would accomplish by trading these places away?”
They will ask Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity: “What did you have to do instead that was more important?”
They will ask you, and they will ask me: “Why did you not throw yourselves on the gears and make this stop?”
I don’t have an answer for that last one.
I do remember a time when it seemed impossible the Berlin Wall would fall, when it would have been absurd to suggest Nelson Mandela might someday be president of South Africa, when it would have been unthinkable to suggest the United States would start to accept same-sex marriages. Change sometimes comes in an eyeblink; I have not yet given up hope. But our time is short.
Sometime soon, in the next couple of weeks, I will head out to the Ivanpah Valley for a night or two, to greet its tortoises and cactus wrens, to photograph its big red-spined barrel cacti, to hike among its cholla and creosote for what may be the last time. I will grieve that I did not do more to preserve the land there and I will be thankful for the opportunity to give it a voice, however ineffective a voice mine may have been. I will celebrate having met the place, a landscape far older and more precious than I can really grasp, at what may turn out to be the very end of its existence.
This never needed to happen.
:’-(
It’s so sad to see that place get ripped up without a fight.
A friend and I were talking about renewable energy just a couple of nights ago, and we were wondering what the impact of large-scale solar would be. Now I know. As heartsick as I am reading this, I’ve never been there; I can’t imagine how you, who know Ivanpah intimately, must feel.
This makes me want to cry. And scream. And puke. And beat up more than a few people. How very disappointing…and disgusting.
My heart breaks…for this loss. I wish I could go with you to see this beauty before it is destroyed for eternity… If by chance it is still standing this fall, I will go and see it’s beauty for myself.
I wish I had the power to change this…
The solar and wind industries are destroying the very soul of America: her wild areas. These areas feed our souls - we may never have the privilege to walk in your shoes in the wildness of Ivanpah Valley, but knowing that such wild places exist sustains us. And bit, by bit, this energy sprawl will be the death of us. Here in PA, we are sickened by the falling of tall trees to make way for even taller wind turbines - turbines that kill birds and bats by thousands, that turn our intact forests into little patches of woods bounded by wide, open roads.
The leaders of our environmental groups (and I am a member of most of them) are greedy for money and power - that can be the only reason why they allow these tragedies to occur over and over across our country. We need to let these leaders know that we have to save the trees if we want to keep the forest. What will it take to make them understand that we don’t buy into their greed?
A lot of my friends have cancelled their memberships in these environmental groups. Is that what it will take?
Thank you Chris for naming names. It is something that needed to be done.
I will definitely be returning, I hope, to walk again up to the metamorphic hill
then over to the smaller hill up near the biological mitigation area, and I am sure
there will be a few teary moments as I say goodbye.
I keep thinking about the John Woolard(BrightSource Energy ceo) video where he said the
Ivanpah site was already degraded(or words to that effect) due to years of cattle grazing.
By that definition, the whole Mojave almost could be targeted. And with the CEC rolling over
for the BrightSources and others, and with no help of any consequence from the big environmental groups, there can be no doubt, the deserts are in major trouble.
Thanks Chris for all you have done to protect the Mojave Desert and the Mojave National Preserve. Without your voice, we would really be in much, much worse shape.
I just hope that your eloquent words here, and perhaps the prayers from the readers who
might be so inclined, might move those on the fence to get involved in this fight, truly
for the future of the deserts, and to protect them from what I feel is the worst threat
they’ll face for their short and long term survival as an intact ecosystem.
Beautiful Chris, thank you, and heart-wrenching as I recall hiking a great piece of desert. The fight is not over till it’s over.
Chris,
I would like to post this writing on my blog in its entirety with proper attribution and linkages to your site. May I have your permission to do so?
Jack Matthews of Sage to Meadow Blog
When it comes to this nation’s unquenchable thirst for energy (and $) there is no such thing as “alternative”. Alternative should mean examining all of the options and choosing the least environmentally damaging alternative. Like placeing solar energy collectors in abandoned parking lots and never used strip malls.
By the way, whatever happened to energy conservation? Haven’t I heard the phrase whispering in the wind from some ancient sandstorm?
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
While it is unfortunate to be-spoil any natural place, the piece really speaks to a core issue with wind and solar energy - POWER DENSITY. Robert Bryce defines this term in his recent book “Power Hungry” and puts out a call for better perspectives in our energy challenges. Power density (the opposite of energy sprawl)affects less humans’ daily lives in some places vs. others. Unfortunately, the places where people do not dwell are also places where energy must be piped long distances at great expense and inefficiency to load centers, creating higher costs and even more sprawl that wind nor solar developers rightfully claim as their own.
The problem with NIMBY-ing about your favorite wild place is that it amounts to an isolated battle in a war that must be won on a united front. Most typically, governmental agencies fall back onto the argument that “we have to do something to get off that foreign oil and dirty coal.” But does doing anything - no matter how futile and expensive - make sense? I implore that it does not. That’s why we must resist the temptation to defend an individual location from nonsense energy and fight the technology on net economic, technical and environmental impacts - together - as one nation under God - indivisible - with liberty and justice for all.
Compact, controllable power sources maximize efficiency in many ways that wind and solar (especially wind) cannot. Understanding the nature of radiation in the context of exposure from bananas and dental visits compared with nuclear power plants might be an important element in steering our policies toward protecting what is really important here, and away from ideas which make unsubstantiated claims of protecting our environment while destroying it.
Why don’t they just build it on that enormous lakebed in the background? Put it on stilts so the 3 inches of water that get in that lake during wet times just doesn’t affect it.
Shit.
As you know, Chris, I used to know a couple square miles of that valley extremely well. It’s real, no-shit East Mojave habitat and they aren’t making any more of that.
I miss it.
Now forever.
Charlie, putting it on the lakebed would be better in some ways, in that it would pose less of a direct intrusion into habitat. However, it would still draw down the oversubscribed aquifer and create an immense visual intrusion. And the engineers don’t want to, because in the 11.5 months per year in which there’s no moisture in the lake there are usually immense dust devils dancing around on it, which would abrade the mirrors to uselessness in a few years and corrode various connections and fittings with alkali.
Tom, there’s much to consider in your thoughtful post. Personally I don’t find nuclear to be in any way attractive as an alternative, given the immense footprint the nuclear fuel cycle has at its beginning and end. Much of the damage from mining and waste storage has already been visited on the desert, and expanding the industry would expand that damage.
Personally while I think your point about power density is exactly right, I think your solution ignores an important trend. Efficiency and distributed generation could — with current technology — reduce the need for centralized power generation dramatically. Yes, solar’s power density is very low, but that doesn’t matter nearly as much when you 1) take advantage of the staggering amount of earth surface area we’ve already destroyed by putting PV and small thermal in the built environment and 2) cut transmission losses to near zero by generating power at the point of use.
The problem is that the utilities are fighting to maintain an industrial structure that was modeled on 19th century gas companies. Their business models are based on the assumption that the industry itself will be the sole supplier of electrical power, with both centralized generation and long-distance transmission being profit generators. They’re looking at the astonishing advances in PV efficiency in the last decade, especially in terms of kw/$. They’re feeling much like the recording industry faced with file-sharing, and they’re fighting like hell not to have to adapt.
In the 1970s there was a cartoon that appeared in a few progressive publications from time to time — I wish I could find it online — that showed a utility company executive telling people “Sure, you can have solar power… as soon as we find a way to METER THE SUN.” They’ve found it. That’s what these giant desert solar plants are: a way to meter the sun for profit.
I mean, honestly I won’t ever support any desert solar power plant until every flat or south-facing rooftop in LA, Phoenix, and Las Vegas have solar panels or green roofs on them. This project is ridiculous on so many levels.
Not to take away from action at all, because it’s really important, but don’t forget that in 10,000 years all of this that we do will be gone, and there will still be deserts. Deserts take a long time to recover, but they HAVE a long time… billions more years before the sun blows up.
As a longtime visitor and a 10-year resident in the Mojave Desert, I feel there are places I never wish to see again, despoiled by rampant suburbanization, and the grasp of Big Utility tentacles for taxpayer-subsidized power resources in the desert.
Cattle crossing signs have appeared all the length of Hwy. 247 in San Bernardino County, years and years after they were requested and the livestock population is down to about 80, in one small area. We feel the signs have been erected so the applicants for all the solar field right-of-ways around us can argue that the desert here is no longer pristine, therefore they should be allowed to blade and scrape at will. Gorgeous canyon backcountry should be topped with giant wind turbines.
Well, I may never see Tehachapi and Jawbone Canyon again except in memory. I could hope the sacrifice of these places have benefited LA residents with reduced electricity bills, but I know better. It has truly been in vain. We can hope for a last-minute Hail Mary to stop the sacrifice of the Ivanpah Valley.
You may remember that when it was proposed to put a dam at the downriver end of the Grand Canyon, proponents cited the example of Glen Canyon; the argument was that floating across the lake surface made it easier to reach remote side canyons and allowed you to reach Rainbow Bridge by just a short hike, and eventually you could float right up to it.
That of course was true.
However I read the most inspired and right-to-the-point argument against this travesty, and I wish now I knew who said it. “Would you flood the Sistine Chapel so you can see the ceiling more easily?”
The Big Utilities have not made even the most slender Glen-Canyon-style case that the public will get any real benefit at all from their destruction of the land. We will only pay and pay more and more, and line their pockets with our taxes.
Environmentally-minded investors are being duped into thinking their stock purchases are helping the planet, and their dividends are not the planet’s blood money. When will they get the word that solar on the rooftops at the point-of-use will generate new business ventures, much less loss from long-range transmission, quicker and easier installation. Shoot, subsidize me up front 30% instead of Chevron and BP, put AB811 low-cost energy improvement loans into effect, pay me for any excess electrons I put onto the grid…how fast can I get those panels onto the roof!
There are countries and even states where visual impact (destruction of beautiful wilderness and rural scenery) is a giant no-no. The landscape is considered a natural resource as important to the people, even more important to the people, than other more tangible assets.
President Obama’s request for our opinions on what would we like to see on our open lands should be answered: nothing! Leave us alone. No more wind turbines looming over us killing birds and driving humans crazy. No more transmission lines in the foreground when you gaze at the Providence Mountains. No more transmission lines drawn across the view of the Kelso Sand Dunes. No more giving away public lands because of misguided government mandates urged into being by “environmentalists” who should know better. No more.
You said it, Betty.
Thanks to Jack Matthews’ blog where he posted this info and link to yours here Chris Clarke. Appreciate your post comparing your upcoming Ivanpah visit to Stegner taking Brower down Glen Canyon, among the other stupidities that have been allowed. Appreciate, too, the comments here a lot. Yes, we are using electricity to communicate. Our televisions aren’t providing this info, though, so I am glad for this mode of sharing extremely important info here on the web.
Wise-use needs a louder rallying cry.
I am indeed very sorry for this loss of habitat for those whose bioregion this is occurring in - but it feels my loss as well over in the high desert river valley of the Rio Grande. Our fragile but so well-functioning desert biomes. Can this too become a huge lesson after the fact?
I would like to link to this post from my Protect Our Wildlife Corridors Community Mosaic page on Facebook - can I have permission? and will send to my Environmental Educators Association of NM to see if they will send out on listserve as well. Let’s let more people know.
I ended up linking to the energy company’s website!
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/projects/ivanpah
I just traveled through part of the Mojave a couple weeks ago, ended up climbing Mt Wheeler in Great Basin National Park to see the bristlecones, and was awed once more by both the mountainous and low deserts.
Thank you for posting this. I shared it on FaceBook and will be spending some time today trying to do my small part to say ‘no, thanks’ to our collective short-sightedness.
You guys are just plain out crazy- do you really think that global warming is a f—g joke? Here you have a technology that will make a significant impact in reducing the 25% of world-wide carbon that this country representing a tiny fraction of the world’s population (by the way that is where you numb-nuts happen to live and watch TV and use clothes and diswhashers, and fly in airplanes and use computers, etc,etc, etc.) is responsible for farting out into the rest of the world’s atmosphere. Instead of being so god-damned irresponsible, why don’t you volunteer to help Bright Source do a good job of relocating the tortoises and other critters? Because if you continue to sit on your asses and bitch and moan, the devastation that is coming on the wings of global warming will make anything that the solar plant might effect seem like child’s play. Wake up folks - the end is in sight!
John;
First things first. you’re welcome to comment here, but you will do so civilly or the above will be your last comment approved on this site.
Most of your arguments above are rebutted here, including your insinuation that we don’t take climate change seriously.
Bright Source’s actual reduction of US carbon emissions is going to be — get ready for it — zero. Right now desert industrial solar isn’t about reducing carbon emissions: it’s about increasing capacity in the grid without INCREASING emissions as much as coal would.
As regards this?
You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about. There is no “good job of relocating tortoises” one can do. To relocate a tortoise is to kill it. You might also try reading this
for more actual science on tortoise relocation and other desert solar issues. That document in that last link isn’t us enviro types making claims: it’s a panel of independent scientists looking at the issue. Educate yourself about this, john. Climate change is the second most serious environmental issuer we face, and making wildlands pay the price for hastily conceived gold-rush schemes that won’t really solve the problem is, as you might put it, goddamned irresponsible.
uh… John…. there are about 2362623 billion acres of non-pristine-habitat land in our country including the Cheatgrass Wastelands that take up millions of acres, and the rooftops of all southwestern cities and suburbs, and all of the salted up unusable ag land in the Central Valley. No one here is opposed to solar energy! We just need to not put it in STUPID IDIOTIC places out of laziness, ignorance, or just plain stupidity
Come on; credit where due.
This one’s due to $$; period.
I appreciate the dialog, but not so much the emotion. May I refer all of you to a relevant document?
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/5131/Wind-Energys-House-of-Cards
“Keep your eye on the ball!”
Thank you.
This is Emotion Central, Tom. In fact, I have some about that link you offer, which concludes:
Unscientific claptrap, that. The article compares coal-burning plants favorably to renewable energy. This is not helping.
I just nuked a comment from a climate change denialist. I don’t want that crap here. Take it somewhere else. This is a reality-based website.
I cannot fathom why someone - or anyone - would claim to have a scientific bone in their body and then proceed to rebuke skepticism. Even fundamental laws of physics are still open to challenge. It’s healthy - and even friendly! Denial and ignorance of challenge to any hypothesis takes one about as far from the scientific method as is possible. Want to appear scientific? Welcome debate.
So I stand by my initial post here: regardless of your work or expectations on the AGW hypothesis, why deploy unreliable sporadic ENERGY resources far from load if they are not a valid replacement for the CAPACITY resources which are out of favor (coal? nuclear?). There is much to be learned out there for those with the demeanor to study scientifically. Try Kent Hawkins on masterresource.org, for instance.
All the best!
Tom Stacy
I don’t “debate” Holocaust deniers, anti-vaccination activists, or flat-earthers either. Climate change denialism is not skepticism: it’s the unquestioned swallowing of bullshit from sources that offer lies, slander, and unsupportable allegations in place of actual argument and research. Anyone whose opinion of my scientific literacy is of any importance to me gets this.
You people have lots and lots of oil- and coal-industry funded platforms to use to spread your lies. I’m not paying to help. Take it elsewhere.