Above is a map, adapted from the BLM’s Geocommunicator site, of the Ivanpah Valley. The aerial image covers about 25 miles of the desert left to right. Interstate 15 is the broad blue stripe running more or less vertically. The boundaries of the Mojave National Preserve are approximated in green.
The Ivanpah SEGS, the needless destructive project I lamented yesterday, is outlined in red in the left center of the image. Also outlined in red, across the valley on the east side of the Ivanpah Dry Lake, is First Solar/Silver State’s 4,000-acre-plus photovoltaic project, also fast-tracked by the BLM. First Solar also hopes to start eradicating the site’s tortoises by September 15.
Outlined in orange are additional right-of-way solar project proposals on your public land. The red ones are fast-tracked, meaning the federal government is sidestepping almost all of the public comment provisions of environmental law in order to hand over your public land in another Obama Bailout to some of the the wealthiest people in the world. Once those red projects are in, it’s much easier to argue that the others will not be damaging wilderness-quality land, or fragmenting excellent tortoise habitat, or altering the character of the Ivanpah Valley. The Valley will already be a sprawling solar factory.
I’ve focused my writing here on the Ivanpah SEGS for two main reasons. First, it’s in California, which theoretically meant that there was another level of public input into the permitting process: the California Energy Commission. Sadly, that turned out not to mean anything. I find it difficult to describe the atrocious behavior of that agency without needlessly insulting freelance sex workers in the comparison. Secondly, the design of the Ivanpah SEGS is worse, in some respects, than First Solar Silver State: It will be far more visually intrusive with its 459-foot towers and blinding glare, and it will deplete the Ivanpah Aquifer far more than Silver State’s photovoltaic pads, which do not require water to generate power, aside from occasional cleaning. The Silver State project, however, is if anything more emotionally fraught for me: I would have been able to see it from my bedroom in Nipton had I stayed there. Both projects will destroy fantastic wildlands. Both should be stopped. Time is running out for both, and then what?
I am trying to find some solace in the placement of First Light/Silver State, in that the developers have placed it in a spot where that little canyon to its right bisecting the Lucy Gray Mountains will funnel one flash flood after another from about 25 square miles of desert directly through the project, thus affording not only the opportunity for schadenfreude but a way in which the desert might reclaim itself in only a few short millennia, rather than the 12- or 15 thousand years it will take the Ivanpah SEGS site to recover. But it’s not working.
That’s really what we’re talking about: destroying a place that is older than recorded human history. And thus I propose a painful compromise: Raze the Parthenon. Tear down the Coliseum, Angkor Wat, the Great Wall, the cathedral at Chartres, Easter Island’s Moai, the Sphinx, Stonehenge. Knock the Washington Monument onto the Capitol dome. Put the collections of the British Museum and the Smithsonian into a big pile atop them all, then grind the lot into gravel to mix into the concrete for the Ivanpah heliostat pads, and then maybe — maybe — you will have demonstrated that you take this piece of desert as seriously as it deserves. Maybe. All those sacred antiquities are as scraps of paper, inconsequential wisps of nothing against the ancient desert. And yet they would have us pave it all to run refrigerators.
Thanks, Chris.
I’m sure wishing I had done more.
Is there more to be done now?
(non sequitur: Do you know where they’re putting the tortoises?)
As I think of what more could be done, I’ll let folks know. Possibly including contributions to bailing me out of San Bernardino County Jail.
As for the torts, at least some of FL/SS’s tortoise overburden will be moved to the Walking Box Ranch, which is just on the other side of the McCullough and New York Mountains, and managed by the Nature Conservancy. I don’t know if NatCo is getting any mitigation funds for this, but I have my suspicions. Walking Box is 800 feet higher than the Ivanpah Valley floor, so I expect some acclimation issues. It’s also in an area that gets a whole lot more off-road traffic than that part of the Ivanpah Valley does, so I expect certain other issues.
Some of the Ivanpah SEGS torts will be going, at least temporarily, into a Mojave Preserve facility where Park Service biologists will commence a captive breeding program. This is something I would probably support under different circumstances. Where torts will go from there after they’ve laid a few eggs is uncertain. The Preserve staffer I talked to thought the south end of the Valley, inside Preserve boundaries, might be one possibility: apparently it’s a bit of a mortality sink. I can’t for the life of me imagine why. Said staffer seemed ambivalent about the whole thing, as if he’d not be precisely disappointed if the tortoises stayed where they were.
For those non-tort-geeks in the audience, tortoises live human-scale lifetimes (or longer) in relatively small territories. They get to know their territories intimately well over those decades. Relocation is utterly disorienting for them. They suffer from inability to find food and water as readily as they did back home, and their not knowing where the good hiding places are leaves them far more vulnerable to predators, which for adult torts are mainly coyotes. A famously disastrous relocation from a site in the US Army’s Fort Irwin resulted in about 40% mortality of relocated tortoises within the first year. The death toll certainly rose afterward, but the Army, as far as I know, stopped counting.
Chris, may I pick up this map and some comments for the Johnson Valley Journal? With credit to Sven DiMilo and Coyote Crossing?
The Journal is a publication with a circulation of 200 for Johnson Valley Improvement Association members, residents and other interested parties that comes out every 2 months. My deadline for material for the next issue is the 15th, and I have an Ivanpah story in the works.
Chevron is close to being granted a solar field on BLM land just 15 miles west of us in Lucerne Valley, the closest in time and distance of all the proposed solar right-of-ways along Hys 247…JV is surrounded by them.
Love Coyote Crossing, just found it today.
Feel free, Betty. Glad you find it helpful.
I am so happy you are writing about this Chris (but depressed about the subject)—THANK YOU! Also of note on the map, I believe the gigantic solar orange polygon north of Silver State in Nevada is an application from Cogentrix=Goldman-Sachs.
It occurs to me, and I’m sure many others, that alternative energy keeps referring to itself as “green”. This is quite deceiving when there are so many alternatives, as to location, to where they choose to locate these facilities.
When one does an alternatives analysis, and believe me I’ve done plenty, for siting a project such as these alternative energy facilities, the object is to pick the least environmentally damaging alternative.
Destroy precious ancient desert or retrofit a dead shopping center. Seems pretty obvious to all those that aren’t financially involved.
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
Thank you for posting further information on this subject, and thank you for placing these actions in the proper historical context through which they should be viewed.
“I’ve focused my writing here on the Ivanpah SEGS for two main reasons. First, it’s in California, which theoretically meant that there was another level of public input into the permitting process: the California Energy Commission. Sadly, that turned out not to mean anything.”
reminiscent of “Who Killed the Electric Car”
I will donate to bail $... . It is all so hopeless.