If you wondered whether I might have been indulging in hyperbole of late in describing the solar energy barons’ plans with phrases like “paving the desert with mirrors,” I wouldn’t exactly blame you. Certainly it’s not the whole desert, you might reasonably have thought. A few thousand acres here, another few thousand there? There’s plenty of land in between. Surely the desert landscape would remain in the main unpaved, far less altered than the plowed and furrowed cotton lands of the Central Valley, or the terra-cotta-tiled carcinoma that is your typical southern California suburb.
Take a look at this map, courtesy the BLM’s “geocommunicator” website.
This map is of the northern half of the Ivanpah Valley, north of Nipton and of the Mojave National Preserve, between the south end of Ivanpah Dry Lake and the long hill between Jean and Sloan, which is essentially the southernmost edge of Las Vegas.
The orange crosshatching indicates land covered under pending applications for building industrial solar power generating stations. Not “study areas” — pending projects.
That’s a majority of the land in the Ivanpah Valley right there slated for blading, paving, and heavy industrial development. It would be an uninterrupted swath of industrial facilities leading from the south end of the Strip to the verge of the Mojave National Preserve.
That southernmost orange splotch is the project closest to implementation: the Brightsource project. The rest of them — on the other side of the Nevada Line, east of the Dry Lake and northwest toward Goodsprings — are distinct and additional.
What would those giant mirrors displace? We don’t know, exactly. We know, because the site has been partially surveyed since the project was announced, that Brightsource’s Ivanpah project would pave the habitat of 70% of the known California occurrences of the rare plant Asclepias nyctaginifolia, the Mojave milkweed. There are ten other taxa on the site named in the The California Native Plant Society’s Inventory of Rare and Endangered Plants.
The Mojave, it turns out, is at least as biodiverse as a redwood forest. Here’s a slide from a recent slideshow put together by Jim Andre, desert botanist and director of the Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center:
A typical undisturbed Mojave landscape has about as many taxa — species, subspecies, and so forth — per hectare as a forest of mature Coast Redwoods. And we know less about the Mojave than we do about the redwood forests. There are many places in the Mojave that have hardly been botanized at all. There are plants that show up only after infrequent summer rains, and few botanists make a habit of collecting and cataloguing species when temperatures reach 110F. It’s a big country and many of the unknown plant species are going to be inconspicuous. Andre noted in the Winter 2008 issue of the Desert Report [PDF] that a new manzanita species was recently discovered growing on a ridge above his Desert Research Center. In our rush to pave the desert we will obliterate things we don’t even know are there, consign species to extinction before we realize they exist at all.
That map is a real eye-opener. We are looking at similar plans for parcels of Chihuahuan Desert in Hidalgo County, NM, and possibly other counties. The idea that desert lands are expendable is widespread, I’m afraid. Jim Andre’s side-by-side comparison deserves wide circulation.
Yes! That’s what I say: If you’re going to pave the desert, then let’s clear cut the redwoods next. Makes about as much sense.
This has to be one of the most succinctly eye-opening entries you have ever written - many thanks for this and many times forwarded to friends.
great post. thanks