Wednesday marked the occasion of my first visit to the Ivanpah Valley since construction began in earnest. I’d been there in October during the Spirit Run to protest the project, but they’d just barely gotten started at that point — putting fences up, raising a few dust clouds.
Now they’ve got all of Phase One cleared and the beginnings of the 450-foot power tower going up. I’d braced myself for several miles before the site came into view, to no avail. We came north around the last curve before that long downslope into the Valley and Nevada, and then came the sudden appalled intake of breath: the gigantic cleared area fills the southern part of the valley much as Manhattan fills the New York Harbor. It is an overwhelming scar on the land, and then I remembered that the land disturbed so far is only a third of what the developers have planned.
I was there to attend a scoping meeting for yet another solar project, the First Solar Stateline Solar Farm — a 300 Megawatt PV project on 2,000 acres of equally valuable tortoise habitat surrounding the 4,000-acre Ivanpah SEGS.
I shouldn’t have bothered going. It was a dog and pony show. A Scoping Meeting is supposed to be a way for the public to comment on a project in advance of preparation of and Environmental Impact Statement. The BLM has apparently decided they’ve had too much public comment on desert solar. We got there only to find there was no public comment section of the meeting. If we had comments, we could write them out on a few pre-printed lines of one side of a sheet of paper, which they thoughtfully provided. How on earth we were supposed to comment intelligently in handwriting in about 75 words was left for us to solve. The meeting erupted in anger, but there was still no public comment.
The upshot: I made the decision I’d pay my rent late, cleaned out what little was in my bank account to fill the gas tank and get a cheap room for overnight, drove 450 miles round trip so that I could be told at the door that they had no interest in what Solar Done Right, or the DPC, or a one-time resident of the Ivanpah Valley had to say. But there were cookies available. They probably spent on cookies what my landlord is hoping I’ll be able to get to them sometime in the first half of this month.
This is how they win. I’m waiting on checks from clients the bulk of which is going to overdue bills, and hoping there are no flat tires or sick rabbits or any other dire emergencies until I get at least a little caught up. Today I decide whether I can afford to drive to Los Angeles tomorrow to attend the funeral of a friend I’ve known since 1982. My jaw aches from clenching it in my sleep the last few months. And I sat in this meeting Wednesday night with other people who’d driven even farther on their own dime, the meeting room surrounded by San Bernardino County Sheriffs and BLM law enforcement rangers with loaded guns and tasers at the ready, and being told that we were to shut up while people traveling on their company’s dime lied to us about revegetating the desert in a few years after dismantling their project — and got paid to do it.
(And here I am turning to my readers to vent: the last people that deserve this. I am so far behind on thanking people for tossing money into the tip jar over there. Some of you have done it more than once. You’ve made any of this possible, and you get the brunt of my complaint. How is that fair? I am embarrassed by it, no matter how much I tell myself that it’s at least theoretically a fair trade, writing for tips, and still I have never been good at asking for money, hearing that shaming Dad voice in my mind every time I even think of doing so. And yet, if you felt like it, I could sure use a little help this next couple weeks making sure the rabbit has enough to eat.)
This is unsustainable. I can’t do this this way any longer.
My colleagues at Basin and Range Watch have often reminded me, when people like me start criticizing biologists for helping round up tortoises, that making a living is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. You make compromises to do so. Sometimes those compromises are little routine ones, like getting out of bed. Sometimes they involve testing your moral code. Ideally you don’t bend too far, but sometimes you’ve just got to feed your kids. Some people are lucky enough, financially secure enough, that they can take stands without worrying about returned check charges, that they can volunteer significant amounts of labor and cover expenses if no one else will. Thankfully, many of the people I’ve worked with over the years who are in this position are aware that this is a privileged position, and are grateful for it, and are aware that not everyone shares it.
I don’t. I can’t anymore. I’ve spent my reserves and eaten my seed corn. I can’t even work on my book. I’ve tried to set aside time each week to do just that and only that, and every single day I’ve tried the debt has intervened, the need to bring in cash has intervened. I’ve left the Board of the Mojave Preserve Conservancy; can’t afford to do the volunteer hours the position requires.
If someone offered me a job doing PR for a giant solar firm right now I would take it. That’s where I am right now. Spent. Broken. I don’t want to think about where I’d be if I didn’t have Annette and the rabbit counting on my going forward.
After Wednesday’s meeting drew to a fractious anticlimax I walked out into the Ivanpah Valley as dusk grew. The air turned purple and hid the worst of the construction scars. It was cool — 90 degrees — and bats and nighthawks swirled above the stupid golf course lawns irrigated by Pleistocene aquifer water. A thin, thin crescent moon sidled down toward Clark Mountain. The moment was a tiny sliver of every night I have spent in the Ivanpah Valley, and I felt for just a few seconds like the Ivanpah Valley was still alive. It’s moments like these I’m talking about when I tell myself the landscape talks to me. It wasn’t until I woke this morning that I realized it was telling me goodbye.
(o)
This is just heartbreaking, Chris! I wish I could do more to help, both you and the desert; that I had some grant I could support you from - but that is not the case, unfortunately. I hope things look up - before you have to go shill for the solar corporations.
(o)
Chris. As one of your many friends/colleagues who draws tough moral lines in bellicose fashion and has, at least for now, the luxury of simultaneously paying my mortgage, eating well, and being a mild irritant to people in undeserved power every once in a while:
I want you to thrive and be secure, and if you have to sell a tiny piece of your scarily nimble intellect and part of the day to someone we don’t like….I’m down with that.
When you love someone who is in your same, very tiny moral universe, you love them for that to the extent that if they have to take a superficial and temporary trip out of it, you still love them, right?
So that’s where I am.
Little more nuance? We need you to be writing what you are writing, and I know you need to be doing it. So part of this pain is whatever negotiation in daily personal energy or politics or gag orders or god knows what that could stifle what you are doing in trade for what they want. I completely trust you to make the right decision, because your expectations are probably 5 turns of the screw tighter than any of ours.
damn it
And if a privileged Palm Beach resident like you feels like that, what hope for the rest of us?
no, but seriously: damn it.
Thank you for trying.
(I almost don’t want to go back now.)
Nobody can take the desert’s inspiration and put it into words like you do—you’ve led the way for so many people to appreciate what we have and what we stand to lose. No employer can take that away, and whatever path you take to make ends meet can never undo that contribution.
The cookies weren’t just expensive, they were massively LARGE so as to silence the voices of reason and dissent. The meeting was an absolute travesty, but went for them exactly as they had planned. Evidently, shutting down comments is the new way for BLM: http://tinyurl.com/3qdens8
In the words of the Big Lebowski, “this will not stand.”
Please don’t stop what you are doing, Chris. Your voice is important and your essays are critical!
If you need a place to stay so that you can attend your friend’s funeral (my condolences), you’re welcome here in Long Beach at my place, Chris.
it’s of little consolation now, I know, but don’t forget that in the end, the desert always wins. The desert will be there as long as the solar fusion furnace runs, and by some definitions even after. The desert has time and though it does little to console us as we watch the places and people we love attacked, still, some day we will all be gone, even the nastiest of us.
it’s of little consolation now, I know, but don’t forget that in the end, the desert always wins. The desert will be there as long as the solar fusion furnace runs, and by some definitions even after. The desert has time and though it does little to console us as we watch the places and people we love attacked, still, some day we will all be gone, even the nastiest of us.
Chris,
I just recently discovered your blog, here on an island in the Salish Sea, Pacific Northwest. I am so very sorry to hear your story. You voice is strong and compelling. I have shared your blog with many folks in my community and I know that your words have made a direct impact on people who did not previously know what was going on in the Mojave.
I completely support your need to take care of your family first. Do whatever you must to survive. Your voice endures. Blessings and strength to you and your loved ones.
Seems that you have some good friends ( Michael). I wish you luck Chris!