Coyote Crossing

Vote Solar to Tortoises: Drop Dead

Update: Partly in response to this post, Vote Solar has removed the sentence to which I objected most from their large-scale solar page. Vote Solar’s Adam Browning tells me that it was an older phrasing that no longer reflected Vote Solar’s

Energy waste as seen by the International Space Station

If you haven’t seen the amazing time-lapse video generated from footage shot by residents of the International Space Station, you should do so now. I’ve embedded it here. It’s undeniably beautiful. But there’s something about it that’s incredibly

The Problem With Wilderness

This is not a call to weaken wilderness protection in law or management policy, to remove any land from consideration for wilderness protection, or to criticize efforts to protect land as wilderness except as specified. This is a call for

Western Watersheds sues to stop Ivanpah SEGS

[Some good news for your MLK Day.]

WWP Sues to Stop Fast Tracked Power Plant in CA

For immediate release - January 17, 2011

LOS ANGELES — On Friday January 14, 2011 Western Watersheds Project filed suit in federal court to halt construction of

Driving stakes into the heart of the desert

A note from Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch just popped into my inbox:

Hi Chris,

Kevin and I are at Ivanpah, and BrightSource has starting staking out the entrance road, Colosseum Road, for tortoise exclusion fencing! We are not sure

Avian mortality at a desert concentrating solar facility

This study, done at the Daggett Solar One plant in the Mojave in the early 1980s, concludes that while local bird populations may not have been critically endangered by Solar One, larger concentrating solar plants could potentially imperil more

A Call for a Standard: Zero Net Loss of Desert Wildlands

This is a nice little video in support of the California Desert Protection Act of 2010. Watch it. I have a question I’ll ask afterward.

Who Needs a Desert? Solar Power in the Mojave from Peter Rhalter on Vimeo.

It’s a nifty little debunking of

Solar Colonialism

The introductory chapter of historian Gray Brechin’s must-read Imperial San Francisco is entitled The Urban Maelstrom. The chapter begins with a reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s A Descent Into The Maelstrom, a tale of the now-eponymous sea storm with