Coyote Crossing

The Sierra Club National defends its support of paving desert wildlands with solar sprawl by saying things like “rooftop solar is great, but we can’t install it soon enough.”

Apparently they really meant that. Our pal Morongo Bill did a little research so brilliant I wish I’d thought of it:

In the screen capture above, the rooftop where the A inside the orange balloon is the building housing their national headquarters in San Francisco, California. Why are there no solar arrays atop this building housing what is alleged to be one of the greenest organizations in the country and self charged with protecting our environment, especially from global warming?

There’s more of his methodology on his Backporch.

8 comments on "What’s wrong with this picture?"

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.

8 comments on "Paving the ancient desert"

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.

30 comments on "Last Summer at Ivanpah"

My colleague Shane Bauer (pictured), along with his fianceé Sarah Shourd and their friend Josh Fattal, have been held illegally in an Iranian prison for 370 days as I write this. As the website freethehikers.org says, the news reports about their arrest conflict. Some outlets say the three accidentally crossed the Iranian border while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan, and others say the Iranian military illegally crossed the border and arrested the three in Kurdistan.

I haven’t met any of the three in person, but Shane wrote a piece for me while I was editing Earth Island Journal. The article, The Ecology of Genocide, was a searing report on conditions in a refugee camp in Chad in 2006. Shane’s sensibilities are manifest in the piece, and it’s those same sensibilities — passionate advocacy of global social justice — that took him to Kurdistan. 

When the three were born, the US was convulsed with outrage over the Iranian government’s captivity of Americans. Thirty years later their friends and families struggle to keep them in the public consciousness. I can only imagine that it is those progressive sensibilities — progressive in the original sense of the word, not in its current meaning of “anyone not belonging to the Tea Party” — that have kept news organizations away from covering their imprisonment. It took the one-year anniversary of their illegal arrest and detention for the US media to mention them. They remain in the notorious Evin Prison, built by the Shah’s political enforcement agency SAVAK and expanded greatly under the theocracy. Shourd has been kept in solitary confinement, and denied medical treatment despite worries about possible cancer symptoms.

Are leftist Americans somehow not Americans? Are Americans who went to UC Berkeley any less worthy of concern?

You can help keep the three in the public eye by checking out freethehikers.org, plugging the site in your Facebook or Twitter feeds, and passing the URL along to others. There are links to ways you can write Iranian officials, submit support videos, and otherwise get involved. Please do.

1 comment on "Three Americans still held in Tehran’s Evin Prison"

I haven’t said much about this family member lately. In fact, my quiet was so pronounced and so prolonged that the person from whom I adopted this family member asked me tactfully not long ago whether said loved one had come to the end of its life.

But there has been no such bad news! Or at least no bad news aside from my having continued the family habit of ignoring upkeep and maintenance of family members for months on end.

The problem was one of those snowballing financial… um… snowballs. The local mechanic told me a year and a half ago, when I took Zheep in for a new radiator, that its rear differential needed rebuilt. That was a $1,500 estimate right there. Right about that time I got a ticket for blithely parking on the side of the street that was getting its weekly cleaning. And then also right about that time I had no job, which was okay until my credit card limit got completely tapped out.

Fast forward to April 2009, which was more than Zheep was doing. The ticket wasn’t paid yet, so it had appreciated in value by approximately 200 percent. A hundred fifty bucks was more than I had in disposable income, and if I’d had it to pay the ticket I wouldn’t have had the cash to renew Zheep’s registration anyway, and since I wasn’t driving the thing I let the insurance lapse and so the poor thing just sat collecting dust in the driveway.

The good news is that apparently sitting out in the sunshine in Los Angeles didn’t hurt much, aside from killing what had been a new battery d-e-d dead. I got a little bit of cash from some freelance work and paid off the ticket, reinsured and re-registered Zheep, and just this morning coaxed enough electrons into the mortally wounded battery to get it the half mile to its Primary Car Physician. I just got the phone call. “It’s really surprising,” the doctor said. “Aside from the battery, everything’s in great shape: belts, hoses, everything. Nice Jeep!” He’d diagnosed bad brakes on the spot, but that turned out just to be dust on the pads.

They are beginning to rebuild the differential, which means that in about five business days I will have a working Jeep and a much smaller pile of cash, almost all of which will be going to the credit card companies. But let’s not think about that. Let’s think about this:

Note: There’s a road there. I’m not a jerk.

Well, not that kind.

6 comments on "Good news! Surgery in the family!"

The California Energy Commission has approved the hideously destructive Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System. From their notice, forwarded to Coyote Crossing by our friends at Basin and Range Watch;

This Decision contains the Commission’s rationale in approving the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) project. Although the project, even with the mitigation measures described in this Decision, will have remaining significant impacts on the environment, the Commission has found that the benefits the project would provide override those impacts.

Of what use are environmental laws if the government can ignore them to achieve “project benefits”? All projects have benefits. A habitat protection law worth its salt would protect the goddamn habitat, and contain no “unless you don’t feel like it” clauses.

True to form for government agencies, the PDF linked above is almost 10 megs: hard to read in a browser with any but the fastest connection. I optimized the PDF and cut out three quarters of the file size, and uploaded it to Scribd so that it’s easier to read, though still not perfect at more than 500 pages. The Scribd doc is embedded here:

Ivanpah Solar approval

5 comments on "Bad news on Ivanpah Solar"

Algodones Dunes. Photo by Andrew Harvey

[From our colleagues at the Center for Biological Diversity, and crossposted from DesertBlog:]

For more than a decade, the Center for Biological Diversity has been fighting to keep southeastern California’s Algodones Dunes - the largest dune complex in the country - a safe haven for the rare plants and animals that call the shifting sands and pocket oases home. Now we need your help to make sure the dunes and the wildlife they support keep their protection.

Unchecked ORV use threatens the dunes and their unique plants and animals. These remarkable and rare species - including the secretive flat-tailed horned lizard, endemic Peirson’s milkvetch and Algodones sunflower, desert tortoise and 21 species of insects only known from the Algodones Dunes - barely eke out existence under unrelenting sun, sand-blasting winds and sparse rains, only to meet their demise by being squashed under churning ORV tires.

The Center has had great success in protecting large swaths of key habitat from off-road ruin, but now, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is proposing to eliminate protections for the dunes’ endangered species put in place a decade ago under President Clinton.

Secretary Salazar’s plan would sacrifice unique desert species and allow ORVs to run unrestricted through the fragile dunes ecosystem. Salazar’s Bureau of Land Management, which manages these unique public lands, is proposing to expand ORV-accessible areas by as much as 45 percent (adding almost 40,000 additional acres to the nearly 88,000 acres already open to unrestricted ORV use).

The Algodones Dunes need your support for increased protection. Please write to oppose any expansion of ORV areas and voice your support today for additional conservation for the rare plants and animals that call the Algodones Dunes home.

[You can compose and send a letter here. Please do. Thank you.]

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