Item: I had a significant uptick in people signing off of the email version of this site’s feed as soon as yesterday’s edition hit the tubes, no doubt due to my dissing the Sierra Club. Such things happen, but it reminds me that I should make something clear. I have a huge amount of respect for Sierra Club activists. Much of what I’ve learned about big desert solar has been as a result of Sierra Club activists. Having worked in environmental non-profits for quite some time, I completely understand that an organization can have policies that its rank and file members and staff do not share. Hell, at Earth Island there were often projects that had conflicting policies, so that no staff person could have possibly agreed with every one of EII’s policies. I’ve criticized The Wilderness Society, and there are Wilderness Society activists, some of them well up in the hierarchy, who I count as dear friends. This is about policies, not people, and I call out individuals only when they happen to be the architects of said policies.

Item: on the other end of the spectrum from the unsubscribers are those people who have said rather kind and generous things about the things I’ve posted the last few days. For that I thank you, but I really feel like I haven’t been pulling my weight in this discussion. The real standard-bearers on this issue have been our friends at Basin And Range Watch, which site you should be reading as often as possible. It’s as close to a one-stop shop for fauxnewable energy news as exists online, and Kevin Emmerich and Laura Cunningham have been tireless advocates of saving our irreplaceable ancient desert landscape from get-rich-quick Big Energy schemes. Most of what I know about desert solar that I didn’t learn from Sierra Club activists I’ve learned from them. They jumped in to intervene in the Ivanpah permitting process among many others, and for that thankless task they have my undying gratitude and should have yours too.

Item: Another person who’s done a lot more on this topic lately than I have is Shaun at the recently redesigned Mojave Desert Blog, which is another site you should be checking daily. Shaun posted a rather scandalous item a few days back that says a whole lot about the kind of people pushing these big projects:

As energy companies rush to bulldoze open space in the Mojave Desert, they are required to conduct surveys to determine the extent of damage that would be done to plant and wildlife. Tessera Solar, the company seeking to build the Calico Solar project on nearly 8,000 acres of pristine Mojave Desert wilderness managed by the BLM, contracted with Mr. Jim Andre to survey the site for special status plants earlier in the CEC application process.  Mr. Andre is an expert on desert plant life, and is considered one of the best-qualified individuals to provide impartial assessments of how energy projects will impact the Mojave.

Given Mr. Andre’s respected knowledge of desert plant life, community groups seeking to discuss the harm the project would do to biological resources presented Mr. Andre as one of their witnesses to give testimony, prompting Tessera Solar to object and have Mr. Andre barred from speaking at the early August evidentiary hearings.

Jim Andre isn’t just a respected desert biologist. He’s the Director of the Sweeney Granite Mountains Research Center, a research station run by the University of California. He’s notable for publicizing the rather surprising biodiversity of the Mojave Desert. As he wrote in the December 2008 edition of the Desert Report;

There is a broad misconception among the public (and to some extent among scientists and land managers) that we have completed our floristic inventory of the California desert, and that the remaining hotbeds for botanical discovery are limited to places like Indonesia and the Brazilian Amazon. Yet the California desert is, in fact, one of the remaining floristic frontiers in the United States. Numerous mountain ranges (e.g. Turtles, Dead, and Avawatz Mountains) have fewer than 100 herbarium voucher records currently housed in herbaria. The vast majority of herbarium specimens from the desert region are recorded along paved roads. New, rare, and localized endemics continue to be discovered, noteworthy range extensions are still frequently reported, and distributional limits of common taxa are poorly established. Even in areas of high research focus, such as the University of California’s Granite Mountains Desert Research Center, a new manzanita species was found growing on a ridge overlooking the laboratories below. Clearly, the Jepson Desert Manual represents only a work in progress rather than the final word on floristic diversity and distribution in our desert.

Efforts to inventory and document plants in the California desert, as measured by the number of vouchers collected per decade, have actually declined since the early half of the 20th Century when famous botanists such as Willis Jepson and Phillip Munz explored and documented the region extensively. Much of the information that populates our agency and herbarium inventory databases is based on collections made more than 50 years ago. Despite the overall decline in field collections, taxonomists have still added an average of three plant taxa per year to the California desert flora during the most recent half century. Most of these are newly described taxa, but some represent taxa previously known only from adjacent states or bioregions of California. With the improved tools for DNA and morphometric analysis, there has been a pulse of new species added to the California desert in the last decade. Using the trends from the past 50 years, if we extrapolate forward in time, we can expect another 120-200 native taxa to be added to the California desert over the next 50 years.

The take home message is that we are far from completing even the basic inventory of species in the California desert. We should be humbled, next time we are hiking through the desert, to know that up to 10% of the plants we see on the ground may in fact not be represented in the Jepson Desert Manual, and many of these are yet to be described by science!

Barring Andre’s testimony in a hearing to permit the bulldozing of 8,230 acres of intact desert habitat at Calico sends a clear message that the developers aren’t interested in a fair, honest record of what might exist on the site. And Calico isn’t the only project on Tessera’s drawing board. They clearly can’t be trusted, and yet the same Energy Commissioners who scoffed at Tessera’s attempt to squelch actual science about Calico rubberstamped their project at Ocotillo.