In Adam Hochschild’s book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin
“As far as [Vologodsky] can figure out, there was no logical reason to build this long and expensive railroad — particularly in the famine-ridden, ravaged, exhausted USSR of 1948… The Soviet Union is famous for grand public works projects that turn out not to work; but this Arctic railway, said Vologodsky, was ‘the acme of the absurd.’
“In the frantic haste to satisfy Stalin’s orders, Vologodsky said, when construction began in 1948, ‘they were laying the tracks at the same time as they were surveying.’ The terrain was a builder’s nightmare: below ground was rock-hard permafrost; on top of this lay six feet of snow in winter, and, in the summer, vast bogs that swallowed up ties, tracks, and equipment. Although the work force of prisoners reached as high as one hundred thousand, in five years they succeeded in laying tracks over little more than half the route.
“Today, thinking of this waste of resources and human life, it seems easy to condemn the folly of this railroad. But listening to Vologodsky talk, it occurred to me that in other parts of the world, when such projects reach their aim, we often honor them as great feats of engineering or symbols of national grandeur. The Pyramids, the First Transcontinental Railroad, the Panama Canal. Between these efforts and something like Stalin’s Arctic railway, where do you draw the moral dividing line? It is not always easy.”
The passage has stayed with me since I read it a decade ago. The Arctic Railway, which ended construction on Stalin’s death, is a useful absurdum to which one can reductio a whole lot of development proposals. The tragic story emphasizes the importance of the practice described by the jargony phrase “ground-truthing,” almost always an effective counter to grand development plans decreed by fiat, whether that fiat comes from a dictator or a bureaucracy or — even — a well-meaning environmentalist.
David Brower learned this lesson in the early 1960s when he bargained away the irreplaceable Glen Canyon in a meeting room somewhere, then actually went out and belatedly ground-truthed his act by visiting the place. He had the best of intentions: saving Dinosaur National Monument from a dam. It worked. The Yampa is still free-flowing and beautiful. It was a victory Brower regretted for the rest of his life.
Brower’s lesson seems to have been lost on at least one person charged with preserving his legacy. Last year, the current editor of the Earth Island Journal, Jason Mark, charged dismissively that opposition to opening up desert wilderness to renewable energy project development is NIMBYism, and “fueling climate change.”
“…it’s hard not to think that some local activists have their priorities misplaced. One conservationist told Lewis, ‘No opening of any wilderness areas in this state to any energy corridors ever. Absolutely not.’
“According to Amy Atwood, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity: ‘It’s hard to see which Western constituency could possibly support this.’
“Well, how about a constituency that recognizes that climate change is already dangerously altering Western ecosystems, contributing to droughts, wildfires, and shrinking and shifting habitats?”
We have to destroy the wilderness to save it, Mark would seem to be saying.
Or take renewable energy activist Gar Lipow’s odd rant in comments on a post in the online magazine Grist, responding to desert protection activists concerned about careless “renewable” development:
“Yeah, let’s stay pure.
“Lets burn more coal - cause we can’t put up one acre of mirrors in the desert.
“Let’s drill oil off the coasts of California and Florida because we are too pure to put wind generators offshore where a couple of Senators have to look at them.
“Let 1 in 4 children in Harlem continue to suffer asthma caused by fossil fuels so that we don’t have besmirch the purity of Wolverine and Stopgreenpath. I hope those snowy white garments you wear don’t get stained by splatters from all the people you will trample if you win what you are asking for.”
Lipow’s comment really has it all: the straw-children, the conflation of habitat preservation with scenery, the Cheneyan accusation that the opponents’ environmental concern is a matter of “personal purity,” and a literal “bloody shirt” threat besides. (An explanation of just what effect transmission lines in the desert would have on the diesel exhaust that chokes kids in Harlem? That Lipow does not provide.)
Here’s the thing. The Glen Canyon Dam provides renewable energy too, and yet I don’t see too many “big picture” enviros like Mark and Lipow self-righteously demanding new dams be put up on free-flowing rivers. Big hydro is a cost-effective source of huge amounts of electricity, and new large dams could conceivably replace a significant amount of fossil-fuel-generated power. Why aren’t enviros demanding new dams, and spattering fishermen and river rafters with the figurative blood of their straw victims? Hochschild’s question about drawing lines would seem relevant here. Where, exactly, is the line between a new Glen Canyon Dam on the wild river of your choice, on the one hand, and paving 689,910 times as much desert as Lipow sneers about on the other?
The line, I suggest, is entirely in the minds of people who talk the way the above-quoted environmentalists do. The fact is, reactions like those offered by Mark and Lipow are fueled by a combination of ignorance of, and apathy toward, the actual groundtruthable reality in the desert. As Hochschild put it later in “Unquiet Ghost”:
“We are back again at the issue raised by the finger on the map. I want a railroad, there. Because it’s good for humanity. Or, perhaps, because I want it there.”
Those who would save the planet at the cost of the desert look at maps like this
and this
and put their fingers on the map right on that sunny blank spot. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it would seem that the functional difference between the Mojave Desert and Glen Canyon is not in the value of the habitat to its wildlife, nor in the efficiency of power generation in each locale, but simply in the fact that most environmentalists don’t give a shit about the Mojave Desert.
The thing is, even if enviros don’t ground-truth their decisions about the Mojave Desert, the developers do, lest they sink their own metaphorical railroad ties in bogs. As a result, there are other, more useful maps of the areas proposed for solar development. Here’s a fragment of one, obtained from this site (hat tip to Larry Hogue):
That’s 1.3 square miles of the Ivanpah Valley, about a third of the planned Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. The developers hired someone to walk every square foot of their project site to note what would be displaced. Those little colored dots, which turn out to be numbers if you look closely, are tortoise-related sites. The brown and black numbers mark burrows or other sign. The green numbers are places where live tortoises were found by the surveyors. The red numbers mark the location of found carcasses. Four times as many carcasses as live torts seen, in part because dead tortoises aren’t as good at hiding as live ones, and in part because tortoises are dying off from a contagious respiratory infection and heightened predation and general habitat disruption.
By law, all live tortoises on a site to be developed must be relocated to intact habitat. The two dozen live tortoises found on the Ivanpah SEGS site will need to be moved uphill, toward Clark Mountain. There they’d rub elbows with a whole lot more tortoises relocated from the immediately adjacent Ivanpah Airport. One problem with tortoise relocation is that it spreads that respiratory disease. Another is that disoriented tortoises, relocated away from a territory they may have known for decades, are easy prey for coyotes, a fact that shut down the US Army’s relocation program at Fort Irwin last year. (The proposal for Ivanpah SEGS tortoise relocation uses the same target tortoise density as Fort Irwin’s plan.)
That’s just one of several threatened species on the site, and we’re only discussing one big solar thermal site in dozens proposed in the American desert. And yet any hesitation desert habitat advocates express to scraping away the soil, denuding habitat, and building massive industrial facilities to generate solar thermal power is criticized as obstructionist. Meanwhile, big hydroelectric, which also offers a theoretically carbon-neutral source of electrical power, is opposed by those same critics simply because it destroys habitat, with neither hemming nor hawing about regrettable sacrifice and cost-benefit and dire emergencies and wheezing fourth-graders.
Which raises the question: why is a fish more valuable than a tortoise? Before we put our fingers on the map and say “there,” I’d like to hear an answer to that.
Great post, Chris—you beat me to it. I’ve been thinking along the lines of “tortoises vs. polar bears” lately, but I never thought about hydro power and why it’s also not part of the discussion in the same way solar farms are.
Lipow’s comment, “1 acre of desert”—sheesh. Ivanpah is going to cover 3400 acres or 5.2 square miles. And that produces just 400 megawatts. Worse, figuring in the capacity factor of .25 (because the plant only generates electricity for about 25% of the 24-hour period), this is equivalent to a 160-megawatt natural gas plant (which has a capacity factor of .6). These are really “peaking” power plants, not baseload generators.
I met a representative from Ivanpah at the RETI meeting on Saturday. Seemed like a nice guy, concerned about environmental impacts, used to work for the EPA, etc. Then he said, “No one would call this area pristine, because there’s been cattle grazing on it.” Here are a couple of photos of the area: http://snurl.com/a6j1i As Chris points out, it is functioning habitat for the desert tortoise, and that’s what counts, not whether it’s “pristine.”
Do we really know enough to decide that killing desert tortoises—and that’s what the “mitigation” plan will do—is more than compensated by the greenhouse gas reductions this plant will provide? I don’t think so. The Earth is sick, and like any good doctor we should proceed with the precautionary principle “first, do no harm.”
Sorry for the rant—this is just making me sick in the gut, and the heart.
My megawatt numbers in the previous comment should probably be expressed in gigawatt-hours per year, but oh well. The point being, a solar power plant only produces about 40% of the power produced by a natural gas plant of the same “nameplate” capacity, in this case 400 megawatts.
I just don’t see any way around it - we need a unified, integrated plan. I don’t think we have time for this patchwork effort any longer. Actually I think we need a comprehensive global plan, but we should at least start with a national one. Everyone should come to the table and have input but then we must reach a consensus and act. If we keep up this squabbling at every step, it will be too late.
I think that part of the problem is that nobody wants to face the fact that we need to change the way we live. So instead, the goal is to replace one source of energy with another source of energy (in the “emptiest” place they can find) so that everyone else can, hopefully, keep on doing things in the same old way. And if a buck can be made on it (or lots) all the better. If the optics look good, then there’s more support to be had from all sides. The reality is a really hard one. We are in deep deep shit and need to make profound changes soon.
I agree. There has never been a more important moment to help people see clearly what is really going on here. I feel that urgency every day. Hopefully we have just elected someone to be the leader of this country who is capable of doing that too.
Part of it, to me, is to communicate the joy of living close to the natural rhythms of the earth, that when we climb down out of our crazy hyper-inflated nature-starved lives and get back to digging in the dirt and planting a few carrots, not dashing around on freeways, having time to play with the kids, etc. - that people will see there is an up-side to living simply and it won’t seem so much like a failure as a return to sanity!
Via a commenter at DesertBlog, this surprising statement from the US Department of Energy:
Swan,
I hope I’m not reading your comment wrong. Although I would love a unified approach and global consensus on the most ethical approach as much as the next idealist, I don’t like the thought of using the very valid urgency of the current situation to gloss over equally valid objections. This is not squabbling. This is how we stop people who try to exploit an increasing global awareness of our current climate crisis to ram through ill-thought measures that appear green only to the majority of people who are pretty green when it comes to what is really green. These measures are ill-thought because there are far better alternatives out there. Better and profitable too, just not for the megacorp dinosaurs who aren’t nimble enough. What you call squabbling is the last line of defense against unethical assholes hijacking the increasing global green awareness.
If we dismiss patchwork in the interest of time, we will be left with neither time, nor a single patch of earth that would make it worth whatever little time we will have left.
Chris,
If this is your entry for the carnival of the arid, I’m afraid it can only go downhill from here when it comes to the other submissions.
Also, Yay! preview works again!
Well, first everyone must come to the table and have input - and then we must reach consensus which is a very important concept. If we are all of one mind (consensus) and agree - after plenty of squabbling (input)- on a unified plan, I believe we will make the best use of our resources.
All life is an interconnected web. If we are to heal the planet from the damage that’s been done, making an integrated wholistic game plan seems the best way to go - to me.
Rebecca,
Just such a holistic process might be the California Energy Commission’s “Integrated Energy Policy Report,” which I just heard about recently. Apparently, it’s a stakeholder process (and not just a report as the name implies), and it’s looking at everything from energy efficiency to photovoltaics to large scale renewables to transmission. I don’t know what the representation on it is, and whether it’s more balanced than the “Renewable Energy Transmission Initiative” (which features heavy representation from Big Renewables and utilities). But I’d like to find out.
Do you live in California? We could all use some help dogging all of these different processes and planning efforts.
At a national level, I don’t know how such holistic planning can possibly take place with any level of detail.
I think it must be done bioregion by bioregion modeled on the dynamic web of the natural world. There is an obvious pattern. It’s like an optical illusion - if we step back and adjust our vision we will see it.
I think first we have to get in synch with each other and the rhythms of the natural world and then sit down at the table and discuss our options and reach our consensus. It’s all connected. We can’t find the solutions if we have a conflict mentality.
I look forward to the day when the plants and animals and fishes and birds have a seat at the table (as in the new Ecuadorean Constitution giving equal rights to Pachamama, the mother earth, and all her beings) - and when there is no more big anything - business, corporations, bureaucracies. Just us, living beings, coming together to see what we can do that’s right for all of us.
It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to keep on fighting the private utility companies and immoral greedy corporations and corrupt politicians. We can change this. This is a rare opportunity to drastically change the whole game. I have no patience with fighting the same old fights. I have been fighting nuclear power, among other things, for 35 years. We are not going to get there by fighting. We may hold the ground but we can’t “win!”
We have to change the game. This beautiful blog is changing people’s heads. I try to do what I can in my writing to get people to look at things from the perspective of the natural world. It’s not whether a fish or a tortoise are more important. They are both important and necessary.
The only way to answer that question is to find a way to look at the whole and sit down and make a plan that gives the best hope we can for both the fish and the tortoise - and us and everything that lives.
Oh, and I live in Austin. I have lived in California and have friends who are active there.
I often wonder how people who would destroy the desert for solar farms would, say, feel about clear cutting sequoias for a solar farm? Yet the sequoia ecosystem is probably less fragile than the desert is.
I think the problem is that, for a lot of people, the desert is “ugly,” “hostile,” and “worthless.” Ed Abbey wrote about this in Desert Solitaire in the form of an exchange between Abbey and a Midwesterner. Basically the Midwestern thought the desert didn’t “have enough water” so he couldn’t understand why someone wanted to live there - he didn’t. Abbey thought that was just fine.
Just back from 3 weeks in bioparadise (Galapagos Islands and Ecuadorian Amazon), already depressed about the contrast to where I live and work, and now here They want to kill my beloved desert tortoises to run air conditioners. This planet deserves way better than us.
Hi Chris et al. Nice to read you again. Wish I was still there.
We will always have to make compromises; every living thing is forced to do so. There is no getting away from it; we are not playing God (nor even Noah) when we prioritize. Honest, well-intentioned people can disagree. David Brower left the Sierra Club and founded Friends of the Earth. Then some who believed in “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth” left that organization and formed Earth First! At the other end of the spectrum are the Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund who get big donations from corporate types and try to steer clear of politics. I have lived in southern California, in New Orleans, in New York, in the midwest and abroad. I love the desert, the mountains and yes, even the swamps. Each environment has its own charm and, even if it didn’t, it has value quite apart from any anthropocentric aesthetics. There are difficult choices to be made now, but that is a far better position to be in than one of having no choices at all. Let us make these choices together after making sure that all voices are heard and that we diligently inform ourselves on all relevant issues.