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 the notion that Feinstein’s bill blocks solar power development in the Mojave Desert. In fact, there are significant parts of Feinstein’s bill that accelerate solar development in the desert; just not on lands protected by the bill. But did you see what the filmmaker did immediately after showing the map of land affected by solar development and/or the CDPA?
The narrator says that there’s plenty of land still available in the Mojave for solar development even if CDPA passes. The landscape shown is a plain full of healthy creosote forest. The filmmakers could have shown an abandoned alfalfa farm, a decommissioned military base with building pads and runways, or a whole lot of warehouse roof space in Barstow, but they showed undisturbed creosote that could easily have been habitat for tortoises or fringe-toed lizards or Mojave ground squirrels. “Take all the healthy, intact desert habitat you want that’s outside the Monument Boundaries,” the film seems to be saying. “We won’t object. See? We’re not NIMBYs.”
The Ivanpah Valley is one of those pieces of land that would not be protected by the CDPA. So is the plain south of the Cady Mountains, where Tessera plans to level more than 8,000 acres of tortoise, lizard and bighorn habitat to install a huge amount of Stirling sun-catchers — an completely unproven technology. So is the stretch west of Blythe where Chevron and affiliates want to put solar on land now occupied by ancient geoglyphs. None of those lands matter to the filmmaker, it would seem. They’re a fair trade-off for getting the bill passed.
That’s a lot to read into one little scene: the filmmaker may not have intended to say that at all. The video may have just had the unfortunate effect of reinforcing what a number of huge environmental organizations are saying explicitly.
Take the Sierra Club’s national office, which recently sent out an email alert urging members to “protect the Ivanpah Valley” by urging Ken Salazar to choose an “alternative” design for the Brightsource solar project that was identical to a plan drawn up by the developer. The Club later claimed that was a mistake. The national office did not notify its members of that mistake. The national office has, however, withdrawn funding from both the Sierra Club’s Desert Committee — a network of grassroots members of many different chapters with an illustrious history of fighting to protect desert wildlands — and the Desert Report, an invaluable publication devoted to those same desert wildlands. Check out the Sierra Club’s new “resilient habitats” campaign, which urges people to work to “create resilient habitats where plants, animals, and people are able to survive and thrive on a warmer planet.” Notice something about the habitats they’ve selected? Aside from the “Greater Grand Canyon” ecosystem, which arguably includes a sliver of the Mojave, true desert ecosystems are nowhere included in the ten habitats the protection of which the Club has chosen to promote.
If that seems a small omission, consider this map of the southwest US, taken from Tom Patterson’s Physical Map of the Coterminous United States. I’ve added shaded overlays to indicate, roughly, the location of the four major North American deserts.
I’ve drawn the overlays somewhat conservatively, and omitted a couple semiarid regions often thought of as belonging to “the desert,” the Colorado and Columbia plateaus in particular. Even so, the desert I’ve marked off is a far larger amount of land than many of the biomes usually deemed complete and important enough to merit some level of preservation. Together, the four deserts are far bigger than the Sierra Nevada, far bigger than the Rocky Mountains, far bigger than the Appalachians or New England. In terms of sheer acreage, the only biomes in the continental US that rival the deserts are the Great Plains and the Mississippi basin. The deserts are far wilder and far more fragile than either of those beleaguered places, and yet the deserts are omitted from the Sierra Club’s consideration as potential “resilient habitats.”
Which is ironic, because if there was ever a place where the topology is set up to facilitate migration in response to climate change, it’s the American Desert. Take a look at this un-overlain section of Patterson’s map:
This section of the desert possesses what the geographers call “basin and range topography”: the landscape is made up of many distinct mountain ranges surrounded by broad, flat valleys. Most relevant for our discussion here is that the ranges and valleys tend to have their long axes aligned more or less north-south, especially in the Great Basin desert in Nevada but also in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts farther south.
Organisms that have adapted to the heights of the mountain ranges in the desert have a bit of a problem if the climate changes: in order to migrate northward, they or their offspring have to traverse the flats somehow. Many species, from endemic plants to small alpine animals such as the pika, are thus seriously threatened by climate change. The only way they can really migrate is up, and eventually, as it gets warmer, they will run out of up.
But for a lot of species not as strictly confined to the deserts’ “sky islands” — whether they’re alpine organisms that can cross the flats, or organisms that live in the flats to begin with — those northish-southish-trending basins and ranges are almost tailor-made for migration in response to climate. Travel northward along the long spine of one of those mountain ranges, or plod along toward Polaris on your tortoise feet as the creosote follows you into what had been cooler lands, and there’s little to block your passage.
Until people come in and cover all the flatlands with industrial energy development, that is. If the flatlands are your migration corridor of choice, industrial developments are locked doors in the middle of those corridors. The Sierra Club’s goal of making landscapes more resilient to climate change is thus undermined by, well, the Sierra Club’s efforts to combat climate change.
I don’t mean to pick on the Club unduly. The Sierra Club has many wonderful activists working on national and local levels, many of whom care deeply about desert wildlands. Besides, the Sierra Club is not alone among big mainstream environmental groups in its seeming willingness to sacrifice desert wildlands to further the industrial development of non-carbon energy. Consider, for instance, this excerpt of a formal comment on the Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System Project, offered by a pair of notable green groups. In the section of the formal comments dealing with the inevitable, massive and irremediable visual impact involved in paving 4,000 acres of wild desert adjacent to a National Park with mirrors surrounding seven 45-story-tall towers, each of which will be capped with a blindingly illuminated “receiver unit”:
[I]t is clear that there will be significant visual impacts from the construction of the ISEGS project. However, the construction of a six square mile industrial development anywhere on public lands will entail significant visual impacts, and the benefits which the ISEGS renewable energy project will provide may well outweigh the costs of the visual impacts from this development.
Let that sink in for a moment. I have to say, I’m not used to environmentalists taking this approach. Usually it’s the other side who insists that protection of the wild environment and its denizens be subject to a cost-benefit analysis, that Endangered Species Act reviews include an analysis of the economic costs of listing the Delta smelt or the gnatcatcher or the Furbish lousewort.
The comments subsequently note that Ivanpah is not the only such facility planned for the desert, and that the cumulative visual effect of massive development of the desert may be more than the sum of its parts:
The ISEGS project, however, is only the first of many projects that have been proposed for the CDCA. The PSA “identifies 76 solar project and 61 wind project applications with a total overall area of over one million acres within the CDCA. This figure [sic] does not include renewable projects within the Nevada and Arizona portions of the Mojave Desert. With this very high number of renewable energy applications currently filed with BLM, the potential for profound widespread cumulative impacts to scenic resources within the CDCA is clear. These impacts could include a substantial decline in the overall number and extent of scenically intact, undisturbed desert landscapes, and a substantially more industrial character in the overall CDCA and Mojave Desert Landscape.
True enough! What do the commenting groups suggest as a way to address this threat to the very nature of the desert?
Recommendation: In the case of the ISEGS project, the agencies should consider whether the benefits which the ISEGS renewable energy project will provide outweigh the costs of the visual and other impacts from this development.
You may be wondering which groups would put together comments so fraught with compromise of the environmental movement’s most basic tenet: that the living environment has intrinsic value which resists spreadsheet analysis. The answer: it’s the Natural Resources Defense Council and The Wilderness Society that have crafted this recommendation that our natural resources and our wilderness be tossed into the energy planners’ balance sheets.
There are important groups who haven’t gone quite as far. Some are working quietly to defend the desert. Staff at Defenders of Wildlife, for instance, have been writing tough-minded comments on desert industrial energy proposals, intervening in a few such projects. Though the Center for Biological Diversity took an emphatically wrong position approving the notion of public lands giveaways to the energy companies, its staff have been invaluable in fighting individual projects and the group as a whole may well come around.
As a whole, though, the mainstream environmental movement has gone AWOL on protecting our ancient deserts. I’m not sure precisely why, though the severity of the climate change threat certainly does lend our decisions some urgency. A cynic would likely point out that the foundations who provide Big Green Groups with their big green have jumped on the climate change wagon with a vengeance, and so this shift in emphasis away from protecting the planet that exists now, in favor of protecting some hypothetical climate-change-mitigated planet that we hope will exist in the future, may be driven more by development staff than by scientific staff. On alternate Tuesdays I am that cynic, and I find the argument persuasive.
Whatever the reason, those of us who find value in the ancient landscapes of the desert Southwest cannot count on help from the mainstream environmental movement unless we make our position irresistable and hard to refute.
Let’s start here: any sensible, ecologically relevant energy strategy must include a commitment to zero net loss of desert wildlands. This is the baseline environmentalist position, and any deviation from it, no matter how “sensible,” is necessarily a loss for our side.
I doubt it’s any consolation to you, but Sierra Club in particular, along with most of the other big enviro groups, is willing to sacrifice the eastern mountains for Big Wind following almost the same logic, and with similar results: “The Sierra Club’s goal of making landscapes more resilient to climate change is thus undermined by, well, the Sierra Club’s efforts to combat climate change.”
This video is a perfect reflection of the inherent contradiction of industrial solar. We founded the Renewable Communities Alliance here in the San Luis Valley, CO which has been “earmarked” (according to the PUC) for 5.5 GW of industrial solar. We’re pushing for point of use DG, the faster, cheaper, smarter, greener path. I battled with TWS and NRDC for 2 years and finally gave up in frustration. I can only conclude that they are being funded by BIG renewables (probably through the Energy Foundation). There is still a HUGE gap in understanding of the alternatives, point of use DG, FITS. But once the general public gets it the regional enviros will no longer be able to hide behind their condescending platitudes about saving the planet from global warming. You are so right, if you extinguish the source population there will be nobody left to save.
Generally I think there are some huge misconceptions at play here. Many people think “Green” energy is environmentally and ecologically friendly. Not true. Why? Because there is big money at play here. Once again it is about profit, not what makes sense for the planet in the long run. When there are already developed (and abandoned) plots of land that could be utilized for solar development why is anyone even considering other options? To save a few bucks?
Deserts have the same status that wetlands used to have. They are considered “waste lands” by many. Sites like Coyote Crossing that educate us non-desert people is the first, best step towards reversing this old way of thinking.
Remember the “No Net Loss Wetlands Program” instituted by George Bush Senior? I hope this gets better traction and success than that program did.
Bill:www.wildrmblings.com
What if we had a comprehensive plan for the whole grid for the whole country - what we have now and all of our possible options are for the future. I’d like to see a map of that!
I know my video skills are at a first grade level, but I’m willing to try. Does anyone know
of a location say near Barstow, etc that is a very large,contiguous parcel of single owner
depleted farm land or former industrial used acreage? Perhaps that could be filmed as an
alternative, but of course, it wouldn’t be as smooth and polished as this video, which by the
way, I really liked, even if I didn’t get the points raised here in this post when viewed.
Well said Chris.
Bill McD, you’re singing my tune. The seeming lack of willingness by the energy companies & legislatures to considering building on already used land has been the most frustrating part of this debate for me. So what can I do to help get a video supporting this out? I have a camera, time, and a good general idea of what to shoot. What I could use are hard locations. I’ll be in Barstow this weekend camping with friends and can hit sites in the area before and after my meetup.
After the holiday weekend I can make time to shoot near anywhere in the region or assist others accordingly.
I have some rudimentary video editing skills. Also my mom can sew the costumes.
I’d fire up Google Earth or Google Maps and look for center-pivot irrigation circles. Those take up a quarter-section and there are concentrating solar designs that would fit.
Best of all, though, would be shots of warehouse rooftops and/or parking garages in Barstow, Vegas, and other towns. It’d be worth getting some footage of the parking lot at the Springs Preserve, cpomplete with PV shade: I think Laura has a still or two on her site.
Our farmers cooperative in the San Luis Valley, CO did an analysis of the area available on the corners of all the center pivot circles. 14,000 acres! They WANT to develop solar PV, in fact 6 solar irrigators installed 10 kV systems at a cost of $90K/each, then Xcel slapped prohibitive demand/insurance fees on them and now community-based solar PV is too expensive. At they same time Xcel claims that we should allow them to industrialize the valley for solar export, “to help the rural farmers”.