Coyote Crossing

Dear President Obama

The State of the Union 2011 provides a reason to trot this poster out from a couple years ago:

Want the poster? Buy it … (continues)

Oh, the irony

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Clear Skies in the Desert

There’s a lot of superficial reporting coming out of Indian Country in northern Arizona this week, with headlines like “Hopi to Environmentalists: Keep Out” emblazoned upon them. The immediate reason is that the Hopi Tribal Council has specifically

Could green kill the desert?

Biologist Bruce M. Pavlik, author of The California Deserts: An Ecological Rediscovery, which I’m working my way through this week, has a great piece in the Los Angeles Times on Big Solar vs. the deserts.

The costs of industrializing the

Ivanpah Valley: Worth more than megawatts

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Compare and contrast

Below are two satellite images, courtesy Google Earth, of different pieces of the Ivanpah Valley. Both photos show land at around 3,000 feet in elevation, at a resolution equivalent to 1,500 feet up.

One of the photos is of land whose

Ken Salazar gets off to a good start

From the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance:

More than 100,000 acres of Utah wilderness will be protected from oil and gas drilling after the Department of Interior announced today that it will cancel 77 leases issued under the Bush administration.

Is a fish more important than a tortoise?

In Adam Hochschild’s book The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Hochschild describes a conversation with Alexander Vologodsky, a Russian physicist. Vologodsky had noticed an abandoned settlement as a youth in the extreme north of Siberia,

No Coal is Clean Coal

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Yes We Can drill off the California coast?

Connect the dots.

From a San Francisco Chronicle article published yesterday, written by the estimable Jane Kay.

The context:

The federal government is taking steps that may open California’s fabled coast to oil drilling in as few as three

Ivanpah Solar Project

Left out of my discussion yesterday of the big solar thermal proposal for the Ivanpah Valley—because I didn’t find out about it until just now—was the fact that the site that would be bulldozed for construction of the Ivanpah Solar Generating

689,910 Acres

The Bureau of Land Management reports that it has received applications for large solar electrical generating projects, around 80 of them, that would cover 689,910 acres of California, almost all of it in the desert.

689,910 acres is a big

Vox Clamantis in Deserto

If the next President makes good on his promise to expand the use of nuclear power plants, the desert will pay.

The desert always pays.

Even if it’s the “safe nuclear power” that those of us in the extreme environmentalist community care about.

Stop the Sunrise Powerlink: Call Now

I want you to pick up your phone today and call California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at (916) 445-2841. You may be on hold for a few minutes after you choose the voice mail option for “express your opinion on a hot issue.” You’ll talk to a