Coyote Crossing

Shame on you, Nevada Wilderness Project

I’ve tried to hold off lately on criticizing environmental groups in this space. This is in part because once started, the practice generally has no end: the venality of the most mainstream groups runs deep. It’s also because every once in a while

Ivanpah Photos: Before and After

Here are two photos taken by Kevin Emmerich of Basin and Range Watch.

The first, taken around the time of Camp Ivanpah, just a few days shy of a year ago, shows a nice little spot in the creosote a few feet from where we all camped. It’s perhaps

Spent

Wednesday marked the occasion of my first visit to the Ivanpah Valley since construction began in earnest. I’d been there in October during the Spirit Run to protest the project, but they’d just barely gotten started at that point — putting fences

Hundreds of tortoises dead at Ivanpah?

David Danelski reports in the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

More than 3,000 desert tortoises would be disturbed by a solar project in northeast San Bernardino County and as many as 700 young ones would be killed during three years of building, says

Ivanpah construction halted

Here’s a somewhat impenetrable document from the BLM that likely gave sour stomachs to those Coyote Crossing readers who work for BrightSource when they received it:

BLM Temporary Suspension Notice for Ivanpah Solar site

The nut grafs [emphasis

Larry Hogue’s Ivanpah Video

Larry’s put together a really lovely video-slideshow on YouTube to show what we’re losing at Ivanpah. Spread it around!

And don’t forget to sign the … (continues)

BrightSource Kills Another Ivanpah Tortoise

BrightSource killed another Ivanpah tortoise recently, my sources have heard from the BLM. BrightSource, or agents thereof, lined a fence at ground level with black plastic — you’ve seen the stuff if you’ve worked landscaping. It’s dark, it’s

You’d think they could have looked up some of the environmental impacts somehow

Google has just sealed a deal to invest $168 million in a Mojave Desert solar energy plant.

The investment is going to BrightSource Energy, a company that develops and operates large-scale solar power plants, specifically to fund its Ivanpah

Urgent petition: Tell Ken Salazar to stop Ivanpah Construction

Given that video I posted yesterday in which a BrightSource employee shreds an ancient* Mojave yucca in direct contravention of the conditions of the permit, and the fact that the BLM now expects to find a hundred more tortoises on the site than

500 years to grow, 30 seconds to destroy

The Mojave yucca Yucca schidigera, like the somewhat better known creosote bush, forms very long-lived clones.

On the site of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System project, I saw a couple that I estimated at in excess of five hundred years

What once was desert, from the air

Erin Whitefield photo, Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station construction site.

There are more photos, and some description of each, at Basin and Range Watch, whose proprietors have stronger stomachs than … (continues)

Ivanpah solar site may hold 140 tortoises

Funny thing. As soon as The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal refers dismissively to the Ivanpah solar site’s tortoise population as being “around 25,” the BLM ups the ante a little.

To 140 tortoises. A hundred forty tortoises on a bit less than four

Environmentalism without the environment: Madrigal in The Atlantic

If you know anything about the desert at all, you won’t get very far into Alexis Madrigal’s recent Atlantic Monthly piece on solar in the Mojave before things start to feel not quite right.

It took me one sentence.

The first one.

There are 25

My Ivanpah story in the Desert Report

Now that the most recent issue of the Desert Report has been out for a couple of weeks, I think it’s fair for me to repost here the article I have in said issue. There’s plenty more articles where this one came from — by other, more expert and

BrightSource, Center for Biological Diversity make pact

As the bulldozers roll, energy developer BrightSource and the Center for Biological Diversity announce they have reached an agreement.

For Immediate Release, October 22, 2010

Contact:

Kierán Suckling, Center for Biological Diversity, (520)

Right now at Ivanpah

Just now at Ivanpah. Protesters from Desert Survivors bear witness as the ecocidal machinery heads for the Ivanpah SEGS site. Laura Cunningham … (continues)

Solar Gold: The Ivanpah Spirit Run (video)

Filmmaker Robert Lundahl joined us at the Ivanpah Spirit Run last weekend. This is the result. Edited among images and interviews with Spirit Run participants are snippets of a longer interview with Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center

A moment during the Ivanpah Spirit Run

He was taking a moment in between running along Ivanpah Road to collect rocks. There are plenty of rocks along Ivanpah Road, debris washed off two mountain ranges. He had a fistful of nice quartz. Five hours later on the Ivanpah Lake playa seven

“Get some perspective on climate change!”

I subscribe to an email list operated by the Sierra Club and devoted to the topic of desert conservation. The majority of the active participants on the list are horrified by the Club’s support of desert public lands energy development, but every

Biologists scour Mojave Desert in tortoise roundup

Louis Sahagun of the Los Angeles Times:

More than 100 biologists and contract workers fanned out across a nearly pristine stretch of the eastern Mojave Desert on Friday to start rounding up tortoises blocking construction of the first major solar