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 high-ranking staff of a group I criticize will respond in such a poorly argued fashion that it further erodes my regard for the organization, as happened on this post.
But mostly it’s because I decided this past year not to rent the sellouts space in my head. Better to write about the things I want to save, to build a fan base for them, than to spend time mired in negativity because a large organization doesn’t agree with me about those things’ value. I’d rather work to support things than oppose people. (F’rinstance: have you signed Desert Biodiversity’s petition to protect the Ivanpah Valley?)
But it’s one thing to disagree. It’s another to spread falsehoods.
I read this post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog yesterday. The post itself is not particularly remarkable: it’s an update on renewable energy policy in Nevada vis-a-vis California’s repeatedly expressed intention to generate all its non-carbon power in-state. Nevada has been tying its plans to sell off its public lands wholesale to energy developers to meet Californian demand, and so the notion that California might not be buying has upset some people.
If you haven’t been following the desert solar Inside Baseball stats, you might think that the Nevada Wilderness Project would be applauding this development; it offers to lessen development pressure on the Silver State’s wildlands. As it happens, NWP has for some time been a cheerleader for remote industrial renewable development in Nevada. The group parallels in this regard its national colleagues at The Wilderness Society, but NWP has taken this support to rather absurd lengths, going so far as to sponsor a 501-mile hike along the proposed route of a huge transmission line, not to protest the line’s construction through the state of Nevada but in fact to cheer it on. IN NWP’s own words:
Adam hiked the path of the SWIP [SouthWest Intertie Project] line on foot, traveling north to south through high quality sage grouse habitat, large mammal travel corridors, canyons, valleys, along dirt roads, past ranches, and many other areas that will be changed by the construction of the line.
NWP conceded that construction would “affect the natural landscape,” but crowed over the resulting “conservation opportunities.” Which to me reads kind of like OxFam mentioning a looming famine in glowing terms because of the resulting “relief opportunities.”
Wilderness groups working on climate issues point out that if we don’t do something about climate change, there will be no wilderness areas left—or at least, the damages to the biological systems in said wilderness areas will be irrevocably and dramatically changed.
This is undeniably a valid argument. It is an argument that would be every bit as valid for groups working to support women’s crisis centers, community gardens, public broadcasting, and food banks: each of them works to achieve goals that will be utterly undermined by catastrophic climate change. Somehow out of all these groups it’s only the wilderness organizations that have rewritten their charters.
A cynic might suggest that the current popularity of climate change as an issue among major granting organizations encourages groups dependent on such funding to shift their mission so as to maximize development potential.
An even greater cynic might speculate that wilderness groups have a special incentive to hop on board the Big Solar train: mitigation. Developers seeking to destroy public lands are often compelled to “mitigate” that destruction by buying and setting aside other land for protection. Of course, if out of 100 acres of prime desert a developer destroys 50 acres but graciously “mitigates” the other 50, what we have at the end of the day is half as much prime desert as we once had. But if that mitigation involves trading development on a piece of land for protecting some other land as wilderness, then the wilderness organization can count that as a victory in their fundraising material.
Or so that cynic might say. I have been that cynic fairly often. Wilderness groups seem to think little of consigning land without “wilderness characteristics” to destruction, as long as they can thereby save land that does have those characteristics. Never mind that the land destroyed might be the best habitat for a Threatened species in the entire state of Nevada. You can see a freeway from the old-growth desert, so it’s worthless.
But I’m used to all that from certain wilderness groups; all the disregard for the value of land shielded from their vision by their ideological blinders, all the backroom horsetrading, all of it.
That’s not what prompts this complaint. What prompts this complaint is a throwaway caption on a photo accompanying the post on the Nevada Wilderness Project’s blog, which reads:
A rendering of how heliostats will look at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the California desert. According to developer BrightSource, the technology design “allows the solar field to coexist with existing vegetation.”
As it happens, the design of the plant requires that the vegetation beneath the heliostats be kept at a height of no more than 18 inches. If you’re used to pruning shrubs in a garden, 18 inches seems like a reasonable height. Boxwood hedges can live through decades of pruning to 18 inches, for instance.
To my knowledge, based on my working familiarity with the Ivanpah Valley, boxwood hedges have been recorded from vanishingly few places within the footprint of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. What does grow there? Creosote, Mojave yucca, buckhorn cholla, and barrel cacti are among the most common shrubs. Several of them can live to astonishing ages. None of them can withstand being sheared to 18 inches for very long. When they die, and when the desert pavement around them is destroyed, the soil around them will no longer be held in place. It will blow away or be carried off in floods, and with it the stored seeds of several dozen native annual plant species, some of them rare.
In actual point of fact, this is how the Ivanpah solar plant has been “coexisting” with native vegetation:
That Mojave yucca was around 700 years old.
Here’s the thing: the Nevada Wilderness Project knows all this. Or if they don’t, it’s because they have deliberately refused to acquire the knowledge. Yesterday morning, I asked NWP for clarification of that caption on Twitter. No reply was forthcoming.
A lot of anger here over a photo caption, you might say, and you’d be right. Except for this: They went out of their way to add it. The image doesn’t require it. And it is just a caption, but a caption here and a pullquote there and an offhand comment somewhere else and you bend your public’s perception of reality. Repeat a lie enough times and it becomes the truth. I forget who said that.
Despite my strong views on desert solar development, I still try to maintain respect for green groups that come down with different positions than mine. I have good friends that work within the Sierra Club, for instance, and continue to find the majority of the work of the Center for Biological Diversity of immense value, and hold its staff in quite high regard, despite the aching boneheadedness of their leadership on the renewables issue.
But functioning as a press release distribution arm for BrightSource goes beyond a good-faith difference of opinion. Casually spreading corporate-sponsored misinformation goes beyond agreeing to disagree.
It’s one thing to find the Ivanpah Valley not worth your time as an organization. It’s wrong-headed and ill-informed, but still: if you don’t care about endangered wildlife that doesn’t live in areas with “wilderness characteristics,” there’s not much one can really say to argue with you.
But to to spread blatant, easily debunked lies, in the service of advancing your organizational mission, even if it means collateral devastation of delicate ecosystems? That, my friends, is beyond the pale. That is not excusable.
It is, in fact, what we are supposed to be fighting against.
Incidentally, if you were looking for a wilderness group in the great state of Nevada that has so far refrained from completely prostrating themselves before the likes of BrightSource, check out the Friends of Nevada Wilderness. It may be a bit “People’s Front of Judea” to say so here, and they may well not approve of what I’ve said in the post, but they do good work.
[Edited to add:] Though see Janine Blaeloch’s caveat, in comments below.
I hadn’t heard about that hike; how utterly appalling. That’s as if Brower et al rafted down the Grand Canyon in order to celebrate the building of the dam!
I too am feeling very tired by the greenwashing committed by supposed allies. As you say, if you’re not interested in fighting a given fight, fine, don’t, but don’t go out of your way to cripple those fighters who are at least trying!
Just when you think people have scraped the bottom of the barrel, you hear stuff like this.
Why am I not surprized?
You are a true gentleman, I am not, let me just say that I hope that they choke on all that corporate money that I believe they are taking.
I can’t prove it, but with this much smoke, there has got to be a fire somewhere.
Absolutely disgusting, with friends like those guys, the Nevada wilderness doesn’t need any enemies.
Stats on these Plants please?
The concept employed at dullsource is similar to Solar One at Yermo, a project of the 1970’s.
Why did the project at Harper Lake sit dormant for 15 years or so after the tax credits ran out?
And why did it need a 14” natural gas line? I note the a natural gas line is also in the Brightsource project spec too. Many times I pass Harper Lake and don’t see steam
And then there is the nearly 5000 acre footprint.
If this were not public land, which I’ll guess they got at usual BLM insider prices, are these projects ever feasible in an economic sense?
The 25 year lifespan would impress ancient Romans or Egyptians, eh?
Seems to me we have an ample data set to stop future projects if we marshall the facts. I don’t honestly know what that data says, but my hypothesis is that it would not be supportive of future Ivanpahs.
Requisition pallet of bricks and bucket of mortar. Construct wall. Bang head.
Thanks for this Chris, your voice on this is so important for so many reasons. It’s happening everywhere. It’s tempting to just throw one’s hands in the air, shake your head and write it off as some sick irony. To be, as you put it, cynical.
These people need to be called out at every opportunity. For those so compelled by vanity, shame is a mighty motivator - and what they are doing is shameful.
Not so fast with the kudos to Friends of Nevada Wilderness. They, like the NWP you rightly chide, were part of the team that negotiated legislation with Harry Reid that secured wilderness designations they had sought by acquiescing to Reid’s mandated sale of tens of thousands of acres of public land in NV. One of the bills also provided a free ROW on public land for a 400+-mile pipeline to take water from northern NV to Las Vegas. (It is hoped that the recent economic changes in LV may have killed chances for that multi-billion-dollar pipeline).
The Nevada Wilderness Coalition, of which both groups were a part, did express some disapproval of the “bad parts” of Reid’s bills, but would never consider opposing land-giveaway legislation because they knew it was the politically expedient way to get their wilderness designations. As the coalition said at the time, “[We] do not believe that defying political reality is effective for wilderness.” Their passive acceptance of “political reality” cemented a trend of quid pro quo wilderness proposals. Fortunately, except in NV (due to Reid’s power), grassroots activists managed to fight these bills off. But the trend is almost guaranteed to re-emerge, especially if the whole Congress goes Republican in 2012. Then the money spigot at the Pew Charitable Trusts will open up again and the quid pro quo wilderness groups will start fashioning more trades. Maybe this time around they’ll trade flat desert for solar plants for their mountainous wilderness.
It sounds to me like NWP has been suborned. Who’s in charge there, whom are they affiliated with, and where are they getting their money from?
I’ve never understood how anybody could walk that 500 mile plus transmission route through the desert and not come away vowing to protect the land, other than he walked it too quickly. In 2006, I walked 78 miles of the original proposed route of the Sunrise Powerlink transmission line through BLM and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park lands. I did it much more slowly, over 10 days. That allowed me time to meet with community members, dawdle at sunrises and sunsets, play with little kids who were there on family campouts, and take a snooze under desert trees at noon. Had I just barrelled on through, I never would have understood why the area and the people who lived there were precious. Speed kills.
Amen to that! I’m truly horrified at the lengths that environmental organizations are going to to justify ecosystem-destroying development of public lands. It’s a kind of collective delirium, a willful dismissal of reality, apologetically defended by the limits of “current policies” and the need to “accept certain costs.” And you cynical observation about “mitigation” is, unfortunately, probably all too true.
So what to do? I say we need to hold our environmental groups to a different standard. Your earlier essay on The Problem With Wilderness made an important point. As long as a place is pretty enough to put on a calendar, we’re willing to wall it off and call it good. But all the creeping, flying, burrowing, pollinating world doesn’t exist within our boundaries. We need to upend popular environmentalism & shift focus to ecologies, not landscapes. Putting politics before science is always a bad idea—both for governments AND environment groups.
Janine, thanks for your caution regarding FNW.
We are starting a new publication which deals with wildlife watching in the Greater Yellowstone Region. Published in print and online editions with an accompanying blog, we will post the latest information on Yellowstone wildlife spottings, etiquette, safety, political and environmental issues. We firmly believe that this project will result in very positive advocacy for wildlife in the Western US. We have a very preliminary web site and blog up. Www.thespottingscope.co. I hope to get your comments and support.
Currently we are tying to get start up funding together to launch this May. Any help you might be able to provide in getting the word out would be most appreciated. We have set up a project with Kickstater to facilitate this fund raising. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1574373108/the-spotting-scope?ref=live