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Jim: jdipeso@rep.org
(253) 740-2066 / 2010
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Can't Solar Energy and Wilderness
Get Along?
February 2, 2010
We
need more solar energy. And we need more land designated as wilderness.
Solar energy and wilderness. We need both. They shouldn’t be pitted
against each other. There is a danger that they could. People of good
faith in the solar energy and wilderness stewardship communities
shouldn’t allow it.
California’s Mojave Desert has two things in abundance – sunshine that
pours gigajoules of energy onto the desert’s creosote benches, and wide
open spaces where one can experience the wilderness values of solitude,
silence, and nature “untrammeled by man.”
The Mojave Desert is where solar energy could break permanently away
from its image as a niche product celebrated by off-the-grid
counterculture types but of limited value to an energy-hungry
industrial civilization. It’s where emissions-free energy technologies
can show their stuff and bury the bearish tirades of skeptics who
insist that there is not and never will be a practical alternative to
fossil fuels.
The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing proposals for seven
“concentrated solar plants” in the Mojave. Most of the projects could
rival a coal-fired bruiser in energy production, without coal’s baggage
of heat-trapping carbon pollution, toxic mercury emissions, and
disfigured landscapes.
The Mojave Desert also is a place close to millions living in the giant
urban centers of Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, who
are only hours away from experiencing wild nature on a scale large
enough to appreciate and to reflect on the reality that creation is
ruled by titanic forces that will forever overshadow man and his
pretentious ways.
Obviously, acres of solar energy reflectors and wilderness preserves
cannot co-exist on the same piece of ground. Hence the potential
conflicts between clean energy and land protection.
The Mojave Desert is big enough to accommodate both, but it would take
some planning guided by a vision that both are important. Local
governments do this all the time. It’s called zoning. Industrial
facilities go here, residential developments go there. Both are
accommodated in ways designed to minimize conflicts between two very
different land uses that each have a place in the community.
Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced legislation that would set
aside about 1 million acres of federal land in the desert as two
national monuments with the evocative names Mojave Trails and Sand to
Snow. Her bill also would add some 73,000 acres to Death Valley and
Joshua Tree National Parks and to the Mojave National Preserve.
In addition, the bill includes language designed to streamline
permitting for solar energy projects and to prod federal land
management agencies, including the Defense Department, to identify
suitable locations for solar energy development.
The bill could go further. It sets aside 300,000 acres for off-road
vehicle play, which is far less important to America’s national
security, economic prospects, and public health than solar energy
development. Surely, the bill could allocate some acreage for
generating solar electricity, which is vastly more important for
America’s national security, economic prospects, quality of life, and
public health than ripping around the desert on dirt bikes.
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