Environmentalists in a Clash of Goals & Strategies
Mar 24, 2009 – You knew it was coming. Green power versus green. What is the controversy? You’ve seen wind farms and large solar collectors. What was there first? Beautiful natural vistas. When do the lawyers get involved? Put in 40 story wind turbines and there goes the neighborhood. Felicity Barringer writes about “Environmentalists in a Clash of Goals“ in The New York Times March 24, 2009.
That specter is of an army of mirrors, generators and transmission towers transforming Mojave Desert vistas. David Myers, head of the Wildlands Conservancy, has fought to preserve the beautiful vistas.
Some of Myers’s fellow environmentalists are helping power companies pinpoint the best sites for solar-power technology. Their goal is to combat climate change by harnessing the desert’s solar-rich terrain, reducing the region’s reliance on carbon-emitting fuels. Myers is indignant, “How can you say you’re going to blade off hundreds of thousands of acres of earth to preserve the Earth?” he said.
As the Obama administration puts development of geothermal, wind and solar power on a fast track, the environmental movement finds itself torn between fighting climate change and a passion for saving special places.
Terry Frewin, a local Sierra Club representative, said he had tough questions for state regulators. ”Deserts don’t need to be sacrificed so that people in L.A. can keep heating their swimming pools,” Mr. Frewin said.
At a national level, strategy is meshing with support for new policies intended to change how electricity is generated, how cars are made and how people live. “It’s not enough to say no to things anymore,” said Carl Zichella, a Sierra Club expert on renewable power. “We have to say yes to the right thing.”
So environmentalists like Zichella and Johanna Wald, a lawyer and longtime ecowarrior at the Natural Resources Defense Council, have joined an industry-dominated advisory group that makes recommendations to California regulators on where renewable-energy zones should be created. ”We have to accept our responsibility that something that we have been advocating for decades is about to happen,” Wald said. ”My job is to make sure that it happens in an environmentally responsible way.”
The nation’s new interior secretary, Ken Salazar, called this month for a task force to map potential energy sites. To counter those efforts, Myers has proposed that Congress put hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in the Mojave Desert off limits as a national monument. The monument would stretch from Joshua Tree National Park to the National Park Service’s Mojave Preserve and would include the Sleeping Beauty Mountains.
Last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, also proposed a national monument to protect much of the same land. ”I’m a strong supporter of renewable energy and clean technology, but it is critical that these projects are built on suitable lands,” said Feinstein, who heads a subcommittee that oversees the Interior Department budget.
“We’re environmentalists,” said Jim Harvey, whose Association for a Responsible Energy Policy represents a coalition of activists in the Mojave area. “These people, who are supposed to be sitting next to us, are sitting across from us.” Harvey’s group says that rooftop solar panels could be vastly expanded in heavily populated areas around Los Angeles. With energy conservation that would make desert clusters of solar plants unnecessary, it says. Zichella and others counter that a wide embrace of expensive rooftop panels will be slow in coming. “The most prudent course is not to put all our renewable eggs in one basket,” Zichella wrote recently.
A reconciliation between the two environmental camps seems likely. As national and state targets mandate more and more renewable-energy projects, many say, environmentalists will have an incentive to work jointly to broker solutions with politicians and the energy industry.
In the Mojave, the biggest fight centers on high-voltage lines that are needed to reach areas where energy will be produced. The likely spots are separated from customers by 2 large national park properties, several wilderness areas and military bases like the Twenty Nine Palms Marine Corps reservation. Finding a route for a project called Green Path North, which traverses those installations, fragile ecosystems and angry communities, has been difficult. One path “goes right between my house and the mountains,” Harvey said.
Aware that internal debate is unavoidable, Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, suggests a greater effort to balance competing priorities. “What you have to do,” Pope said, “is show that you’ve done the best job you can.”