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Chinatown, Redux?
By Nicole Panter
In April, Vanity Fair published their third annual “Green” issue. The rich and the powerful threw down for the cause on glossy pages and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered up a manifesto for the next president of the United States. “As for solar,” he wrote, “according to a study in Scientific American,
photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 per cent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation's electricity needs without any rooftop
installations…”
My heart sinks a little whenever I read a progressive environmental leader like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. so casually advocate the decimation of the desert -- a unique and fragile
ecosystem -- in the quest to feed our country's drunken appetite for energy.
The study referenced by Kennedy, A Solar Grand Plan (January 2008) was written by three engineers with
business interests in the solar and photovoltaic industry. These men are neither wild-lands experts nor conservation biologists. The “barren” land they dismiss so offhandedly, the Mojave, is
home to two National Parks, a National Preserve, numerous private land trust preserves, various BLM lands, including 69 wilderness areas, multiple wildlife linkages, and a number of endangered species
and shrinking habitats, both plant and wildlife. That's in a small corner of California.
Kennedy's mentality - that it's just the desert -- is the same one that has the city of Los Angeles
fighting in court for the last 20 years for the right to dump 40 million tons of garbage a day for 117 years on the southern edge of Joshua Tree National Park. Now, Mr. Kennedy proposes we plant
huge fields of mirrors on tens of thousands of acres of pristine desert, which would require tens of thousands of additional acres for transmission towers and lines to the East Coast. He might be
surprised to learn that those of us who love the desert find his plan for the Mojave as repulsive as locating giant wind turbines in the middle of Cape Cod Sound was to Mr. Kennedy, a renewable energy
project he ferociously and successfully defeated.
Why is Kennedy advocating the old-fashioned model of building more transmission lines rather than the wholesale installation of
rooftop-solar? Downed power lines in wilderness areas are a documented cause of wildfire in the West, a problem that has dramatically increased in recent years due to climate change.
The old-model grid is far more vulnerable to a successful attack by an enemy than individually placed technology would be. Is it just a lack of bigger vision, or could it be that the bottom line
wouldn't be nearly so great for the energy companies if they were not the controlling purveyors of this new energy? Kennedy's brother, Joseph Kennedy II's Citizen's Energy Alliance together with the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power are the primary partners attempting to place giant transmission towers across the Mojave in designated wilderness areas and preserves.
Whether it is Kennedy,
or Bonnie Raitt and Tom Hartman on Air America extolling the virtues of “mining solar in the Mojave” or David Nahai, head of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power declaring “we have the solar fields
of the Mojave” environmental thinkers have got to change their mind-set about this precious and besieged ecosystem. Just because they can't see it - though they would if they made the effort -- it doesn't mean it isn't teeming with life.
I was raised in the desert and I've learned that there are two kinds of people, those like me who love it wildly and draw sustenance from it. Then there's the rest -- those who can't see
the beauty or the abundant life in this dramatic landscape. They are the folks who see it as a place to dump their garbage, their old mattresses and sometimes, their dead bodies.
Didn't
anyone learn anything 95 years ago, when the Owens Valley in central California was plundered to supply water to Los Angeles? Or should we just forget it, because it's Chinatown, Jake? Perhaps we
need to address the problems we face at their root: too many people and the excessive, unwise, use of dwindling resources in our throwaway culture. The Mojave Desert is fragile. When it is
gone, it will be gone forever. Is irrevocably damaging an irreplaceable ecosystem really an acceptable price to pay for easy solar power when other choices exist?
Nicole Panter is a teacher, fiction writer, photographer, film critic and essayist.
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