den’s
environmentalism being fushed down the toilet. And why should we be
surprised, knowing that David Bonderman, the multi-millionaire profting
from three new lignite coal-fred power plants in Texas, sits on GCT’s
board and provides substantial fnancing to the group?
Remember
those “vast open spaces”? I’m told GCT emphasized rooftop solar at the
sustainability festival, but did they mention the huge industrial wind
farm proposed for plateau rangelands southeast of Flagstaff? They’ve
taken no position, of course. GCT might ask if the landscape is
“disturbed” at the site. Well, since cows have grazed there, I guess it
means that hundreds of 500ft tall bird-killing turbines are OK by them.
But what about GCT’s own cattle ranches down slope of the Kaibab, where
the wind fairly howls much of the time? Hypocrisy
In the end, the capitalists who fund
the Grand Canyon Trust don’t care
about the environment
or our future either. No, what they care about
is our perception of the future
“Jim Stiles holds up a mirror to those of us
living in the American West,
exposing issues we may not want to face.
We are all complicit in the shadow side of
growth. His words are born not so much
out of anger but a broken heart.
He says he writes elegies for
the landscape he loves, that he is
“hopelessly clinging to the past.”
I would call Stiles a writer from the future.
Brave New West is a book of import
because of what it chooses to expose.”
-- Terry Tempest Williams
author of - RED -
Passion and Patience in the Desert
SIGNED COPIES OF
Brave New West
are now available directly from
The Zephyr
PO Box 271
Monticello, UT 84535
$20.00 postage paid checks only at this time
literally oozes out of this organization.
In
the end, the capitalists who fund the Grand Canyon Trust don’t care
about the environment or our future either. No, what they care about is
our perception of the future, so they put on a “sustainability
festival” in the face of unmitigated environmental disaster. As long as
there’s the illusion of hope, the big boys fgure we’ll keep on
shopping. That’s all they need, and that’s exactly what we can take
away from them.
DOUG MEYER is The Zephyr’s Colorado Plateau Bureau Chief. He lives in
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Flagstaff, Arizona.
BASIN & RANGE WATCH UPDATE
By Kevin Emmerich & Laura Cunningham
Baron of the Land Rush:
Salazar Fast-tracks Solar in the West
Living
and working at Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada in 1991
could be a challenge. The nearest grocery store was just under 80 miles
and the better quality shopping was about 180 miles away In Cedar
City, Utah. Getting there was the fun part. One of the most beautiful
parts of the trip passed through the wide open sagebrush of Wah Wah
Valley in Utah. Not much was there back then except peace and quiet and
meadowlarks. Most of the basins seemed so distant from the industrial
worldview of the cities. At the time, the remoteness of this little
known basin seemed untouchable.
But
lately, our beloved Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced
several ways to change all that. One is a Bureau of Land Management
plan to take several of those remote desert valleys and map them as
“Solar Energy Study Zones.” The government will then help companies
build thousands of acres of solar thermal mirrors or photovoltaic
panels over the desert by pre-qualifying huge swaths of federal land
for development.
“The
Secretary of the Interior proposes to withdraw approximately 676,048
acres of public lands from settlement, sale, location, or entry under
the general land laws, including the mining laws, on behalf of the
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to protect and preserve solar energy
study areas for future solar energy development. This notice
segregates the lands for up to 2 years from surface entry and mining
while various studies and analyses are made to support a fnal decision
on the withdrawal application,” says the notice on the Federal
Register, June 30, 2009.
“Protect and preserve for solar energy…”? We’ve come a long way in defning what public land is.
These
Solar Energy Study Areas, 24 tracts of BLM-administered land in
California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, would
provide landscape-scale planning and zoning for solar projects,
cutting out many of the obstacles (such as public comment?) to
permitting solar development. Pesky threatened and endangered species
like Sage grouse will be dealt with, we presume, by committees of
GIS-experts safely distant in their city offces.
The
Solar Energy Study Areas will be included in a huge Solar Programmatic
Environmental Impact Statement, or PEIS, a sort of “one-stop shop” for
developers seeking permits. See http://solareis.anl.gov/index.cfm.
Joan
Taylor, California-Nevada desert energy chairwoman for The Sierra Club,
called the declaration “a knife through the heart of the desert.”
Utah’s share of these new renewable energy zones includes Escalante Valley, Milford Flats South, and, yes, Wah Wah Valley.
“This
environmentally-sensitive plan will identify appropriate
Interior-managed lands that have excellent solar energy potential and
limited conficts with wildlife, other natural resources or land users,”
Salazar said.
The
reality on the ground, however, may make things more diffcult for
Salazar’s plan, as top-heavy management and real-world conficts pile
up. When concepts like “preservation” simply become bureaucratic
advertising ploys that open the food gate for energy development on
public lands, it becomes symbolic that we never really owned our public
lands.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE ZEPHYR
Become a member of the Zephyr
BACKBONE
or become a Zephyr
ADVERTISER
You can sign up with your credit card or Paypal
or you can still pay by check.
See details at the top of our HOME PAGE
13