The sunrise reflected on fingers of sheet water filling the sand washes as  we hiked up an enormous fan of granitic stone and gravel that poured out of a canyon in the Lucy Gray Mountains. A loggerhead shrike winged past us, hunting whiptail lizards, calling harshly as it landed on green spears of a Mojave yucca. A few pools of water revealed the hidden activity of the night before, delicate kangaroo rat tracks and paw prints of kit fox passing through the mud edges. What surprised us most, however, were the abundant desert tortoise burrows, deep half-moon shaped shelters dug into the loose fan sediments by the reptiles to over winter or escape the aridity of midsummer. But the monsoon had just started in these parts, and yesterday’s thundershowers had triggered green leaf sprouts in the galleta grass and fluffgrass tufts, favorites of the herbivorous tortoises. They were out.
  We had come to this desert garden in southern Nevada’s tip to ground-check the Green Economy.     
  Hiking for two hours up the fan at dawn, the humidity engulfing us, we tried to get at least halfway through this giant renewable energy project site on public land before the day heated up into electrical storms.

   This new proposal to develop nearly 8,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land in two phases continues the ‘domino effect’ of solar developers making a land rush in the West. Instead of housing tracts, this time it is utility-scale solar companies, often seeking to gobble up large 4,000 acre pieces of land at a time.
   
     NextLight Renewable Power, LLC (formed by New Jersey-based private equity firm Energy Capital Partners, a group of high-rolling Goldman-Sachs investors who seem to buy and sell power generation plants, gas pipelines, dams, coal reserves -- and soon carbon credits -- like the rest of us trade used clothing) wants almost 8,000 acres of pristine desert to construct a massive array of photovoltaic panels. We noticed quickly that the 4,600-acre ‘phase one’ Silver State South site occupies some of the highest quality tortoise habitat we have seen in a while. The fan is two miles east of Primm, Nevada and about ten or so miles from another proposed project, a set of concentrated solar thermal ‘power towers’, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, across the basin in California. That project would tear up 3,400-acres (5.3 square miles) of biologically diverse Mojave Desert. In fact, this could easily be called “old growth Mojave Desert”.
  
    These projects are located within the Northeastern Recovery Unit first outlined in the Fish and Wildlife Service 1994 Desert Tortoise (Mojave Population) Recovery Plan. The NextLight site was also once proposed to be included in the Piute-Eldorado Desert Wildlife Management Area (DWMA) as Critical Habitat for the desert tortoise (then removed for political reasons). The site appears to be in very good shape for recovery. There is very little sign of off highway vehicle use and minimal sign of invasive species. Development of just one of these projects would be so large that it could cut off the connectivity that many wildlife species require to maintain their genetic diversity. As it turns out, saving our planet from climate change this way, could very well lead to the extinction of this keystone species of the Mojave Desert.

  The biggest irony here is that all the photovoltaic panels that NextLight proposes to build on the desert way out here could go on rooftops, over parking areas, and on brown fields in Las Vegas, just 45 miles up the highway.     At another public meeting for a proposed giant wind energy project near the Nextlight site, we asked a county commissioner why the city did not have programs available to enable the public to install photovoltaic systems on our rooftops in a cost-effective manner. Several California cities have incentives that give loans to install rooftop solar with no upfront funds. Feed-in-tariffs are another way to help bring affordable local solar to the cities, and end the need for massive new transmission lines to hook up distant industrial solar and wind projects out in the wildlands to city users. Many communities are also developing collective solar agreements to reduce the costs by making whole neighborhoods locally solar-powered. So there are alternatives to destruction of the desert. We are not always saying “no” to every renewable project. But the commissioner shrugged and said he did not know about such programs, and none are planned.

    Luckily, whenever there is such a large assault on our last wilderness by any developer, the environmental groups send in the white knights! Ughhhh…were those white knights supposed to get here today? No? Can we at least get one environmental activist to say hello to us?
    A few weeks after our site visit, we attended a local BLM scoping meeting for the NextLight Silver State South project. There seemed to be plenty of empty chairs to choose from. Just where were all those environmentalists? We and a local group, the Amargosa Conservancy, were the only ones speaking up about loss of tortoise lands. An off-roader also made a pubic comment about how three

trails were going to be blocked by the massive project, and he too said the tortoises needed protection here. While many environmentalists are the first ones to point fingers at off roaders for being the cause of so much ecological destruction, we are seeing a situation where off roaders are being better stewards of the land than the good ole’ Sierra Club! Yes, there are a couple of OHV trails near the site, but the riders stay on the trails and stay off the tortoise habitat. In these strange times, our allies are shifting away from mainstream environmentalists. So a couple of ATV riders said, “Leave our trails open, protect the desert tortoises