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as surrogates for wilderness itself,” in the words of historian Bill Cronon. The form of the laws has forced environmental groups to use single species in this way, “thereby making the full power of the sacred land inhere in a single numinous organism whose habitat then becomes the object of intense debate about appropriate management and use.”4

And that is the situation shaping up in the Mojave. Except in this case, it’s a bit unusual. Both sides can legitimately claim the mantle of protecting the environment. One side protects this patch of wilderness, whereas the other protects a dispersed patch of atmosphere from carbon dioxide emissions, an invisible substance present in tiny concentrations. It’s telling that no power plant ever inspired more organized groups to comment on a plant than Ivanpah, not even the Sundesert nuclear plant, the symbolic end of nuclear power in California.5

Ivanpah is a bellweather, then, and environmental groups in California, battle-hardened by years of fighting power plants, were quick to organize to critique the project and position themselves for a protracted public and legal struggle. The arena for this intra-green battle is the California Energy Commission’s power plant siting process, presided over by Commissioner Jeffrey Byron. At the opening of the near-final round of hearings in January 2010, Byron said,

I want to make clear to everybody that this is an extremely important project for this Commission . . . this represents the first of what we hope will be many renewable projects that will come before the Energy Commission. It’s unique in that regard, but also in that it has a number of large land use issues associated with it, and biological and others that will come up.6

Outside groups, known in the jargon of the process as “intervenors,” have multiple opportunities to submit legal briefs, provide testimony, and cross-examine whomever they would like from the project developer’s personnel bench.

In hearings before the Commission, BrightSource officials and contractors have had to answer for absolutely every detail of the project’s plan, from the distance of the mirrors to the tower boiler that receives reflected solar heat to the type of materials that can be used in the fences that will surround the site to keep out stray tortoises. Their biologists and engineers are subjected to blistering questioning. Environmental groups have called thousands of the tiniest details into question. Intervenors can and have proposed radically different alternative plans, sites, and means of generation, long after BrightSource had purchased this piece of land from the Bureau of Land Management.7

As nuclear advocates have complained for forty years, whether the environmental intervenors want to modify specific proposals or protect certain species or whether they just want to shut down the whole damn thing and prevent it from being built is not always clear. In press releases and the pages of the country’s major newspapers, environmental groups jockeyed for position. Some, like the Sierra Club, tried to chart a middle path. “It’s not enough to say no to things anymore,” said one of the group’s experts on renewable energy. “We have to say yes to the right thing.”8

But it’s clearly an uncomfortable position. When BrightSource altered its plan to reduce its output and change its design in response to criticisms, the Sierra Club responded with a mixed statement. “Looking at this new proposal, it will not do anything to protect the desert tortoise and they won’t be able to generate as many megawatts,” said the group’s senior attorney in San Francisco, Gloria D. Smith. Despite that, she said, “We still support this project but just want it to have a more beneficial footprint.”

The National Resources Defense Council has taken much the same pragmatic stance, with its longtime lawyer Johanna Wald pointing out what is the great irony of the parable of the tortoise and the sun. “We have to accept our responsibility that something that we have been advocating for decades is about to happen,” Wald said.