Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [141]
Other groups, particularly the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife staked out more hardline stances. Kim Delfino wrote a warning in the group’s magazine that “California is starting to see a new kind of ‘gold rush’, but this time, it’s going to be our wind, sunlight and public lands that are up for grabs.”9 Large-scale solar farming is, to Delfino, another form of mining and quite possibly a government giveaway to private companies. Defenders of Wildlife harangued the Ivanpah project tooth and nail through the plant-siting process.
One can almost imagine the fossil-fuel industry laughing all the way to the slag pile. Would-be nuclear plant builders, too, must be enjoying watching the solar boys getting the same workout that has kept California from building large coal and nuclear plants. Using primarily solar fuel, or as BrightSource chairman Arnold Goldman calls it, “fuel for life,” has not caused environmental groups to give them a free, or even an easy, pass.
For fledgling green-tech companies, the lack of support from those who would seem to be their natural allies could prove to be their Achilles’ heel. After decades of fighting power plants and pollution, trying to impose limits on society’s activities, mainline conservation groups do not find supporting the destruction of desert by a private power plant developer easy. Like a longtime opposition political party suddenly handed the keys to the kingdom, the environmental movement is discovering that governing is a lot harder than it looks; the cracks in the coalition are easier to see in the realm of action.
In the condensed narrative, the environmental movement rose up in affluent, suburban communities after World War II to oppose environmental pollution and toxic chemicals, which were killing off animal species and shortening human lives. Combining older conservationist thought with new scientific understanding of ecology, environmentalism offered a political alternative to the bipolar Cold War world, critiquing the nasty environmental records of the Soviets and Americans.
Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is often given credit for launching popular interest in environmental issues.10 In elite circles she and other ecologists brought new scientific expertise to bear on how nature worked, countering the expertise of other groups of established authorities like utility executives and corporate industrial chemists. “The development of atomic energy, the chemical revolution in agriculture, the proliferation of synthetic materials, and the increased scale of power generation and resource extraction” gave the ’60s generation many new technologies that all seemed unabashedly and fundamentally unnatural.11 Reacting against this tremendous assault on nature, twenty million Americans rose up on April 1, 1970 for the first Earth Day and then scared the Nixon administration into signing the greatest streak of environmental legislation in American history.
Rice Odell’s book for the Conservation Foundation on the occasion of the 1980 Earth Day was clear on exactly how big the change was. Odell wrote,
The environmental awakening was a rude one, indeed. It cast doubt on some of the most cherished credos of the day—beliefs in the ever-increasing rewards of industrial, technological, and chemical progress and of economic growth under a free-market system. It made the future look bleak and disappointing. Paradoxically, the Environmental Revolution also brought a glow of welcome reform, of hopeful change, and of prospects for a higher quality of life. It brought a new dimension to civilization.12
The primary concerns of the movement’s members were protecting wilderness and disabusing Americans of the desire to think of all of nature as a “resource” just awaiting human exploitation. As Carson put it, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists