Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [144]
The strength and ductility of the environmental movement came through little environmental injustices like the ones Galbraith described, encountered in the new, treeless suburbs and the streets of the cities. Different subsets of Americans—often led by women like iconoclastic economist Hazel Henderson—began to coalesce around the idea that clean air and water were worth paying for.26
Note that this environmentalism is not nature, endangered species, or wilderness focused: It is concerned, first and foremost, with humans. Clean and safe were more important than “natural.” The suburban housewives and baseball dads who supported the passage of the nation’s landmark environmental legislation were not interested in biomes, perse: They cared about the places that humans co-created, or, as ecologist Erle Ellis calls them, anthromes.
This tension between different environmental thinkers is a live issue. One exchange in the BrightSource hearings was particularly telling. Michael Connor of the Western Watersheds Act was cross-examining an ecologist hired by BrightSource about the possibility of ever restoring the land that would be used by the plant. Connor asked W. Geoffrey Spaulding, who had thirty-five years of botanical experience in the Mojave, to explain how the restoration of an area of the desert disturbed by the construction of a pipeline had worked.
“Re-vegetation actually, in comparative terms, over the last nine or ten years, seems to be going along fairly well,” Spaulding testified.
“And so you think it looks—it’s starting to look natural?” Connor asked.
“Please define natural,” Spaulding fired back. The restoration was actually the height of unnatural efforts made by human beings, first to disturb the land and then to make extraordinary and long-term efforts to restore it.27
The confusion resulted because Connor had substituted the word natural when what he really meant was good. It’s a common thing to do in many environmental circles, one that reflects the particular late ’60s and early ’70s sensibility that the pollster Daniel Yankelovich called “the new naturalism.”28 As related by Rome, “Yankelovich discovered a widespread conviction” among college students that “everything artificial was bad, while everything ‘natural’ was good.” Defining natural, unfortunately, is difficult.29 In a world completely dominated by humans, what’s natural?
THINK GLOBALLY, DESTROY LOCALLY
Big-thinking climate scientists say that solutions to global warming need to meet a key criterion: They must be able to scale up to the size of the problem. This simple dictate will require major changes in the way environmentalists shaped by this era think.
“Think Globally, Act Locally,” became a mantra for ’70s-trained environmentalists. Stopping your local power plant was a way of protecting the earth. When environmentalism was perceived as a way of reconnecting with the land, then it made sense to work locally, where one could go out and smell the fresh air one was protecting. Large-scale problems like “the military-industrial complex” could be attacked at the grassroots level through many different organizations. Besides, privileging the local ecosystem over the globalized world economy was easy. But what if responding to climate change with renewable energy deployments means sacrificing local landscapes?
That’s the very situation that BrightSource’s Ivanpah plant presents to nature preservation groups like Defenders of Wildlife. On the one hand, if no mirrors were installed in their territory, this would obviously be better for the desert tortoises. On the other hand, the plant is a key test case for an entire field of technology that could provide large amounts of low-carbon electricity. If Ivanpah works, it could pave the way for dozens of similar projects across the world.
Fledgling energy companies want—and need—to get big if they want to compete with oil, coal, and gas. Scale has a very important