Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [145]
Yet it’s exactly that scenario that is most frightening to wildlife environmentalists.
“I’m very concerned about the whole scale of this. I think you really need to take a strong comprehensive look at what’s going on here,” one desert tortoise biologist testified before the Commission. “It’s a very complex situation, and there’s a lot of actors involved, and it really needs a wide sweeping programmatic look.”30
If there is one problem with the solar power stations in the desert, it’s scale—sheer size. Although the impacts of one or two projects could probably be mitigated, a push to generate considerable amounts of our electricity from solar without dramatically cheaper solar photovoltaic panels basically requires building solar farms in the desert. The California Energy Commission explicitly considered whether rooftop solar could meet the state’s renewable energy generation goals, and the answer was a resounding no.31 The environmental movement, as currently constituted, will have to learn how to deal with that build out. Coming up with ways of reconciling the need for low-carbon energy with the desire to protect endangered species and wild habitat has to be the dominant intellectual challenge for greens of the next generation.
This is because the battles in Sacramento aren’t just about California. The tension on display in the hearing rooms of the California Energy Commission runs straight back to the heart of environmentalism and its complex relationship with technology. Sociologist William Gamson argued that Americans have long believed in “progress through technology,” but wrapping around and cutting through this dominant framework is a countertheme that humans should live in “harmony with nature.”32 The Jetsons epitomize the first idea whereas commune-living hippies embody the second. If there’s a big, definable arc to the American relationship with technology, this is it.
What’s important about green technology is that it may resolve a tension that’s threaded through history from John Etzler and Henry David Thoreau, through the meatpacking plants of Chicago, past the oil fields of Texas, beyond the solar homes of New Mexico, to the suburbs of Los Angeles, and up to the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. For environmental groups, the answer won’t be coal power or no power plant at all. There will be real alternatives that can be promoted and supported.
At the same time that our technology is coming to depend on natural energy flows, scientists are discovering that “nature” is a lot more manufactured than it looks. Ellis and others point out that humans have altered nearly the entire surface of the globe in ways that are at least as deep as what we’re doing to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Ellis wrote,
Humans have transformed more than three quarters of the terrestrial biosphere into croplands, rangelands, villages, settlements and other anthropogenic biomes (anthromes) including managed and recovering woodlands. While the process of anthropogenic ecosystem transformation and management has been sustained for thousands of years on every continent except Antarctica, there is still a tendency for ecological scientists, educators and policymakers to portray the terrestrial biosphere as a natural place just recently disturbed by humans.33
The hundreds of pages worth of ecological testimony by the environmental intervenors arguing over methodological differences in counting desert tortoises seem to lack perspective. The solar plant’s human components were put on trial by groups and institutions that developed in order to stop the building of plants, not support them. The lives of a few dozen desert