My free-ranging, trail running, biking, hiking, hunting, fishing, sage-smelling, birdwatching, dirt biking, four-wheeling, and stargazing friends—please consider lending your voice in a public comment to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) here:
https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2022371/570/8020124/comment
Under pressure from Executive Order 14008 and the Energy Act of 2020, the BLM plans to smother nearly a million acres of public lands with solar panels. These are 870,000 acres of sage steppe and desert open spaces spread across Washington, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The BLM anticipates that these solar farms will provide energy to power more than 29 million homes. But using these once-public lands will destroy places where we hunt and ride and hike, vital habitats and sacred sites, enriching private companies while our public land is locked up.
Wait, don’t I know it’s either coal-fired power plants, dams, windmills, or this? Wow, the enviros have lost their minds–now even solar is off-limits? Don’t worry, I’m not against sunlight harvesting. The allure of solar energy development is clear. We need a lot of electricity to fuel our high quality of life in America. We need sources of energy that don’t pollute the air or degrade the earth. Unfortunately, transforming nearly a million acres of open land into America’s newest energy feedlot is not the answer. Not only is this antithetical to reducing the damage we are doing to the planet, but it doesn’t make sense when we have a clear alternative: cover urban surfaces with these solar panels and achieve the goals of the private companies and the BLM.
Let’s use our parking lots, south-facing walls, the rooftops of Walmarts, Costcos, Safeways, shopping malls, and government buildings. We could generate the energy we use, on-site. No need for extra transmission lines, unnecessary roads, and the destruction of our Great American Sage Lands. Instead of letting the sun hit our black asphalt surfaces and roofs, which warms urban areas by 5ºF or more, cover them up and give some shade to the parked cars. Plus, these solar panels will shield sidewalks and parking lots from snow and frost in the winter.
Instead, the proposed BLM plan looks like this. Find some of the very best open, culturally significant, undeveloped, and glorious sky-gazing land and turn it into a glass parking lot cover with no cars underneath.
Looking at a map it’s not hard to see why they picked these lands for such a project. They are wastelands, scablands, and deserts. Desolate, barren, arid–to the nescient at least. But anyone who has spent a day in them knows otherwise.
You don’t have to enter these places to benefit from them. Ever stopped at a rest area along the interstate, tucked against BLM lands, and been transported, restored, by the meadowlarks song rising above the sage, above the traffic? While we’re here, let’s cover rest stops with solar panels too; more shade for sleepy travelers, plug-ins for electric cars: another win for earth and economy.
Wasteland, desolate, barren? Not for the burrowing owls, mule deer, golden eagles, sage grouse, coyotes, elk, sandhill cranes, gopher snakes, harriers, lizards, badgers, and bluebirds. It’s their home. And the sagebrush, rabbitbrush, balsamroot, cactus, camas, lupines, and buckbrush…solar panels have nothing on these self-replicating, earth-cooling, carbon-sequestering, aromatic, photosynthesizing plants. You don’t even have to water these plants and they live.
And for us humans, these are the last best open spaces that aren’t wilderness in the Western United States. If you need somewhere to go clear your head, look at the stars, or ride your dirt bike off into the sunset, these are your lands. For Native Americans, these lands contain sacred sites and cultural and food resources that are still used today.
We also know solar panel technology is only going to get better in a few years, making the destruction of public land now short-sighted. And new technologies are on the verge of eliminating the idea that we need to destroy more of the earth to save it. Take, for example, the emerging fusion start-ups of the Pacific Northwest. Not the scary fission of melting down nuclear reactors, but the fusion that produces no radiation or carbon byproducts. Why would we agree to the desecration of these fallow, hallowed lands when there are other options?
Join me in telling the BLM that we’d love for them to keep managing our lands and not turning into the Bureau of Energy Projects or the Bureau of Converting Public Lands to Private Hands. Have them send those eager, earth-loving energy companies who want to cover the earth in opaque glass to meet with our local chambers of commerce, city councils, county commissioners, box stores, and gas stations, where we could actually use some shade while we run in for groceries.
Like muscles, if you don’t use your democratic voice, you lose it. Add your voice here:
https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2022371/570/8020124/comment
*If you are in Washington State, send the same letter addressed to the State of Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council. Instead of BLM lands, refer to state-managed public lands. Remind them that culturally significant places to the Moses Columbia and Wenatchi tribes, like Badger Mountain, should be off-limits to solar development.
https://www.efsec.wa.gov/about-efsec/how-comment
Thank you,
Steven Gnam
