California Desert Ecosystem

Although environmental threats and conflicting interests on how to deal with these threats exist in the Mojave, there are many organized groups working on restoring it. The Mojave spans from a significant part of southern California, a smaller portion in central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, and there are organized university and volunteer groups in all of these regions striving to revive the desert from anthropocentric interferences so that the self-feeding cycle of its ecosystem can keep pace.

There is not much media coverage on the necessary restoration of this natural habitat. However, among the most popular sources was another blog that advocates for the preservation of these deserts in response to Climate Change. This blog mentions steps that California has taken to prevent large-scale solar corporations from invading this delicate habitat for solar implementation. Whether it be to prevent solar implementation in the Mojave or not, “California has already installed over 115,000 rooftop solar installations, generating over 1,200 megawatts of local clean energy.” This is enough energy to replace two coal power plants in Southern California.

Among other popular articles on the topic is a research article called Climate Change Implications of soil temperature in the Mojave Desert, USA, which discusses the temperature patterns in the Mojave’s climate and soil. According to this article, “the mean annual air and soil temperature rose at a rate of 0.79 and 0.63 degrees celsius per decade, respectively, from 1982 to 2000.” This has serious implications on the the wildlife and vegetation. Even without human interferences in the area, the terrestrial ecological processes of that ecosystem still needs to adapt to the changing climate conditions. However, to my disappointment, there is no consensus towards restoration in this in the article.

Another article that discusses climate change effects in the Mojave is Renewable Energy in the Mojave Desert: Climate Change, which particularly focuses on the carbon surplus in the atmosphere. This article acknowledges that the desert has been warming for decades and “this warming is likely to alter rainfall and weather patterns, which could alter plant cover and productivity, and affect ecosystem functions, species distribution, and community composition.” Unfortunately, all these increasing factors are what’s making it harder and harder for restoration programming to successfully make any major positive impact. Organizations such as Mojave Desert Land Trust in California or Restoring Mojave Desert: Status of Knowledge and Future Directions of the University of Nevada Las Vegas are working on acquiring land along with restoring land that has been subject to dumping and that contains toxic or other unnatural debris. However, despite their efforts, it is a very tedious and ambitious goal that has long ways to go.

Conclusively, I am a bit disappointed in the lack of media coverage on this issue. Besides the Mojave Desert, there are countless ecosystems scattered across the globe that are in similar delicate states of slow recuperation from anthropocentric interferences. This is a critical environmental matter that can have pretty substantial and catastrophic outcomes if not dealt with appropriately and responsibly.

The University of California Press in the department of Biological Sciences lay out some facts of the current operations that go on in the deserts of Southern California, particularly the Mojave Desert in their article Wildlife Conservation and Solar Energy Development in the Desert Southwest, United States. Though it does not cover much about the media affiliated with these activities, it does provide lots of factual and statistical information that is not normally mentioned in typical media. For instance, when discussing the debate of wildlife and habitat conservation versus the implementation of solar development, of all the peer-reviewed articles since 1991 “only 7.6% of all publications on the topic covered environmental impacts, only 4.0% included discussions of ecological implications, and less than 1.0% contained information on environmental risks.” Just by glancing at these numbers, anyone can see that this is clearly an issue that requires careful analysis on all the environmental costs along with all the benefits to society renewables and conservation of habitat bring to the table.

The Utility-Scale Solar Energy Development and Operations (USSEDO) is a major corporation in southwestern United States that was founded in response to the increased demand for an alternative energy source from fossil fuels. The southwestern United States has very high potential for this kind of renewable business and is already established in various areas. However, the risk potential for natural wildlife and habitat is also very high due to past anthropocentric damages and the habitat’s delicate recuperating nature. Therefore, despite the USSEDO being an environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional energy production systems, the implementation of such technology in these deserts can have a massive impact on a regional scale that are detrimental to the wildlife of the region, especially at the state that wildlife is rendered to today.

The USSEDO has yet to successfully implement any major solar infrastructure in any Southern California desert. However, based on past human disturbances and operations in natural habitats there are very many impacts that these sort of activities will have on wildlife (particularly the Agassiz’s desert tortoise, which is one of the most endangered and affected species living in these deserts), regardless of how “environmentally-friendly” of a corporation they are. The impacts the USSEDO are bound to include mortality of wildlife, destruction and modification of wildlife habitat, impacts of roads, off-site impacts such as transportation and processing of materials, electromagnetic field generation, microclimate effects, fragmentation of habitat, pollutants from spills, water consumption, light pollution and fire risks, along with many unanswered questions due to insufficient scientific data. Therefore, related to my past blog posts on the issue, there is a clash of interests, both for very environmentally conscious causes. However, there is insufficient data and information to determine whether the USSEDO’s operations would in fact be less environmentally costly and more socially beneficial than leaving the habitat to slowly naturally recuperate.

Conclusively, this article has done a much better job of laying out the necessary information needed to determine whether corporations should enter the southern California deserts. The main question revolving around this dispute is whether efficient energy production corporations such as the USSEDO can interpret the minimization of costs and the maximization of benefits to society, two factors that are not mutually exclusive, and see whether they are responsible enough to acknowledge that their business may actually be environmentally harmful overall. “Renewable energy sources are not the panacea they are popularly perceived to be; indeed, in some cases, their adverse environmental impacts can be as strongly negative as the impacts of conventional energy sources”

The Mojave Desert Under a Media Spotlight 

Environmentalism is not always as compatible as you may think. Not every tree hugger out there agrees on the same solution to an environmental issue. The New York Times published a popular article on California’s Mojave Desert called “Desert Vistas Vs. Solar Power,” which discusses an interesting clash of environmental goals. On one side there are the developers that plan on installing solar plants and wind farms in the Mojave, claiming that it’s arguably the best solar land in the world and that the establishment of solar plants is the land’s best utilization. On the other hand, there’s senator Dianne Feinstein, who is determined to protect the land from industrial and economic projects, whether it be for a sustainable cause or not. Her ambition, of course, is for the sake of the much needed natural restoration of the Mojave due to past anthropocentric degradation. For over a decade now, Mrs. Feinstein and the Catellus Development Corporation, with support from the federal government, have had legal property ownership of the land in promise to protect and conserve it for natural habitat revival and to prevent extinction of native species.

This difficult clash of environmental goals remains unresolved to this day, though both sides are slowly becoming more adequate to cooperating with each other. “I strongly believe that conservation, renewable energy development and recreation can and must co-exist in the California desert,” Mrs. Feinstein said in a statement. “This legislation strikes a careful balance between these sometimes competing concerns.” The rationale behind senator Feinstein’s hesitation in letting renewable developers establish solar plants in the Mojave is because of the current delicate state of the desert’s natural habitat. The combination of agricultural development along the Colorado River, grazing, off-road vehicles, military activities and other anthropocentric factors have have left only half of the the Mojave desert naturally intact.

The New York Time’s “Desert Vistas Vs. Solar Power” is among the most popular articles to bring attention to the environmental concerns of southern California deserts. This article is a good sample article of what you would expect your average newspaper reader to stumble upon in the environmental section of the New York Times. However, as I have mentioned in my previous post, I find that environmental articles in newspapers and popular media generally don’t display most of the unsettling information in order to prevent their readers from panicking or distressing over the issue. Rather, these popular media therefore typically remained focused on the science and the politics associated with the issue while leaving out majority of problematic information.

Habitat Destruction

What is not mentioned in the “Desert Vistas Vs. Solar Power” article is how detrimental and afflictive habitat destruction is to native species and to humans, leading to serious health, economic and social problems that are essentially irreversible. Although, the developers conflicting with senator Feinstein are fighting for an environmental cause, the consequences of what Feinstein is trying to avoid has much bigger and long-term consequences that outweigh the consequences of not implementing solar plants in the Mojave.

The consequences of further habitat destruction and exploitation include local or global extinctions of species, leading to loss of biodiversity. Lack of biodiversity will negatively affect the natural flow of ecosystems, which will in turn lead to a decrease in the environment’s economic value to humans. A few of the consequences The New York Times forgot to mention are topsoil erosion, reduction in sustainable yields of fisheries, along with forests and other biotic resources, loss of natural pollinators, sedimentation, which leads to a decrease in water quality, loss of genetic materials that can provide medicinal value, and the list goes on and on. Not to mention, that all of these things carry a massive economic toll. Fisheries and agricultural productivity suffer economic losses of easily up to a hundred billion dollars per year. Furthermore, this introduces the question of food security for hundreds of millions of people. The loss of food security is most threatening where habitat losses are currently greatest and where population growth is the highest. This has serious implications of increasing famine and warfare food and water conflicts intensify in those regions.