Defenders of Wildlife Blog

The Calico project's footprint, comprised of fields of solar panels similar to this one, will fall on 4,000 acres of public land in California, including key habitat for threatened desert tortoise.

BREAKING: The proposed California-based Calico solar project fails to meet basic environmental protection requirements and threatens imperiled wildlife, according to Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club. The groups are filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of the Interior after failing to reach agreement with the developers and the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to move the project to a location without major environmental conflicts.  

Read our fact sheet to learn more about what’s wrong with the Calico project.

Over the course of three years, the environmental groups met 10 times with the Bureau of Land Management and Calico’s current and former developers, K-Road Power and Tessera Solar (respectively), to urge the developers and Interior to relocate the project to less environmentally sensitive lands. Some of these options included degraded private agricultural lands near the proposed project that would significantly reduce the project’s impacts and bring it more in line with “smart from the start” principles. All these options were rejected.

The proposed project covers 4,000-plus-acres of vital wildlife habitat in the Mojave Desert’s Pisgah Valley – an area four times as large as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park – and is located on key desert tortoise habitat that connects several tortoise recovery areas in the region. Building a solar project here, the groups contend, would threaten at least six other imperiled animals and plants, including golden eagles, burrowing owls and Mojave fringe-toed lizard.

Desert tortoise benefit from smart planning of solar power projects.

Defenders, NRDC and the Sierra Club have previously supported or reached agreements with developers of five of the seven large-scale solar projects approved in California by Interior since 2009. This consensus building effort resulted in better projects that would create almost 3,670 construction jobs, about 525 permanent jobs and nearly 2,600 megawatts of clean power while minimizing impacts on key species and wild lands.

Collaborative solar development efforts among these conservation groups, solar developers and federal, state and local agencies will continue, including a joint effort to help shape Interior’s national solar program that will provide a robust blueprint for successful and responsible solar development on public lands in California and the rest of the West.

Following are statements from leaders of the conservation groups presenting the lawsuit:

Kim Delfino, Defenders' California program director.

“What’s frustrating about the Calico solar project is that the developer and the Bureau of Land Management can avoid the worst impacts to wildlife by being ‘smart from the start’ and moving the project to degraded agricultural lands near the proposed site,” said Kim Delfino, Defenders of Wildlife’s California program director. “If this project moves forward at this location, Calico will irreversibly harm the sensitive Pisgah Valley and the desert tortoise.”

“We drew a line in the sand and the Calico solar project crossed it,” said Johanna Wald, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “My colleagues and I tried very hard to avoid litigation and filed this suit as the last resort. We have focused instead on consensus building to improve as many large-scale solar projects as possible to transition our nation to clean energy sources while protecting wild lands and wildlife. The Calico project, however, is an example of a solar project done wrong from the start.”

“The Pisgah Valley is just too critical for desert tortoise recovery and for a whole suite of important desert species like golden eagles,” said Sierra Club Senior Representative Barbara Boyle. “We need to build renewable energy, but we can find much better places that don’t harm important wildlife and habitat.”

Defenders helped to fend off two drilling projects threatening imperiled sage grouse and public lands proposed for wilderness protection in Wyoming.

When oil company Samson Resources targeted drilling on lands near imperiled sage grouse breeding grounds and in places some local residents want protected as Wilderness, Defenders and a handful of conservation groups, came to the defense—challenging the Bureau of Land Management in court last July.

We were braced for a tough battle. But in a surprising turn of events last Friday, our coalition scored a small, but important victory for sage grouse when Samson Resources abandoned plans for the Desolation Road drilling project in Wyoming.

The oil company has filed paperwork to withdraw its application for the project, according to the Public News Service.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Listen to the full story from the Public News Service.

Grizzly bears are just one species that could be impacted by the so-called riders.

The vitality of America’s wild landscapes, such as those found in the majestic 20-million-acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, depends on budgets passed by Congress.

But the U.S. House of Representatives’ funding proposal contains dozens of non-spending related, anti-environmental policy provisions that could bankrupt citizens of their right to weigh in on decisions that affect public lands and wildlife.

Two of these so-called “riders” aim to make it difficult for concerned citizens and member-based conservation groups, like Defenders, to be involved in critical public lands decisions that affect wildlife and wild lands.

These riders would severely limit the public’s ability to have a say on how national forest lands, which belong to the American people, are managed.

One provision (in section 118) impacts Bureau of Land Management lands — some 253 million acres throughout the West, including millions in the Greater Yellowstone area such as the Bighorn Basin. It would require the public to engage in time consuming bureaucratic reviews before having the opportunity to get a fair court hearing on environmentally damaging actions.

Public lands offer world-class mountain biking.

The legislation would let the BLM move forward with harmful oil and gas drilling in places such as the Bighorn Basin without the benefit of reasonable pubic and judicial oversight.

The other (in section 437) targets the National Forest System — 193 million acres in 155 forests across the country, including seven national forests within the Greater Yellowstone region. This provision would block the public from legally challenging potentially harmful Forest Service activities such as logging and road-building. And instead of having 45 days to object to a final decision on a harmful project, the public would be forced to protest prior to a final decision. But even then the agency would have the power to ignore public concerns and exempt some projects from any appeal.

These riders would severely limit the public’s ability to have a say on how national forest lands, which belong to the American people, are managed. In a Democracy, it is critical that the public be allowed to participate in decision-making regarding the future of public lands.

Do these proposals blocking the people from having a say in the management of their own public lands sound American to you?

Contact your Representative today and tell them to put people ahead of special interests — vote against this bad bill!

The U.S. Department of the Interior gave Americans a nice early Christmas present today.

The Vermillion Basin in Colorado is among the areas that could receive protection under the new order. Photo courtesy BLM.

An order from Secretary Ken Salazar restores the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to protect the wilderness quality of the nation’s “wild lands,” reversing a Bush era decision that stripped BLM’s authority to do so.

BLM manages 245 million acres of public land in the West–more than any other federal agency. Today’s announcement potentially affects nearly 6 million acres of wilderness-quality land in Utah, 650,000 acres in Colorado, more than 5.5 million acres in Arizona and more than 2 million acres in New Mexico.

Here’s what Defenders president Rodger Schlickeisen had to say about the announcement:

Some of America’s most unique and valuable lands have remained unprotected for years due to the short-sighted action of the Bush administration. Today’s announcement will allow the broad vistas of Colorado’s Vermillion Basin, Utah’s Valley of the Gods, and many other unique and irreplaceable landscapes, which provide habitat for wildlife like sage grouse and pronghorn, to be managed to maintain their wildness.

Read our full press release here.

Breaking: Draft impact study signals shift in solar energy planning strategy

The Interior Department released an environmental study today that is viewed by conservation groups as a welcome shift in solar siting strategy away from the “fast-track” process.

The draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), a document totaling more than 10,000 pages, aims to drive solar energy development to areas that would reduce impacts on wildlife, water and the environment.

We strongly support solar energy development when it’s done in the right places and in the right ways to protect wildlife, water and wild lands.  — Jim Lyons, Defenders’ renewable energy expert

A Broken Process

The “fast-track” process – focused on project by project reviews of previously proposed renewable energy projects — has been widely criticized by conservationists as an impediment to developing a more strategic, efficient and cost-effective program for guiding future clean-energy development.

The current process has allowed renewable energy developers to choose project sites, apply for permits and draw-up costly plans before fully studying impacts on the land, scarce desert water and wildlife. A similar process is also likely to be used by the Interior Department to permit renewable energy projects in 2011. Conservationists have argued that the lessons learned from the “fast-track” projects should be used to improve the process and help inform a long-term strategy for energy development on public lands.

The following is a statement by Jim Lyons, Defenders of Wildlife’s senior director for renewable energy development:

“We strongly support solar energy development when it’s done in the right places and in the right ways to protect wildlife, water and wild lands. The draft Programmatic EIS for solar energy development begins to move us away from a haphazard, project by project approach to one that is more strategic and guides development to the places where energy can be produced with minimal conflict with wildlife and the environment.

“The Bureau of Land Management’s proposal offers us an historic opportunity to begin planning a clean energy future that’s smart from the start,

BLM lands in California.

where solar power plants are designed, built and operated in ways that produce the benefits of clean energy and minimize the collateral damage to wildlife and important habitats that can result. Although we haven’t had a chance yet to fully digest the study, we’ll be closely analyzing it in the coming weeks and look forward to participating in the public listening sessions and to working with the Interior Department to improve it.

“Smart, sustainable planning and a national renewable energy strategy is essential if we’re going to successfully and quickly transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources that will benefit our economy, produce jobs, and protect the environment. The BLM’s study is the first step in this direction. That’s why it’s vitally important that the Interior Department get this right.”

Desert tortoises are threatened with extinction.

Defenders will be reviewing the draft PEIS to determine…

• That it provides protection for wildlife, threatened and endangered species, critical habitat and wildlife linkages
• If the proposed zones will, in fact, reduce conflicts with wildlife, water and natural resources and speed up environmentally sound solar projects
• That renewable energy development is guided to the appropriate zones, such as through the use of incentives
• That solar energy development doesn’t rely on drawing unsustainable amounts of water from desert environments
• That it encourages development on abandoned agriculture lands, brownfields,  former mines and other already disturbed places
• How many acres of public lands are necessary and suitable for renewable energy development to meet our clean energy needs
• And in the end, that clean energy projects minimize and mitigate impacts on wildlife, water, wild lands and important natural resources

Learn more about Defenders’ work on renewable energy.