San Gorgonio Pass wind farm in Riverside County, California (3/15/17)
This photo looks like a promotional shot for “green energy” but I took it to show how monstrous these tall machines are in a natural landscape and to talk about their negative environmental effects. Wildlife habitat was razed for their installation, wiping out desert plant life and delicate biotic soil crusts, and destroying the homes of animals and birds who lived here, including the Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), an endangered species. More land was bulldozed to string long-distance transmission lines. The majority of displaced flora and fauna cannot return because the area must be kept cleared for maintenance. Use of herbicides might well be routine. The beautiful yellow flowers are Desert Dandelions (Malacothryx glabra), an annual that thrives in disturbed places including human-impacted sites, but which in a healthier, more intact environment would be one species among many, not the nearly monotypic expanse seen here.
Technology, including AI, is using an increasing amount of energy each year and is one of the drivers of new power infrastructure, including “green” projects like wind and solar farms. The virtual world is wreaking environmental havoc in the real world, often in wildlife habitat that had been spared the worst of industrial destruction up until now, like the deserts and steppes of the western US, which are hotspots of biodiversity including rare species found nowhere else. These areas also host a multitude of edible and medicinal plants traditionally used and tended by indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans, and in this way, “green energy” development, including lithium mining, is just the latest chapter in the brutal history of colonial land theft.
Over my life, I have watched as environmentalism has tragically morphed from a movement striving to protect nature and prevent pollution to one that’s narrowly focused on finding alternative ways to fuel the techno-industrial system that is itself responsible for degrading healthy ecology. “Sustainability” is about preserving profits and greed, not the planet and its amazing array of life.
So when I look at a windfarm or a solar array like this, I do not see a solution. I see the problem taking different shape.
Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer, photographer, tree-hugger, animal lover, cultural dissident and occasional farmer whose work can be found at Macska Moksha Press at macskamoksha.com
