Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds VIII

This is Part 8 of a special essay series for paying subscribers to Letters from the Desert.

Parts 1 through 7 are linked below:

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds (Part One)

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds 2

Letter from the Desert: Burning Birds III

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds IV

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds V

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds VI

Letter From the Desert: Burning Birds VII

ISEGS. Chris Clarke photo.

As we learned more about the threat the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System’s square miles of focused mirrors posed to flying wildlife, I reported on each new release of data, each subsequent prevarication by the company. Brightsource objected. My editor and I met two Brightsource execs for a lunch at which they planned to point out all the errors in my reporting. By the end of the meeting, they conceded that none of the passages that bothered them were actually errors.

Meanwhile, a glimpse at my employers’ web server logs showed that my articles were being forwarded from government email accounts to any number of agency list servers, generating thousands of page views. Desert protection activists began copying my articles and introducing them into formal proceedings of state and federal agencies. I began to see hit pieces in the renewable energy trade press criticizing my assumptions. One assumption that bothered the trade writers most seemed to be my belief that the desert deserved better than being harmed in the name of climate mitigation. Another was that birds mattered. “Cats kill more birds than renewable energy” was a common trope; a technically accurate and nonetheless irrelevant assertion.

The bird deaths mounted.