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That entire attitudes have to be changed in the fight for a better life. Because apparently capitalism has a clause that says: "And above all, you MUST be fucking over SOMETHING or someone with ALL of your projects, for great bags of money don't taste as sweet without the tart flavour of exploitation, ruin and death."

Big Solar's Death Panels

The Mojave, where the sun shines more than 300 days a year, would seem like a perfect home for the solar hub—unless you happen to be a threatened desert tortoise, in which case you can kiss your burrow goodbye. Across the country, environmentalists are finding themselves in the awkward position of having to choose between clean energy and wildlife: In the Midwest, wind farms ensnare bats and migrating birds, and hydropower dams in the Northwest decimate salmon spawning grounds. "We've been supportive of efforts to accelerate clean-energy projects," says Jim Lyons, who studies renewable energy at the conservation nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. "But the scale of these new projects is massive, and they could be enormously destructive to plants and animals."

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Of course, solar projects needn't destroy pristine landscapes at all. I visited one future plant site where farming had long ago scared off tortoises and other sensitive species. And consider that just outside the Mojave lie acres upon acres of flat, sunny spaces where the tortoise count is guaranteed to be zero: the roofs of warehouses and big-box stores. The idea has taken off elsewhere; in Germany, where solar installations have proceeded at eight times the US rate, hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies now sell their excess electricity back to the power authority.

But here in the US, where public land can be rented for a song, it's more cost-effective for utilities to build a massive power plant out in the desert than hundreds of little ones atop privately owned roofs. And utilities usually aren't keen on the idea of buying electricity from their customers, says Bill Powers, a solar-energy expert in San Diego. "Utilities make money off power plants; they'd lose money if big-box stores started making their power on the roof," he says. To wit, the New Mexico utility PNM waged an unsucessful battle in 2009 to prevent residents and businesses from installing rooftop panels and selling the electricity they didn't need back into the grid. The same year, Xcel Energy fought and lost a similar battle in Colorado.
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Will Big Solar Bulldoze Sacred Tribal Sites?

Alfredo Figueroa, an elder in the Chemehuevi tribe, has spent all of his 77 years in the Sonoran Desert town of Blythe, next to the Colorado River in southeastern California. But now, he's worried burial grounds and giant etchings in the earth that are sacred to his people could soon be replaced by giant solar panels. It's part of the unprecedented expansion of solar power into California's deserts, a key piece of President Obama's push to make energy production 80 percent "clean" by 2035. Late last year, Figueroa filed suit to stop the 7,000-acre solar plant being built outside his hometown, along with five others approved for public lands.

The litigation was the latest in a series of lawsuits protesting the federal government's expedited cultural and environmental review of solar project sites. It contends that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in a rush to qualify projects for Obama's stimulus fund deadline (since extended to the end of this year), failed to adequately consult with tribes and properly identify at-risk ecosystems and sacred lands to avoid. A self-taught historian, Figueroa believes that the sands and hills outside Blythe are especially sacred: After reading a book his uncle gave him half a century ago, he became convinced that the fabled Aztec ancestral lands of Aztlán sat there.

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A study last year by the California Energy Commission (PDF), which grants permits to large-scale solar plants, found 17,000 cultural sites—not all indigenous—in the southern California desert that "will potentially be destroyed" by past, present, and future construction of various sorts. (That number is probably larger today, the CEC says.) BLM archeologist Rolla Queen defends the government's review process, but admits that the dozens of solar proposals and projects in the desert region are "a little overwhelming." Not since the days of the major dam-building projects of the 1920s and '30s has the country seen public-land construction on this scale, he says. It shows: Overstressed government workers scramble to review new proposals while continuing to monitor sensitive areas at approved sites. Environmental groups are even more strapped for resources, and tribes often don't have any legal staff at all.MORE