People PLEASE read this and SPREAD THE WORD! Only a small group of people seem to know what is going on in the Mojave Desert as I write this. A massive LAND RAPE. All in the name of "go-green" which in this case is the rhetoric of sustainability being used in a twisted way. 5-10% of the species of the Mojave Desert flora and fauna remain un-discovered and un-named.
The Ivanpah Valley, California Spirit Run - to raise awareness for this beautiful area of the Mojave Desert located near the California-Nevada stateline....and where the world's largest solar facility is currently being installed, with drastic, horrific implications for the future of the desert and its many inhabitants. Plants, animals, geologic and archaeological-cultural features, many which are not yet fully understood.
http://vimeo.com/16014476
Watch this video:
http://thesunrunner.ning.com/video/shocking-projection-of-mass
Interview with ecologist Jim Andre, Director, Granite Mountains Desert Research Center at University of California. If he seems in shock...well, he is. This has all come down so quickly, so sneakily, and so drastically that none of us involved in desert protection quite knows what to do.
This very precious region is not only barely being understood, but as a desert that attracts millions of visitors yearly from around the world for its fragility, intensity, and wisdom, not to mention beauty and allure....it is being grabbed in what is being termed by desert conservationists as the ugliest, biggest land-grab and archaeological and biological eco-destruction our country has seen since the Gold Rush in the Sierras in the 1800's.
This is NOT good and in fact is pure evil. There is no reason these massive solar and wind plants cannot be placed on land that is already "gone" or on farms anywhere in the western U.S. that are laying fallow.
The Mojave Desert is largely YOUR land. Public land. BLM land, there for all of us to use and enjoy. The BLM has made, and continues to make, dirty deals for minor ducats with corporate robber-barns, on land it is supposed to protect for generations to come. Why can't the corporations barter deals for windmill and solar - which still uses oil and gas and water for production - with private landowners?
Read this article, which I found on a private blog: it's by an environmental writer who really outlines the evils, comparing the solar-wind land grab on the California desert to the fights of the 1950's and 60's to protect Yosemite and nearby Sierra valleys from development of dams.
http://palimpsest.typepad.com/frogsandravens/2010/10/hetch-hetchy-and-glenn-canyon-all-over-again.html
The desert is my home. This hurts. It's unnecessary. Solar and wind CAN be done right. The sickening destruction of stands of virgin, old-growth Joshua trees, which are already endangered, by bulldozers -- to build the world's largest solar plant - is an irreversible decision that will ruin what can never be replaced.
Pass the word along. Let people know. GET INVOLVED. Maybe we can...change this world.
The California Desert...is YOUR backyard.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Live Desert Poetry Reading, Guerrilla Reads Magazine + Phantom Seed @ P & W Online
This is a very cool online literary journal....Guerrilla Reads....based in L.A. and extending to the California Desert
MOJAVE DESERT POETRY: live reading by Ruth @ Guerrilla Reads Online Literary Magazine....you'll have to copy/past the URL to your browser...I'm still trying to figure out how to enliven links here on my page.
http://guerrillareads.com/
Issue 15, October 19, 2010
if you don't see it on the homepage, go to the Issue 15, Oct 19 archives.
Please also view some of the other videos on the Guerrilla Reads website, especially the one just before mine, issue 14, October 12, 2010 - featuring the stellar poet-activist-humanist Juan Felipe Herrera, my friend and a huge inspiration, in a collaborative reading his great poem, Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070), in protest the passage of SB 1070. Just scroll down from where you see my humble little video.
And: check out the Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert poetry and prose listing at Poets & Writers Magazine....I think it looks great! Issue 4 is now out. Cover photograph taken at Rock Chapel, near Christ Church Park in Yucca Valley, CA - the cross is cut=out into the bricks of the artistically-designed, small chapel. I spent a day in there a few years back, meditating and praying, desert light filtering in through the open crosses, Joshua trees and Jesus-statues in the background.
http://www.pw.org/content/phantom_seed_magazine
submissions accepted year 'round. Email to runolan@aol.com along with writer's bio.
MOJAVE DESERT POETRY: live reading by Ruth @ Guerrilla Reads Online Literary Magazine....you'll have to copy/past the URL to your browser...I'm still trying to figure out how to enliven links here on my page.
http://guerrillareads.com/
Issue 15, October 19, 2010
if you don't see it on the homepage, go to the Issue 15, Oct 19 archives.
Please also view some of the other videos on the Guerrilla Reads website, especially the one just before mine, issue 14, October 12, 2010 - featuring the stellar poet-activist-humanist Juan Felipe Herrera, my friend and a huge inspiration, in a collaborative reading his great poem, Arizona Green (Manifesto #1070), in protest the passage of SB 1070. Just scroll down from where you see my humble little video.
And: check out the Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert poetry and prose listing at Poets & Writers Magazine....I think it looks great! Issue 4 is now out. Cover photograph taken at Rock Chapel, near Christ Church Park in Yucca Valley, CA - the cross is cut=out into the bricks of the artistically-designed, small chapel. I spent a day in there a few years back, meditating and praying, desert light filtering in through the open crosses, Joshua trees and Jesus-statues in the background.
http://www.pw.org/content/phantom_seed_magazine
submissions accepted year 'round. Email to runolan@aol.com along with writer's bio.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Sign Petition to Stop Big Solar/Windmill in the California Desert
Help! Sign the petition to stop the "Gold Rush Mentality" desecration of the Colorado River Indian Intaglios, a sacred and important archaeological site located in the California Desert near Blythe, California -
http://www.petitiononline.com/savekoko/petition.html
Then, PLEASE pass this petition along to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS, online and otherwise!! TIME IS PASSING QUICKLY - the Gold Rush is raging, the big utility companies are sealing-the-deals-with-the-state, and other, massive solar-windmill facilties are lined up to scrape and destroy the face in ugly, unwanted surgeries already scheduled to be knifed across vast tracts of the Mojave and other California deserts!!!
To be blunt: we need to act NOW!
Why is the big-solar-faciilty-in-the-desert-thing such a big deal?
There are so many things wrong with this picture - including the fact that these solar facilities take up mega-water.....as most of you know, water availability is a MAJOR problem throughout the desert, and the southwest. Not to mention that the CA desert, second in biodiversity of life - including the beloved icons of our region, the endangered Desert Tortoise and the Joshua Tree - stand to take another horrid ecologic hit & run that they may not recover from. Not to mention...who stands to profit in this LAND AND CULTURE RAPE? The big corporations - PG & E....Edison....not us, folks! Not the defenseless desert or its myriad, magical forms of animal and plant and geologic life.....
WE CAN AND MUST DO THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! Do you like the Grand Canyon? Who doesn't? Did you know that...back in the 60's, grassroots activists + the Sierra Club got together and managed to stop plans to install a series of dams in the Grand Canyon - yes, that's right, and one dam site even got drilled - and preserve this ancient and abiding place of magic and beauty for generations to come.
We, on facebook, can do this, too. We have the Internet at our fingertips, so please help those of us in the California Desert who are trying to pass the word along before it is too late!!!
Feel free to sign or not - but at least, before you make up your mind, take a moment to learn just a little bit about what is at stake with the massive solar-windmill-corporate-land grab, and what's going down faster than a "speeding bullet" in our Mojave Desert. Just so you are informed.
To learn more about the Intaglios, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
ACT NOW!! The California Energy Commission has already approved legislation that allows for construction - desecration - to begin at the Blythe Intalgio Site, as well as at Ivanpah, CA - the latter is planned to be the largest solar panel facility in the world and will destroy thousands of untouched acres of our sacred and necessary California Desert.
After you sign this petition, please visit the following site for information on the pending Ivanpah, CA (located near the stateline between California-Nevada) solar installation.
Information at Ivanpah, CA solar facility - note that "PG & E" and other utility conglomerates are jumping on the "investment" bandwagon...
http://sunpluggers.com/news/as-decisions-near-on-more-solar-power-plants-opponents-urge-alternatives-01020
http://californiasolarinstallation.com/archives/tag/brightsource
THERE IS AN EXCELLENT GROUP CALLED
SOLAR DONE RIGHT
who are working feverishly to put a stop to the Gold Rush on public desert lands. Contact them for more information.
http://solardoneright.org/
I plan to visit the Blythe Intaglio site very soon, within the next two weeks, and speak directly with a Colorado River area Native American elder who is intimately familiar with the stories behind the Intaglios, and learn more, which I will share with you on this blog as the stories unfold. I will also take more pictures and post on my blog soon. Keep the Faith!
Thank You!
Ruth Nolan
Mojave Desert Native.....and advocate
editor, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009)
http://www.petitiononline.com/savekoko/petition.html
Then, PLEASE pass this petition along to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS, online and otherwise!! TIME IS PASSING QUICKLY - the Gold Rush is raging, the big utility companies are sealing-the-deals-with-the-state, and other, massive solar-windmill facilties are lined up to scrape and destroy the face in ugly, unwanted surgeries already scheduled to be knifed across vast tracts of the Mojave and other California deserts!!!
To be blunt: we need to act NOW!
Why is the big-solar-faciilty-in-the-desert-thing such a big deal?
There are so many things wrong with this picture - including the fact that these solar facilities take up mega-water.....as most of you know, water availability is a MAJOR problem throughout the desert, and the southwest. Not to mention that the CA desert, second in biodiversity of life - including the beloved icons of our region, the endangered Desert Tortoise and the Joshua Tree - stand to take another horrid ecologic hit & run that they may not recover from. Not to mention...who stands to profit in this LAND AND CULTURE RAPE? The big corporations - PG & E....Edison....not us, folks! Not the defenseless desert or its myriad, magical forms of animal and plant and geologic life.....
WE CAN AND MUST DO THIS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!! Do you like the Grand Canyon? Who doesn't? Did you know that...back in the 60's, grassroots activists + the Sierra Club got together and managed to stop plans to install a series of dams in the Grand Canyon - yes, that's right, and one dam site even got drilled - and preserve this ancient and abiding place of magic and beauty for generations to come.
We, on facebook, can do this, too. We have the Internet at our fingertips, so please help those of us in the California Desert who are trying to pass the word along before it is too late!!!
Feel free to sign or not - but at least, before you make up your mind, take a moment to learn just a little bit about what is at stake with the massive solar-windmill-corporate-land grab, and what's going down faster than a "speeding bullet" in our Mojave Desert. Just so you are informed.
To learn more about the Intaglios, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Intaglios
ACT NOW!! The California Energy Commission has already approved legislation that allows for construction - desecration - to begin at the Blythe Intalgio Site, as well as at Ivanpah, CA - the latter is planned to be the largest solar panel facility in the world and will destroy thousands of untouched acres of our sacred and necessary California Desert.
After you sign this petition, please visit the following site for information on the pending Ivanpah, CA (located near the stateline between California-Nevada) solar installation.
Information at Ivanpah, CA solar facility - note that "PG & E" and other utility conglomerates are jumping on the "investment" bandwagon...
http://sunpluggers.com/news/as-decisions-near-on-more-solar-power-plants-opponents-urge-alternatives-01020
http://californiasolarinstallation.com/archives/tag/brightsource
THERE IS AN EXCELLENT GROUP CALLED
SOLAR DONE RIGHT
who are working feverishly to put a stop to the Gold Rush on public desert lands. Contact them for more information.
http://solardoneright.org/
I plan to visit the Blythe Intaglio site very soon, within the next two weeks, and speak directly with a Colorado River area Native American elder who is intimately familiar with the stories behind the Intaglios, and learn more, which I will share with you on this blog as the stories unfold. I will also take more pictures and post on my blog soon. Keep the Faith!
Thank You!
Ruth Nolan
Mojave Desert Native.....and advocate
editor, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts (Heyday Books, 2009)
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