Rachael Myrow here, host of the California Report, with an AM post from somewhere else in California. We're in this Golden State together. Right?
One person's desert is another person development site.
Or as then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said back in 2010, "There's some people that look out in the desert and they see miles and miles of emptiness. I see miles and miles of a gold mine."
Early this week, Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit over one massive solar project known as Calico. The press release on the NRDC's site says the plaintiffs failed 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." Namely, private agricultural lands nearby .
Instead, developers prefer roughly 4,000 acres in the Mojave Desert's Pisgah Valley. The thing is, tortoises live there, along with golden eagles, burrowing owls and the Mojave fringe-toed lizard. Yeah, you know with a name like that I had to do a YouTube search. This critter pumps and shimmies like a dancer in a Soul Train line.