Greeny News

presence of sea and desert horned toads maintain production at several million dollars in the sites of California

Among the many projects commissioned by the Obama administration to show its commitment to renewable energy, few are as impressive as futuristic solar projects of billions of dollars in construction with large bands desert on the border between California and Arizona.

But at least two developments, including $ 1 billion, 250 MW of solar Genesis Blythe near the Colorado River Valley below and the site of the Millennium Project are subject to long delays in construction, while others face legal challenges by environmental groups and Native Americans who fear damage to the ecology of the desert, and ancient rock art and other heritage sites sacred.

output on the stone floor of the desert, the Native Americans say, are places of special spiritual, especially those related to the flat-tailed horned toad and the desert tortoise.

"This is where the Horny Toad lives," said Alfredo Figueroa, a little man, full of energy and a solitary figure in the opposition that could have emerged from the pages of a novel Carlos Castaneda pointing to several small terriers. Figueroa is several hundred meters on the site of Solar Millennium, a project supported by the Foundation, based in Cologne Solar AG. The company, which has solar projects stretching from Israel to the United States, last month placed in the hands of the Germans and their asset managers listed for deletion.

Figueroa is delighted with the news. "Of all the creatures, the Horny Toad is most sacred to us because it is the center of the Aztec solar calendar," he said. "And as the turtle, representing Mother Earth. They can not survive here if developers of ground level, because they need to dig into the hills."

Figueroa, 78, a Chemehuevi Indian and historian at La Cuna de Aztlan Sacred Sites Protection Circle, has become one of the biggest criticisms of the solar energy program and expresses some exceptional claims bold on the importance of this valley is said to be the cradle of the Aztec and Mayan systems of belief. Takes note of the representations of a frog and a turtle in a facsimile of the Codex Borgia, one of a handful of divinatory manuscripts written before the Spanish conquest.

In a study of 2,400 points in Figueroa hectares geoglyph a giant, land, says the size is Kokopelli, a fertility god often depicted as a humpbacked flute player with the antenna as bumps on head. Kokopelli, he said, will certainly be affected if development resumes here.

The area is known for the giant geoglyphs, which is considered by some dating back 10,000 years. Pointing to the mountains, but also describes Cihuacoatl - a pregnant woman the snake - that is captured in rock formations. All that said, this is equivalent to know why the government was quick to solar energy programs in the Valley, where temperatures reach 54 ° C, should be abandoned. This is a question of your own survival.

"We are a traditional village, the people of the cosmic tradition," says Figueroa. "Europeans arrived and made many of us They tried to destroy us, but they don ' were not able to destroy our traditions, and is due to our traditions and mythology that we were able to survive if I had mixed with the wasps ... - The White Anglo-Saxon Protestant -. we have long lost "

The Genesis solar plant, 20 kilometers to the west, Florida-based NextEra began to develop a site of 810 hectares. The brackets that hold the mirrors that reflect standing like sentinels. Supported by a department of $ 825 million loan for energy, Solar Genesis is considered essential to the administration program of renewable energy, with a production capacity sufficient to power 187,500 homes.

BrightSource, Ivanpah operator, said the allegations that hundreds of square miles of flat desert scraped, destruction of sensitive habitats, are exaggerated. The company estimates that if all the 11 institutions approved by the California Energy Commission are constructed, which would cover only 66 square kilometers, 0.26% of 25,000 square miles of the Mojave Desert.
The company says it spent $ 22 million to help desert tortoises in the breeding programs, fences, and sometimes 100 biologists employed to patrol the site. In addition, BrightSource plans to spend up to $ 34 million to meet the obligations of the state and federal mitigation. Turtles are not short of attention: an earlier survey found that 17 throughout the site