![]() ![]() Every single solar plant slated for the California Mojave since 2008 has been hit with some kind of lawsuit.īut in the Sonoran Desert around and about Gila Bend, none of that seems to matter there's no risk here of killing tortoises, destroying viewsheds or drying up critical seeps. Conservationist locals have gone to battle against national environmental leaders pushing Big Solar Native American leaders have sued green entrepreneurs for disturbing sacred sites and relics. I had spent years covering California's Mojave, where gigantic solar farms on public lands have biologists worried about lost habitat, depleted groundwater, even the desert's precious crust, a soil so packed with mysteries that scientists call it "cryptobiotic" - the soil of hidden life. ![]() I had come to this outpost in eastern Maricopa County, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, because so many people had told me it was a rational place to put utility-scale solar projects. But in all of human existence, it will never, ever run out of sun: Parts of southwestern Arizona rival the high Mojave in what engineers call "insolation" (short for INcoming SOlar radiATION). Plus, southwestern Arizona is running out of groundwater cones of depression have formed where agriculture has pumped too much for too long. Army Corps of Engineers declared the reservoir behind Painted Rock Dam just west of town a health hazard and banned humans from its waters.Ĭotton remains a mainstay of the local economy, but a faltering one, vulnerable to price fluctuations and competition with other countries' exports. ![]() The bollworm mutated and stayed the DDT left the Gila River so poisoned that the U.S. In the 1950s, the pink bollworm arrived in the region's cotton fields, and federal authorities fought it with clouds of DDT. ![]() (England's Prince Harry trained on the field last year, and was warned by Mayor Ron Henry to refrain from "fornicating" with local girls.) Indeed, Gila Bend's last true revival happened in 1942, when the Gila Bend Auxiliary Air Field became a training hub for troops headed to desert battlefields, and the town's population grew 300 percent - to nearly 2,000. Hazardous waste incinerators have come and gone and left behind their poisons smoky gas-fired power plants chug pollutants into the air. I was the only one on the street to observe them.Īlmost since the Hohokam people all but disappeared from here some 600 years ago, Gila Bend has been a sacrifice zone, a place where any activity, no matter how destructive, toxic or fleeting, has been welcome. A dark-haired teenage girl and her Brylcreemed boyfriend sprawled in a languorous make-out session on the patch of lawn outside the Best Western, secure in their privacy. On the two-mile stretch between Love's gaudy gas station and the weird flying saucer hovering over the Best Western Space Age Lodge, I counted 11 battered and boarded-up buildings, including a laundromat, a convenience store and a motel, renovated in 2003 in anticipation of a housing boom that never happened - another wave of renewal that dissipated a few miles short of Gila Bend. Here in the Arizona Sonoran, it was a spectacular day: Clear and crisp, with a warm wind stripping clouds from the sky.Īnd still the town itself looked dismal and sad. And valleys in the Colorado Desert - the California portion of the Sonoran - turned gold with the blooms of long-dormant plants. It had been an unusual spring in the Southwestern deserts abundant late-season rains spread carpets of green across rocky hillsides in the Mojave Desert, which spans much of southern California and Nevada as well as nibbles of Utah and Arizona. One afternoon last April, I took a walk down Pima Street, the main drag that runs through Gila Bend, Ariz., linking the state highway from Phoenix with Interstate 8 to Yuma and beyond. Planned and operating solar projects in Gila Bend, Arizona California clean energy rules may impede imports from rest of WestĬhoosing between solar and soil in California ![]()
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