Some greens keep watch for a wolf wearing wool: Big Green

There is a place in Central California that calls itself the Middle Kingdom. It features unscarred mountains, pristine beaches, green and golden hills–some of the best terrain California can conjure. When William Randolph Hearst was looking for a quiet place to build a castle, that’s where he went. And the same has been true of energy companies.
The feisty locals have battled offshore-oil derricks for years, repeatedly sending oil executives and their federal friends away in tar and feathers. They lost a brutal battle to PG&E when it built the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, but they’ve made the utility rue the day it stepped across the county line. Now San Luis Obispo County’s sun-baked eastern plains, zippered by the San Andreas Fault, are eyed for vast arrays of solar panels.
But isn’t solar power Earth-friendly?
The Don Quixote of this La Mancha is Pat Veesart, who tilts at windmills as an enforcement officer for the California Coastal Commission, but also takes a longer view at the larger problem as an indefatigable activist. Last August, in the Santa Barbara Independent, he warned of threats to habitat from friendly-sounding enterprises in solar and wind:
The same corporate mindset that brought us Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Auto, and Big Water and Power is now at work to bring us “Big Green.”
Faced with growing public concern about climate change, the proponents of “Big” are swathing themselves in green to seize a golden opportunity. The rush is on to convert rural lands and already fragmented wildlife habitat into bio-fuel production and industrial solar and wind power plants. Big Industry is manipulating the political system to receive government subsidies to develop hydrogen fuel cells, mega-solar, and other so-called new technologies that lend themselves to centralized production and big profits.
While starry-eyed environmentalists ooh and ahh over wind and solar, Big Green is taking advantage of their naiveté to cover the hills and valleys of the Golden State with big new power plants. The problem with “big” is that living large is what got us into this mess.
Since then, Veesart said by email Sunday, nothing has changed. “I’m sure that my little piece on ‘Big Green’ had no effect whatsoever, though it was one of the first pieces in print that questioned the blind rush to large-scale solar and wind. Now, there is a growing chorus of concern about large-scale solar and wind.”
Got a better idea? He does:
I would like to see us 1) reduce our energy needs and; 2) tap out distributed generation opportunities (roof-top and parking lot solar in urban areas) before we talk about large-scale solar. In any event, large-scale solar should not be located on sensitive habitat (especially the Carrizo, dammit!), and areas that have already been highly disturbed should be looked at first.
Veesart lives on the Carrizo Plain, home to the Carrizo Plain National Monument, the last vast tract of prairie in California, where the deer and the antelope roam. Three solar projects proposed for the plain would cover 18 square miles.