Joshua's Trumpet

Sounding the Alarm on Astroturfed Environmentalism

Photo by Cedric Letsch on Unsplash

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot” — Joni Mitchell

In the Beginning

The Joshua tree is an iconic avatar of the Desert Southwest. Found nowhere else on earth, these strange denizens of the Mojave unfurl their gnarly branches, twining and twisting toward the open sky. Their contorted geometries dot the landscape for miles, unobstructed and stark against the scrubby chaparral. Seeming to exist outside of time itself, the Joshuas offer a glimpse into the primordial past.

Technically a type of succulent (Yucca brevifolia), the Joshua tree’s elusive and mysterious nature captured the imagination of indigenous tribes and colonial settlers alike. Mormons navigating through the wilderness in the 19th century thought the spiny branches resembled an old man stretching his arms out to the heavens to pray, and named the trees after the Old Testament prophet Joshua.

The biblical Joshua was successor to Moses, leading the Israelites to victory over the idolatrous and fallen land of Canaan. When Joshua blew the trumpet at Jericho, the walls of the wicked city came tumbling down, in fulfillment of God’s prophesy. Today, as its name divined, the Joshua tree is fit to fight a new battle against vainglorious fetish: the encroachment of solar farms onto its sacred territory.

On High Alert

Last week, a little-known conservation group called Basin and Range Watch went viral in energy and environmental circles on Twitter (now X), drawing attention to the imminent plight of the Joshua trees in the following post:

4,200 Joshua trees are scheduled to be removed are [sic.] replaced by solar panels for the Aratina Solar Project near Boron, CA in June of this year. They will not be salvaged but funds based on the size of the tree will be placed in a mitigation bank

According to its Draft Environmental Impact Report, The Aratina site sits on 2,317 acres of privately owned land in the high desert of eastern unincorporated Kern County. Project plans include the installation of 530 MW of solar PV modules, and an energy storage facility providing capacity of up to 600 MWh for the electrical grid. Located in the Antelope Valley on the western edge of the Mojave, the topography is elevated and mostly flat, and therefore highly suitable for utility-scale solar.

Aratina Solar Project location site

However, the project comes at the inevitable cost of habitat destruction, including the removal of not only Joshua trees, but also ground-cover desert brush (mainly creosote bush) and animals such as tortoises, lizards, birds, and small rodents. As shown in the graphic below, the project areas are densely populated with Joshua trees. Particularly alarming is the high concentration of mature plants (dark blue dots). Western Joshuas grow and mature very slowly, taking around 30 years to reach reproductive age, and they can live up to 200 years (or more, in rare instances). Destroying primarily older, established trees has an outsized effect on the species’ ability to reproduce, as these are the only plants capable of seeding.

Joshua tree density on proposed Aratina site

Lies by Omission

Like many renewables projects in California, Aratina Solar, developed by Avantus (formerly 8-Minute Solar), largely avoided public scrutiny throughout the contract negotiation and scoping processes. The agreement was overseen by Central Coast Community Energy, a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA). Although residents initially complained about the plans, voicing concerns about impacts to the environment and local economy, the Kern County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the solar farm in October 2021. Since then, outside of local media with limited distribution, there has been no major news coverage of Aratina or the developer’s intention to mow down the treasure of the Mojave. The San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, and San Diego Union-Tribune search engines deliver zero hits for Aratina or Avantus (other than classified ads).

The L.A. Times’ environment columnist Sammy Roth mentioned Avantus in an ode to building renewables on public lands , praising the company’s habitat restoration projects — a classic PR deflection technique that should have raised skepticism and prodded further investigation. As Mr. Roth accurately reported, Avantus purchased 215,000 acres of grazing rights in Kern County from the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in order to retire those rights and restore the natural Mojave ecosystem, including desert tortoises, burrowing owls, ground squirrels, and…Joshua trees. What the Times apparently did not bother to find out was that this land acquisition serves (at least in part) as the mitigation bank that will be used to offset the destruction of the 4,200 Joshua trees on the Aratina solar site. For those unfamiliar with the mitigation bank concept, it is a variation on the carbon offset program, where, according to Investopedia “ecological loss…is compensated by the preservation and restoration of wetlands, natural habitats, and streams in other areas.” These plans are blatantly stated on Arantina’s website:

One novel mitigation approach is the Onyx Conservation Project, which Avantus created in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). In Eastern Kern County, Onyx permanently protects 215,000 acres of critical California habitat - home to 20 sensitive wildlife species, including the Mojave desert tortoise and Mohave ground squirrel, as well as an estimated 80,000 acres of western Joshua Tree habitat.

An Unholy Alliance

While Avantus was scoping and siting Aratina’s arrays, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) was busy denying environmental protection for Joshua trees. For several years, conservation groups had lobbied to get Y. brevifolia registered under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, pointing out the plant’s unique habitat requirements and its sensitivity to even small changes in climate. Indeed, academic researchers have found evidence for declining population trends of Joshua trees in certain terrains. For example, data collected by Harrower and Gilbert (2018) showed that the “range of Joshua trees is contracting at the lower elevations…as the hot, dry conditions extend upward, future generations of trees may only thrive at cooler, higher elevations.” A modeling study by Sweet et al. (2019), similarly predicted a severe retreat of Joshua trees from the lower elevations based on increased drought conditions under various climate change scenarios. These threats, according to advocate groups such as WildEarth Guardians, warranted a deep assessment of the species’ resiliency and survivability.

A preliminary review by USFWS in 2021 refused to grant endangered status to the Joshua tree, claiming it did not meet the legal definition of a species likely to become extinct within the foreseeable future. Federal District Judge Otis Wright III disagreed, calling the refusal “arbitrary and capricious,” and chastising the agency for neglecting to review key research. The judge ruled that a new decision be submitted within 12 months. However, the second review came to the same conclusion. A press release by USFWS issued in March 2023 stated that:

Projecting the primary threats into the foreseeable future, we can more reliably predict impacts and the species’ response to 2040-2069. We find that Joshua trees display enough resiliency, redundancy, and representation to not be at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future.

As the review only focused on resiliency to climate, a notable omission still stands in the agency’s failure to model the Joshua tree’s ability to simultaneously withstand an increased preponderance of infrastructure development projects on their natural habitats, such as utility solar.

Following the USFWS decision, California state legislature enacted the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act, going into effect in July 2023. The law “prohibits the importation, export, take, possession, purchase, or sale of any western Joshua tree in California unless authorized by CDFW.” That last item is key: the state allows the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (in conjunction with USFWS), to permit impacts to Joshua trees if submitted as part of a mitigation strategy on behalf of planned infrastructure projects, and upon collection of fees to be placed into a mitigation bank. In other words, wealthy developers can buy an indulgence for the CDFW to look the other way.

It is likewise noteworthy that supposed environmental NGOs are fully onboard the bandwagon to build utility solar on virgin desert, without so much as acknowledging the apparent contradiction to their original missions of conservation. In a letter to BLM submitted by a coalition of advocacy groups (NRDC, Audubon, The Wilderness Society) and for-profit energy companies (EDF Renewables, Intersect Power, Longroad Energy), the unholy alliance of signatories urged the agency to hasten the construction of solar projects on federal lands (which inevitably comes at the cost of performing due diligence and thorough environmental impact studies).

Of course when any of the aforementioned government agencies or NGOs are asked for their reasoning in declining to advocate or intervene on behalf of the Joshuas (or any other species standing in the way of “progress”), their answers default to boilerplate statements on “climate change.” Warming temperatures necessitates burning less (or ideally no) fossil fuels, and the only solution is to build as much wind and solar as humanly possible at breakneck speed (never mind the habitat decimation or leaching of toxic metals). As I have previously reported, many NGOs are openly hostile to nuclear (perhaps because fission truly does provide an escape from business as usual). Meanwhile, corporate developers laugh all the way to the bank, making no attempt to hide their plans to bulldoze entire ecosystems. To wit, Avantus proudly posts this gem on their Aratina FAQs site:

Avantus is working to preserve native Mojave plants like Joshua Trees while also preserving California’s ability to achieve its clean energy goals – and the economic and climate benefits that come with them. While trees will be impacted during project construction, vastly more Joshua Trees are being threatened by climate change caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions, which the Aratina solar project directly addresses.

Reading this, the phrase “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” comes to mind.

More concerning, Avantus baldly acknowledges in their impact report that the cumulative effects of their solar projects plus other renewables projects in the area would be “significant and unavoidable” on measures such as biological resources, hazardous materials waste, and increased wildfire risk. Given the state’s intention to build 19GW of new solar by 2035, and given the ideal conditions of the Mojave for solar generation, it is not unreasonable to suspect these cumulative impacts may indeed come to fruition. Why isn’t the NRDC or Audubon Society talking about that?

The Trumpet Shall Sound

If the sordid details of California’s failure to protect its much loved and prized Joshua trees tell you one thing, it’s that today’s environmental public policy, media coverage, and many “grassroots” organizations have been astroturfed by Big Green. Now, with the fate of more than 4,000 Joshua trees signed, sealed, and nearly delivered, it is time for some soul searching. If not, a day of reckoning will surely come, when the guilty parties will look upon a sea of solar panels slowly rusting in the desert, and all they will see is their empty suits, reflected back at them.

Electrically yours,

K.T.