LAS VEGAS— In response to a petition and lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental and faith-based groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that a population of the greater sage grouse found in the Mono Basin of California and Nevada warrants protection under the Endangered Species Act, but that such protection is precluded due to lack of resources.

“Continued delay of protection for the Mono Basin population of sage grouse is a recipe for extinction,” said Rob Mrowka, an ecologist at the Center. “To date, the Obama administration has not improved on the Bush administration’s progress in providing protection to the nation’s most endangered species.”

During his eight-year tenure, Bush protected a mere 62 species, for a rate of fewer than eight species per year. This compares to 522 protected under Clinton, or 65 species per year, and 231 species protected under George H.W. Bush, or 58 species per year. With only two species listed so far, the Obama administration appears to have flatlined on listing. Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service can only delay protection of species if it is making expeditious progress listing other species considered a higher priority for listing.

“Delaying protection for Mono Basin sage grouse is clearly illegal and irresponsible,” said Mrowka.

The Mono Basin area population of sage grouse is the southwestern-most population of the greater sage grouse and is geographically isolated from other sage grouse populations. It is found in Storey, Carson, Douglas, Mineral, and Esmeralda counties in Nevada and in Mono, Alpine, and Inyo counties in California. “Because the Mono Basin population of sage grouse exists at the periphery of the sage grouse range and is genetically unique, it contains characteristics that may well be critically important to the survival of the species as a whole, particularly in light of climate change,” said Mrowka.

Primary threats to Mono Basin sage grouse include degradation of habitat by livestock grazing and invasive noxious weeds, fragmentation of habitat caused by development, roads and transmission lines, ORV use, drought, and loss of sagebrush due to the encroachment of junipers. Sage grouse are also still hunted in Nevada and California. Populations have declined up to 70 percent.

Like other sage grouse, Mono Basin sage grouse are noted for their elaborate spring courtship rituals and displays. Males and females gather on traditional display areas called leks. Males strut, fan their tail feathers, and produce a haunting sound from air sacs located on the sides of their necks to attract willing females. An average of six to seven eggs are laid and incubated for around 30 days.

The Program would have been the first of its kind for a rural county in the US, and would have positioned Imperial County to tap into millions of dollars in public money for energy efficiency retrofits.

Millions of Federal dollars are poised to fund the construction of gigantic “renewable” industrial energy facilities in our fragile deserts, including those in Imperial County. Those tax dollars should be going to reduce our energy consumption! Retrofitting existing buildings has a lower environmental cost than building new facilities, and creates more long-term jobs with transferrable skills.

Please join IBEW Local 569 and other community partners for a Solidarity Rally to hold Imperial County Supervisors accountable for rejecting green energy efficiency jobs and stimulus funding that would have put local people to work and reduced polluting greenhouse gases!

WHO: Hold Imperial County Supervisors accountable for rejecting green jobs and stimulus funding for local working people.

WHAT: Solidarity Rally at “State of the County” address delivered by County Board of Supervisor President Louis Fuentes

WHEN: Wednesday, February 24th at 6:15. The event starts at 7:00.

WHERE: Rodney Auditorium, SDSU Calexico campus. We will meet outside of the auditorium. For directions to the campus, please click HERE.

RSVP: Contact Micah Mitrosky at mmitrosky@ibew569.org or 619-957-2596.

Please pass this alert along to family, friends and community members so we can have as strong a turnout as possible!

re: Ivanpah SEGS Public Comment Thursday, February 11, 2010
To Whom It May Concern:

Of other public comments arriving with regard to the proposed Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station south of Primm, NV, I am confident many will address the abundant technical, hydrological, and wildlife-related problems contained in the proposal to bulldoze a broad swath of publicly owned ancient desert habitat for private industrial development. It is on these details that projects such as the Ivanpah SEGS are either approved or denied, and I am grateful that others can speak to those details more authoritatively than I.

What I can address with confidence and authority, however, is the fact that the Brightsource project threatens one of the most beautiful places in the United States. True, that beauty may not be apparent to the casual traveler on I-15 speeding through the desert with the airconditioning cranked up as they peer through tinted safety glass. It takes a few moments of quiet for the Ivanpah Valley’s beauty to sink in fully.

I lived in the Ivanpah Valley for much of 2008. I have been spending time there and in neighboring places in the desert for much of my life. The Ivanpah Valley is not wilderness, at least not that part of it outside the Preserve. There are many visible human intrusions there. Freight trains roar through the valley sounding loud horns, engines on both ends straining to build up momentum for the long climb to Cima. Off I-15 there is traffic on Nipton Road, long-haul truckers heading for Searchlight, vacationers in RVs and motorcycles heading for the Colorado River. One can in fact hear them from several miles away. They approach. They grow louder. They pass. The noise recedes.

And then the noise ebbs, and the cricket song swells, and the coyotes’ song, the breeze, the sound of blood in your veins. In the south end of the Ivanpah Valley, at least, human influence is limited and inconstant. From the Mojave National Preserve even Interstate 15 recedes in significance, becoming not much more than a pretty string of far head- and taillights in the distance, and that only at night. The sere backdrop of Clark Mountain, the McCulloghs and Lucy Grays in the east, and the protected peaks of the New York and Ivanpah mountain ranges contain between them a vast, largely wild piece of the Mojave. The Ivanpah Valley contains nearly all the Mojave’s landscapes in its boundaries — alkali flat, old-growth creosote and ancient Mojave yucca, Joshua tree woodland, piñon-juniper forests on the slopes of the fringing ranges. There is even an alpine sky-island overlooking the Ivanpah Valley, white firs clinging to the higher slopes of Clark Mountain, directly above the project site. The Valley is the Mojave in microcosm.

Paving thousands of acres of the Ivanpah Valley with mirrors would utterly destroy the wild character of the place. It would be an encroachment on the peace of the Preserve and the lands around it, with the noise and dust of construction and the subsequent blinding glare of the completed facility an intrusion into a peace I have found nowhere else on earth.

Others will question the actual carbon reduction benefit provided by building this plant, and rightly so. They will question the validity of tortoise relocation and mitigation, the additional demand on the 12,000-year-old water in the Ivanpah Valley’s aquifer, the loss of Mojave milkweed habitat. These are all crucial questions that absolutely must be answered. Neither Brightsource nor Interior have done so.

The loss I want to question, however, is the loss of our soul.

Are we really so bereft of wisdom that we see this beleaguered but beautiful stretch of ancient desert as nothing more than a blank spot on a map? Are we really so callous that we can consider the improbably old creosote, Mojave yucca and barrel cacti on the Ivanpah site less valuable than leaving our closet lights on when the door is closed? Many of the plants growing there are older than this nation. Some may pre-date European presence on the continent. We may as well raze the Parthenon to build a strip mall, knock down Stonehenge for use as highway berms. There is something very wrong in us if we value this place not for its beauty but for its square footage. There is something broken in us if we look at the Ivanpah Valley and see not peace, but merely a way to increase our power and the profit we derive from it.

In 2008, just before sunset after a day of scattered small rainstorms, a friend and I got out of her car near the abandoned railroad siding known as “Ivanpah,” in the southern Ivanpah Valley well within the Preserve. We had a clear and unobstructed view of the whole valley there at the end of the paved section of Ivanpah Road. A desert tortoise stood at roadside. We’d stopped to make sure no passing cars hit her as she tried to cross but there were no passing cars, and she had no apparent intent to cross. Unperturbed by our presence, she fell asleep as we watched. A band of coyotes began singing somewhere off toward Morning Star Mine Road. It was hard not to feel very small. The valley held an immensity of space and of time as well, humbling both in the sense of personal insignificance it conveyed and in the realization of our frightening capacity to do unintended harm.

It was one of those moments I have found surprisingly common in the Ivanpah Valley, a place that though altered by human hands is still precious, still wild in essence, well worth being defended from further unnecessary and destructive change.

I urge you to halt this project.

Chris Clarke
Private citizen

Supervisors Mitzelfelt and Derry are planning to eliminate the staging portion of the off-road vehicle ordinance 3973 at a meeting of the San Bernardino Board of Supervisors in March. This would allow as many as 199 ORVs to gather on 2.5 acres for up to 6 days in a row without oversight resulting in excessive noise, dust, nuisance and trespass — no permits, no control!

Residents throughout the desert are planning a massive CALL IN DAY on Wednesday, February 10 to flood the supervisors’ phone lines with the message:

• Keep the ORV ordinance strong and effective.
• Do not eliminate the staging portion of the ordinance.
• Do not allow large, uncontrolled and unpermitted stagings of ORVs in our communities.
• Stop ORV trespass on our private and public lands.
• Stop harassment and intimidation by ORV riders.
• Protect our rural communities and the desert environment.
• Don’t place special interests above the needs of our communities.
• Defend our desert communities from ORV abuse!

Call Supervisor Brad Mitzelfelt at: (909) 387-4830

Call Supervisor Neil Derry at: (909) 387-4855

Be firm but respectful. Hundreds of phone calls will help convince the supervisors that we are prepared to defend our communities from ORV abuse!