he BLM has identified tracts of public land in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Oregon and California as high-priority areas for developing wind farms. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock)
August 28, 2024
By Andrew McKean
Imagine this scenario: You are tracking a wide and heavy mule deer buck over a low ridge somewhere in the sagebrush ocean of public land in eastern Oregon. The minute you crest the ridge, though, you are greeted not by the buck of your dreams within rifle range, but rather an industrial complex of high-tension power lines, chain-link fences and access roads. The buck has vanished into a labyrinth of modern machinery.
It’s not a gas field or a mine; it’s a solar farm, converting the abundant sunshine of the prairie into kilowatts. But to a public-land hunter, the effects of a shallow-gas well, a wind farm or a solar installation are the same. Each fragments habitat, introduces invasive weeds, promotes off-season travel and shatters the pristine experience that our remote American game lands can often produce.
Before you accuse me of being a progress-hating Luddite, let me explain myself. I applauded patriotically in 2017 when then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced that America’s public lands had contributed to making our country independent. I’m realistic enough to know that as long as I want a warm house, a capable pickup and energy to power my phone and computer, we’re going to have to drill, mine, burn and harness natural resources to produce energy. I’d much rather that energy came from America, where our resource-protecting regulations and income-distributing industries are far fairer and more sustainable than they are in most of the rest of the world.
But I’m also a Western public-land hunter who has spent decades recognizing the connection between intact habitat and good hunting. The more we carve up that habitat, whether for shopping malls or gas-well pads, the more we will displace the mule deer, pronghorn antelope and sage grouse that define some of our greatest days afield.
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PUBLIC-LAND PLANS A big displacement is being planned this year for our public lands, mainly Western ground administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM earlier this year released its plan to develop renewable energy on the millions of acres of lands it manages, and the scale of development might astonish you. Check out maps of both solar and wind development at the BLM’s website (BLM Utility-Scale Solar Energy Development and West-Wide Wind Mapping Project ).
No one who has been watching the Biden Administration’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gasses and confronting climate change should be surprised at this development. One of the tenets of green energy is that we have to develop alternatives to burning coal and methane somehow, and both wind and solar power are convenient options, especially in the sunny, windy West. But one of the details that has slowed America’s conversion to alternative energy is that we haven’t been very good at scaling-up solar or wind power, and given America’s insatiable appetite for energy, rooftop solar panels and backyard wind turbines aren’t going to make a difference.
To harness enough solar energy to make an appreciable impact on electricity usage, extensive arrays require large pieces of land. (Photo courtesy of Shutterstock) What will? Huge, industrial-scale solar farms and wind developments that are tied into our cross-country electric-transmission grid. Because these big complexes are expensive and difficult to build on private land, America’s public land is an attractive place to site them. Hence, the BLM’s energy plans.
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The incongruous part of this initiative is that many of the impacts of green-energy development are precisely the same as those of conventional-energy development. Both require industrial-scale infrastructure, with roads, power lines, solar panels and wind turbines replacing the drilling rigs, pipelines and compressor stations of gas and oil fields. But a mule deer doesn’t know the difference between a road bladed through its habitat to service a solar farm or a gas field. A sage grouse doesn’t care if the chick-eating hawk is perched on a power pole constructed to deliver power to an oil rig or to take it away from a wind turbine.
AREAS OF IMPACT The BLM has prioritized a total of about 870,000 acres for solar energy development. The biggest blocks of BLM land identified for proposed solar farms are in the Great Basin, specifically in southern Nevada centered on the town of Tonopah, and all across southern Utah’s Sevier Desert. Other concentrations of federal land that have the components of appropriate solar development, according to the BLM, include southeast New Mexico near Carlsbad, the Colorado-Utah borderland northeast of Monticello, Utah, and Wyoming’s Red Desert.
As for wind potential, the BLM has identified pretty much the entire state of Nevada as ripe for development. Other high-priority areas are the Snake River plain of southern Idaho, Colorado’s Animas River valley, southeast Oregon and much of southeast California’s lower Colorado River valley.
While looking at the feds’ green-energy map, your eye may be drawn to the big chunks of BLM land that have been identified as having the required components for development: sunny days, windy days, proximity to electrical transmission lines and few competing interests. But there are also plenty of smaller chunks of public land, those 10-section parcels that might be considered marginal by national energy prospectors but which have abundant potential for pronghorn hunting, provide traditional access for mule deer hunters, offer refuges for prairie grouse or contain a reach of riparian corridor where you can reliably find a prairie cottontail.
The impact on our natural heritage and hunting traditions are the same concerns that public-land hunters and conservationists have been communicating to federal land managers for the past 70 years as the BLM auctioned off public-land energy leases and identified what could be called “national sacrifice landscapes.” Those are the areas, from Wyoming’s Pinedale anticline to western Colorado’s methane fields, that we drilled to oblivion on our way to energy independence. While the means and methods of energy extraction may be different from one administration to the next, and as we develop new national priorities for domestic energy production, the impacts on our wildlife and public-land resources nevertheless are the same.
Let’s greet this new frontier of renewable energy generation the same way we’ve greeted any industrial development on our public lands: Let’s go slow. Let’s make sure we’re not impacting resources that can’t recover. Let’s make sure that America’s wildlife, and the hunters who pursue it, aren’t the ultimate victims of our rush toward green power.
This article was featured in the August 2024 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe .
