The City Square: Environmentalists at war with environmentalists

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Environmentalists at war with environmentalists

The New York Times reports that David Myers, head of the Wildlands Conservancy, is "indignant." As an environmentalist, he, of course, wants to preserve open spaces, such as the Mojave desert, in their natural form and untouched by man. He is opposed by global-warming-environmentalists who want to convert his beloved desert to a solar power plant:

Mr. Myers is indignant. “How can you say you’re going to blade off hundreds of thousands of acres of earth to preserve the Earth?” he said.

The local Sierra Club is also outraged:

Terry Frewin, a local Sierra Club representative, said he had tough questions for state regulators. “Deserts don’t need to be sacrificed so that people in L.A. can keep heating their swimming pools,” Mr. Frewin said.

However, the national Sierra Club is siding with the Obama administration and supporting green power:

At a national level, that strategy is meshing with support for new policies intended to change how electricity is generated, how cars are made and how people live. “It’s not enough to say no to things anymore,” said Carl Zichella, a Sierra Club expert on renewable power. “We have to say yes to the right thing.”
So environmentalists like Mr. Zichella and Johanna Wald, a lawyer and longtime ecowarrior at the Natural Resources Defense Council, have joined an industry-dominated advisory group that makes recommendations to California regulators on where renewable-energy zones should be created.
“We have to accept our responsibility that something that we have been advocating for decades is about to happen,” Ms. Wald said. “My job is to make sure that it happens in an environmentally responsible way.”