B\u00a0<\/strong>eatty, an old gold rush town in Nye County, Nevada, looks like a Wild West stage set.\u00a0\u00a0Burros, legacies of the region\u2019s mining past, wander the streets. A century ago, it was a bustling three-railroad town. Today, it\u2019s home to 854 people. Beatty has two gas stations, one excellent barbecue restaurant, and no stoplights. At Happy Burro Chili & Beer, a meal costs less than ten dollars and you can still smoke\u00a0inside.<\/p>\n A solar farm in the Mojave Desert. All photographs from Nevada by Balazs Gardi, October and November 2022, for Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em> \u00a9 The\u00a0artist<\/p>\n West of town, a sign on State Route 374 reads welcome to beatty: gateway to death valley. The road winds through the Bullfrog Hills\u2014prospectors thought its green rock resembled the skin of a bullfrog\u2014before a wide valley comes into view, dizzyingly vast for anyone unaccustomed to the basin-and-range topography of the West. It\u2019s so big you can see the weather: rain slashing the vaulted sky, the shadows of clouds moving across the mountains. The landscape creates a vacuum of sound, the wind sweeping all noise up into a cinematic void. It\u2019s easy to see why this area may soon be home to one of the largest concentrations of solar power in the\u00a0world.<\/p>\n On a fall day in 2021, I headed out into the desert in a dusty red SUV with Laura Cunningham and Kevin Emmerich, the married co-founders of Basin and Range Watch, a non-profit focused on protecting the desert and opposing \u201cenergy sprawl.\u201d Laura is an expatriated Berkeley-trained biologist, artist, and science writer. Her silver hair is short and utilitarian. That day, she wore a puffy blue jacket bleached by the sun and rubbed to a shine by headbutts from her horses. Kevin, a retired Death Valley park ranger, was dressed in an equally weathered parka. They moved to Beatty twenty years ago because they love this land, and it\u2019s hard for me to imagine them existing outside of it. Though we\u2019ve since met on several occasions, I\u2019ve never seen either of them indoors, or without sunglasses.<\/p>\n To Kevin and Laura, Western deserts are some of the richest ecosystems remaining in the United States. To developers, they are prospective solar farms. Nye County, in particular, is a major target. It is the third-largest county in the continental United States, spanning eighteen thousand square miles\u2014more than twice the size of New Jersey. Ninety-two percent of its area consists of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under a \u201cmultiple use\u201d mandate, meaning that the land can be used for recreation, grazing, extraction, or energy production.<\/p>\n Nye County\u2019s potential for renewable energy generation is difficult to overstate: if covered in solar panels, it could produce enough energy to power the entire planet. In the past two years, twenty thousand acres of solar farms have been proposed on the public land around Beatty. This is in addition to plans for other kinds of renewable energy development: geothermal plants, lithium mines, transmission lines. It\u2019s still speculative\u2014the environmental review process has barely begun\u2014but if all of these projects pan out, they could dramatically transform Beatty\u2019s ecology and way of life. Invoking the West\u2019s boom-bust history and the frenzy of current development, the media frequently refers to the phenomenon as a \u201cland rush\u201d or a \u201csolar\u00a0boom.\u201d<\/p>\n Before we reached the entrance to Death Valley, Laura pulled over. There are few fences on BLM land, so we were able to walk right out into the desert. While the area\u2019s scrubby terrain lacks the iconic Joshua trees of the Mojave or the red rocks of the Colorado Plateau, Laura explained, the ground itself is alive. Cryptobiotic soils form a living crust that, once disturbed, takes five thousand years to regenerate. We picked our way through old-growth creosote bushes and blackbrush, taking care to avoid the burrows of kit foxes and Mojave desert tortoises. Laura was quick enough to grab a sun-drunk Western patch-nosed snake, and I photographed her holding it. She posted the image on social media: more ammunition for her crusade against the misconception of deserts as little more than empty\u00a0space.<\/p>\n As we drove back toward town, Laura pointed out red ribbons that their friend Karl Olson had tied to mile markers to indicate the boundaries of one of the solar sites. Like Kevin and Laura, Karl is a member of the Beatty Solar Project Subcommittee, a group that was convened by the town board to keep track of applications for solar developments. Karl has been a peripatetic adventurer and history buff for most of his eighty years. His interests have taken him to the Arctic, the ocean, and, most recently, the desert. Since 2014, he has been mapping old rail lines and mining roads around Beatty for use by recreational off-highway vehicles (OHVs). He got involved in the fight against solar after learning that the proposed sites would intersect some of those routes. The red ribbons marked the boundaries of the proposed Beatty Energy Center Project, a 6,515-acre site whose projected size has since been reduced by more than half. Next to it was the unmarked site for the prospective 5,300-acre SB Solar Project. As we rolled along the highway, squinting out at the cathedral of natural and human history that Karl calls America\u2019s Rome, Laura waved her hand out the window, conjuring the sweep of development, the scale of the potential devastation. \u201cWe\u2019d still<\/em> be driving by solar panels. Still!\u201d she said. \u201cImagine\u00a0it!\u201d<\/p>\n T\u00a0<\/strong>he Biden Administration has made renewables a key part of its decarbonization strategy, a shift that involves not only rethinking where our energy comes from, but also imagining new physical and political geographies. Meeting energy needs with solar panels or wind turbines will require much more surface land than coal mines or oil rigs. Choosing where to install solar farms or route transmission lines thus requires difficult decisions about how renewables should be spatially and economically organized. Large-scale or small? Public or private? Centralized or decentralized? These questions\u2014answered through apparently mundane decisions about land use\u2014will determine the shape of our collective\u00a0future.<\/p>\n At her nomination hearing in 2021, Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland announced that \u201cAmerica\u2019s public lands can and should be engines for clean energy production.\u201d Early in 2022, the administration set a goal of producing twenty-five gigawatts of renewable energy on public land by 2025, in addition to thirty gigawatts from offshore wind by 2030, which they have pursued by offering utilities and energy developers cheap leases so projects can be built quickly and at a large scale. The recent Inflation Reduction Act extends this approach by streamlining the permitting process and expanding tax credits. This strategy reflects a progressive view of public land as a source of green jobs and of locations for large-scale wind, solar, and geothermal projects, part of what advocacy groups have come to call a \u201cjust transition.\u201d<\/p>\n The agenda has found bipartisan support in Nevada, where 85\u00a0percent of land is publicly owned. The state has not only plenty of the sunlight and flat land that solar panels require, but also ample wind and natural hot springs, as well as the metals, like lithium and gold, that are needed for batteries. Carl Zichella, a former senior policy advocate at the National Resources Defense Council, calls Nevada \u201cthe Saudi Arabia of renewable energy.\u201d In 2019, the governor Steve Sisolak announced that half the state\u2019s energy portfolio would be renewable by 2030, generating an estimated $539 million in wages and $1.5 billion in economic activity. The plan is to produce energy both for in-state consumption and for export\u2014to households in Los Angeles and tech companies in Silicon Valley. Meeting this goal will require not only the construction of solar farms, but new transmission lines and upgrades to existing\u00a0ones.<\/p>\n This model of centralized energy generation and long-distance transmission is popular with a wide range of constituencies. For utilities and some urban social and environmental justice organizations, it is one way to supply affordable renewable energy to renters and low-income homeowners who can\u2019t afford pricey rooftop panels. For unions, it guarantees construction contracts and well-paying jobs. And for large environmental organizations, it provides a way of indirectly addressing species and habitat loss by mitigating the effects of climate\u00a0change.<\/p>\n But in Beatty, the just transition does not feel just enough. Across the region, a handful of tribes, environmental organizations, and activists like Laura and Kevin have been arguing for a decade that utility-scale solar is a regressive use of public land at odds with commitments to deeper social and environmental transformation. They see the destruction of habitat and sacred sites as a dismissal of the ecological value of arid lands and the communities that live in them on the part of coastal policymakers and energy consumers. They argue that the political economy of this approach to renewable energy development\u2014driven by private developers and for-profit utilities, and concentrated on \u201cundisturbed\u201d public land rather than on private farmland, brownfields, or rooftops\u2014sidesteps questions about energy conservation and the possibility of perpetual\u00a0growth.<\/p>\n From this perspective, the climate crisis appears to be offering a new warrant for an old paradigm: the government-sanctioned sacrifice of public land for private profit. While renewables may be an opportunity to do things differently, the argument goes, the solar rush all too closely resembles the injustices of prior public land rushes: gold and gas, grazing and logging, railroads and electric utilities. Locally, there is panicked recognition that it\u2019s happening again\u2014the moment of speculation, the lack of coordination, the distribution of costs and benefits, the inevitable bust, profits accumulating in a few distant pockets while local communities are stripped of resources.<\/p>\n O\u00a0<\/strong>n a windy Saturday afternoon last April, a crowd assembled in Beatty\u2019s town hall, a modest building surrounded by the senior center and a thrift store run out of a metal storage shed in a parking lot. The hall typically hosts run-of-the-mill community meetings, with discussions of spelling bees and car washes. That afternoon, however, sixty of us had gathered to hear a presentation from representatives of NextEra Energy, the largest renewable energy developer in the United\u00a0States.<\/p>\n The previous summer, the town board had written a series of letters to the BLM and Nevada\u2019s Public Utilities Commission opposing several of NextEra\u2019s proposed solar projects. The company had come to convince them that Beatty stood to profit. It was a big production. Clad in matching blue polos emblazoned with the company\u2019s logo, the presenters set up easels with large maps of their proposed sites. I wandered around the room with the other attendees for half an hour looking at the maps, then we all took our seats. The solar representatives and the town board members faced one another from two long tables at the front of the room, as if competing in an awkward game of Family\u00a0Feud.<\/p>\n The room was tense. Karl, who described himself as having a \u201cget the fuck outta here\u201d philosophy, was upset that Beatty had agreed to meet with the developers at all. Angry citizens had recently run developers out of a similar meeting in the nearby town of Pahrump, and it was rumored that they might do the same here. When Beatty residents convened that morning to look at proposed development sites, Erika Gerling, the chair of the town board, had asked residents to remain \u201ccivil, because this is who we are!\u201d But no one was quite sure what would happen. I wondered whether a few solar supporters might come out of the woodwork.<\/p>\n The meeting did, in fact, remain civil. And the developers made what I thought was a compelling pitch. NextEra, they explained, is a well-established company that generates more wind and solar energy than any other renewables developer in the world. They build, own, and manage their own facilities. They hire veterans. They had some ideas for how to encourage local ecotourism: A solar-powered visitors\u2019 center. Sponsorship for more and bigger OHV races. A new RV park. Job training. Support for local community organizations. I was a bit surprised when they mentioned a new filing\u20146,500 acres for the Tarantula Canyon Energy Project, eleven miles southeast of town\u2014but they reminded us that only a portion of the proposed acreage would ultimately be developed. \u201cWe love the spirit of this town,\u201d they said, and I found myself believing\u00a0them.<\/p>\n Then the floor opened for questions, and the NextEra reps were met with hot emotion. The matriarch of a ranching family cried as she listed the ways transmission lines could harm her property, health, and loved ones. The former owner of a local racetrack was hoarse with anger: \u201cWith this solar, the view of the West is gone. It renders my land worthless.\u201d A business owner, her voice breaking, described Beatty\u2019s hotel and RV revenue, which had grown from $1.4 million in 2007 to $4.2 million in 2019. \u201cThe biggest gift you can give us,\u201d she concluded, \u201cis to find another location.\u201d<\/p>\n She spoke for a broad contingent of the dissenters. After the Barrick gold mine closed in the Nineties, Beatty began to make a living off its public land through tourists attracted to the region\u2019s ecology, history, and recreational opportunities. Solar farms could destroy that economy by closing off access to public lands and converting them to a single, industrial use. David Spicer, a rancher who has pivoted from running cattle to building mountain bike trails and irrigation ponds for threatened toads on his property, argued that solar development is antithetical to the extensive work he\u2019s done to protect land and water resources in the area. He pointed out the irony of incompatible projects being funded by the same public agency on the same land. Karl asked about the toxic, blinding dust storms that are kicked up from construction. He was also worried about the future of the weekend OHV events that bring hundreds of people to town. \u201cIt\u2019s a three hundred and fifty day per year tourist economy now,\u201d Erika told me. \u201cThere are always people here. The hotels, restaurants, and bars are full. ATVs all over the place. We worked ten years to get here. How are we going to say, \u2018Come visit our solar farms?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n I\u00a0<\/strong>n a 1947 article for this magazine, the essayist and historian Bernard DeVoto warned of the \u201cforever-recurrent lust to liquidate the West.\u201d \u201cAlmost invariably the first phase was a \u2018rush,\u2019\u2009\u201d he wrote. \u201cThose who participated were practically all Easterners whose sole desire was to wash out of Western soil as much wealth as they could and take it home.\u201d For DeVoto, the New Deal offered a chance for more sustainable and locally beneficial uses of Western resources, but, in the end, Eastern capital was \u201cable to direct much of this development in the old pattern.\u201d<\/p>\n When outsiders try to describe the solar rush, they reach for historical analogies: the 1889 Oklahoma land rush; the early-twentieth-century eucalyptus boom that tore up the desert; housing speculation and development in the Aughts. But in Beatty such boom-and-bust cycles\u2014the sort they\u2019ve been trying to break out of for the past ten years\u2014are part of the everyday landscape. In the desert, the past is close to the surface. There\u2019s not much soil to bury things. Footprints and petroglyphs, railroad grades and telegraph lines, mine shafts and tin cans, whiskey and beer bottles\u2014all of it just sits there in the sun, alternately baking and freezing. This makes it easy to situate the solar rush in the long history of government-facilitated expropriation of and extraction from public\u00a0land.<\/p>\n The first act of plunder, of course, involved the wrenching dislocations of Native peoples of which the very idea of \u201cpublic land\u201d is a residue. This valley is part of the ancestral territory of the Timbisha Shoshone, today a federally recognized tribe that resides on some 7,500 acres of reservation land, three hundred of which are located inside Death Valley National Park. In addition to public meetings such as the one with NextEra, representatives of the tribe have separate, government-to-government consultations with the BLM. When I spoke to Barbara Durham, the tribal historic preservation officer, she made it clear that the Timbisha Shoshone support Beatty\u2019s resistance to solar projects in the region. The tribe has concerns about how the farms might affect cultural resources, as well as water and wildlife, even though the sites fall outside official reservation boundaries.<\/p>\n The second act of plunder was the gold rush. Mining for silver and gold began in the Bullfrog district in 1904 and continued through 1920. This produced the boomtown of Rhyolite, which at its peak boasted concrete sidewalks, an opera house, and a population of ten thousand. As the region was blanketed in mining claims, Beatty grew as a transportation and supply center, equipping nearby towns and mining camps. But in less than twenty years the newspapers folded, the railroads stopped running, the electricity was shut off, and the people disappeared. The train tracks and railroad ties were torn up for scrap metal and wood. Of all the regional settlements, Beatty was the only one to\u00a0survive.<\/p>\n Then came the Cold War transformation of much of the region into what the historian Valerie Kuletz has described as \u201cthe most bombed place on earth, the most fully realized sacrifice zone in the United States.\u201d Between 1951 and 1992, almost a thousand nuclear tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site, only twenty miles from Beatty. Old-timers remember seeing the glowing mushroom clouds as children. The town was spared the worst of the effects\u2014 so-called downwinders east of the site suffer cancers and birth defects from radiation. But nuclear tests polluted an estimated 1.6 trillion gallons of groundwater long before the West\u2019s current drought. Beatty is in no immediate danger, but Kevin and Laura\u2019s groundwater is tested every year for radioactive residue, just in\u00a0case.<\/p>\n And most recently, there was the modern mining boom, which in Beatty began in the early Eighties and lasted about fifteen years. In addition to providing jobs, the old Barrick Gold mine invested in the town. An employee at the local museum recalled the mine making donations to help start the museum, contributing to local civic organizations, and supporting the schools. They fixed the roof on the train depot and built a playground. The epilogue of one of Barrick\u2019s annual reports from the mid-Nineties states optimistically that \u201cthe new Bullfrog Mine was built to withstand the natural and economic storms which brought the District\u2019s first mining era to a close.\u201d But the price of gold and silver dropped shortly thereafter, and the mine closed in 1996. Beatty\u2019s population dropped from more than one thousand to around eight hundred. The butcher and the grocery store went out of business. Drug use rose. School enrollment halved, dropping from three hundred to one hundred and fifty. \u201cBarrick wasn\u2019t the first,\u201d Erika told me. \u201cWe\u2019d been through this cycle before. We knew what would happen when they\u00a0left.\u201d<\/p>\n Beatty made its pivot to tourism soon after. At first, the transition was, in Erika\u2019s words, \u201ca subtle shift,\u201d one that capitalized on the town\u2019s proximity to Death Valley National Park. Now Beatty boasts numerous restaurants, hotels, and campgrounds, as well as growing networks of OHV and mountain bike trails. Beatty still has a ways to go before it becomes \u201cthe next Moab,\u201d an arguably questionable aspiration I heard several residents voice. And the revival of gold mining in the area\u2014which Beatty has welcomed, even though it\u2019s more destructive than solar\u2014may still undermine these plans. But the idea that tourism can get Beatty out of the boom-and-bust cycle through what David Spicer describes as a \u201cdemonstration of the long-term, thriving use of public lands\u201d has been persuasive to residents, who have benefited from the additional jobs and\u00a0income.<\/p>\n Before the town hall meeting, one NextEra employee had told me the people of Beatty were \u201cdifferent.\u201d They had \u201can extractive history,\u201d he said. \u201cThey understand that some use is necessary.\u201d But to me, their relationship to the land seemed more complicated. While DeVoto believed that Westerners were complicit in their land\u2019s \u201crape\u201d by Eastern interests, Beatty\u2019s embrace of tourism suggested a break from these old patterns. Everyone emphasized what a big shift the gateway to death valley sign represented, marking the transformation of a mining town that might have ignored or disparaged the national park on its doorstep into one that actively courts its visitors. Tourism represents a more sustainable future for the town and its land, one more in line with progressive commitments to deep change. As one resident told me, \u201cSolar is like mines. They think in fifteen-to-twenty-year cycles. They plan on a finite timeline. But people\u2019s desire to get out and commune with nature is transcendent. It\u2019s a better long-term investment.\u201d And avoiding short-term abuses is exactly what residents are trying to do when they protest solar\u00a0today.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-7_Final.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-41_Final.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-41_Final-1400x0-c-default.jpg\")
<\/div>\n![\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-12_Final.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-12_Final-1400x0-c-default.jpg\")
<\/div>\n![\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-40_Final.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-40_Final-1400x0-c-default.jpg\")
<\/div>\n
![\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-48_Final.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/harpers.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/CUT-48_Final-1400x0-c-default.jpg\")
<\/div>\n