The Wilderness Society and Renewables

Recently, I spoke with Ben Beach, Senior Editor at the Wilderness Society. I reached out to Ben because I wanted to see how the organization was dealing with issue that public land (I presume some of it “wilderness”) is a good candidate for the generation of renewable energy, the form of solar thermal, wind farms, etc.

Ben pointed out that there are four categories of public land. 

National Forests
National Parks
Wildlife Refuges
Other land managed by the Bureau of Land Management

I’ve included links so readers can learn a bit more about each type.  The first of these is managed by the US Department of Agriculture; the others are handled by the Department of the Interior.

The Wilderness Society advocates for a rational balance of public land management, in which there are some areas (currently about 109 million acres) of true wilderness, not susceptible to any development (i.e., no roads providing access).  Ben’s point is that if you (as a camper, say) want to access otherwise pristine land by road, you have Yosemite, and the other national parks.

I must say that this seems fair to me in principle.  Of course, the devil is in the details; we can only hope that the forces of reason are working towards dealing with all this fairly.  In particular, as we’ve all noticed, when we fly across the country, we see that there are hundreds of times more land than we need to generate enough electricity for the entire continent.   If we can reduce and ultimately eliminate the consumption of fossil fuels by using some of that land — even if such use comes at a certain ecological costs, I think it’s obvious to everyone that this a deal worth making.