Life in the Mojave Desert and the Green Energy Gold Rush

Author Claire Vay Watkins lives in the eastern Mojave Desert, in a town of about 100 people called Tecopa, roughly halfway between Las Vegas and Death Valley. It is, she says, "staggeringly gorgeous"—huge mountain ranges, a mostly subterranean river called the Amargosa that surfaces in hot springs, producing "an explosion of life." It is also the setting of her new novel Yellow Pine, which centers on a small community protesting a massive solar energy development.

The vast majority of land in this region is public land administered by the federal government, and Watkins describes it as being "in the crosshairs" of what boosters call "the green energy gold rush." The area is besieged not just by solar development but by geothermal projects and mining at an increasing scale. The aquifer has been dramatically depleted in a place that has little water to begin with. And there is a long history of environmental injustice: the area is not far from the Nevada Test Site, where the federal government detonated nearly a thousand nuclear bombs until 1992. "It's a place that's been treated like a wasteland for a really long time," Watkins says, "and that story has been very cooperative and convenient for extraction and exploitation."