Hop online and you’ll see some folks that put the mental in environmentalist. Some of the best/worst are:

• A pulled-over motorist, chucking a tortoise into a pond to “help the turtle.”
• A brilliant tourist shoving a baby bison into his SUV because it was cold out.
• A child taking care of a bluegill by drying it off with a towel before tossing it back into the lake.

The last one is excusable and cute. The first two ought to have you rolling your eyes. But none of them cost you money.  That doesn’t mean that there haven’t been some earth-saving measures that haven’t touched your wallet in one way or another. Or $1.6 billion.

But before interacting with that number and the contradictory ecological integers that go into its sum, it is worth talking about what conservation is and what it isn’t.

The core of conservation is protection. True conservationism is all about people working in the natural world to keep things the way they are. It is ensuring the landfill doesn’t leach into the water table, the endangered trout aren’t harvested, and camping only occurs outside the fragile alpine zone. Of course, restoration is an aspect of conservation. But it is an abstracted aspect. For example, a stocking program is restorative. It is not the same, and carries much more risk, than protecting the trout and allowing them to reproduce on their own and without interference. Prevention is also a somewhat abstracted component. Preventative measures take people out of nature, so the conservation is remote, hands-off, and passive.

Conservation entails an educated, discerning intervention that results in the stabilization of an ecosystem.

It doesn’t mean extirpating rare fish like darters as the collateral of introducing trout into a watershed. It doesn’t mean eliminating native predators to encourage a more robust whitetail population. And it doesn’t mean destroying 3,500 acres of unique desert land for a controversial technology.

Of course, both the previous sentence and the  1.6 billion referenced above are directed squarely at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility.

There are plenty of places where one can go to learn about this sprawling array in Nevada’s Mojave desert. Built in 2010, left-leaning  outlets lauded it as an important step away from fossil fuels.  Right-leaning voices use it as an example of Obama-era greenwashing. 16 years later, Ivanpah is going to close. Left-leaning outlets celebrate newer solar technologies that  have quickly outpaced the 173,500 heliostat mirrors. Right-leaning voices point to it as a picture of wasteful hypocrisy.

Regardless of your political affiliation, what is clear is that Ivanpah was an experiment  in preventative conservationism.

Still, the question stands: was it worth it? Was it worth the cost? Was it worth the land acquisition? Was it worth the   tens of thousands of birds, cooked alive from flying into the superheated air? Pragmatism is a fickle mistress. Her allure is wrapped up in the potential ends – damn the prospective means. But what if the ends go belly up less than twenty years later?

This is not clean energy. More important, it is not conservation. You can’t pave paradise, put up a proverbial parking lot, and pat yourself on the back that a different swath of Eden might be avoiding asphalt for a few years. It ends up further disenfranchising the skeptical and compromising any put-on airs of a moral high ground. It has the veneer of conservation, but a quick fingernail scratch reveals  the same money, bureaucracy, and destruction that we’re used to.

But right now, the bluegill is floundering about with  desiccated scales and dirt-caked gills while the little boy walks away thinking that he’s saved the world.

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For more (diverse) reading:

11 years after a celebrated opening, massive solar plant faces a bleak future in the Mojave Desert

What right-wing media didn’t say about an ill-fated solar project in the Mojave desert

Taxpayer-Backed Solar Facility In Mojave Desert Will Shut Down Next Year

As solar farms sprout up in Southern Nevada, concern for desert tortoises grows