TWO important environmental imperatives, ecosystem protection and renewable energy development, are squared off against each other in the Soda Mountains of California’s Mojave Desert.

The area is home to a resurgent population of bighorn sheep, declining numbers of desert tortoises and other creatures adapted to survive in what seems, on the surface, to be a bleak and unforgiving environment.

It is also where the Bechtel Corporation is seeking to build a 264-megawatt photovoltaic facility on about 1,900 acres of federal land along Interstate 15 near Baker, Calif., less than a mile from the Mojave National Preserve. The plant would convert the sun’s energy into electricity to power 79,000 homes without generating the greenhouse gases that are heating up our planet.

We’re all for solar projects. We need more of them. But not in this place.

The project threatens to disturb the migration of bighorn sheep in a region already fragmented by highways. As the biologists John D. Wehausen and Clinton W. Epps warned earlier this year in an article in the Daily Bulletin of Ontario, Calif., this project “would likely add another nail in the coffin of these sheep by precluding the re-establishment of a critical migration corridor across Interstate 15 that could reconnect bighorn sheep populations on either side.”