Ivanpah is a bellweather, then, and environmental groups in California, battle-hardened by years of ﬁghting power plants, were quick to organize to critique the project and position themselves for a protracted public and legal struggle. The arena for this intra-green battle is the California Energy Commission's power plant siting process.

In press releases and the pages of the country's major newspapers, environmental groups jockeyed for position. Some, like the Sierra Club, tried to chart a middle path. "It's not enough to say no to things anymore," said one of the group's experts on renewable energy. "We have to say yes to the right thing."

But it's clearly an uncomfortable position. When BrightSource altered its plan to reduce its output and change its design in response to criticisms, the Sierra Club responded with a mixed statement. "Looking at this new proposal, it will not do anything to protect the desert tortoise and they won't be able to generate as many megawatts," said the group's senior attorney in San Francisco, Gloria D. Smith. Despite that, she said, "We still support this project but just want it to have a more beneﬁcial footprint."

The National Resources Defense Council has taken much the same pragmatic stance, with its longtime lawyer Johanna Wald pointing out what is the great irony of the parable of the tortoise and the sun. "We have to accept our responsibility that something that we have been advocating for decades is about to happen," Wald said.

Other groups, particularly the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife staked out more hardline stances. Kim Delfino wrote a warning in the group's magazine that "California is starting to see a new kind of 'gold rush', but this time, it's going to be our wind, sunlight and public lands that are up for grabs."

One can almost imagine the fossil-fuel industry laughing all the way to the slag pile. Would-be nuclear plant builders, too, must be enjoying watching the solar boys getting the same workout that has kept California from building large coal and nuclear plants.

For ﬂedgling green-tech companies, the lack of support from those who would seem to be their natural allies could prove to be their Achilles' heel. After decades of ﬁghting power plants and pollution, trying to impose limits on society's activities, mainline conservation groups do not ﬁnd supporting the destruction of desert by a private power plant developer easy. Like a longtime opposition political party suddenly handed the keys to the kingdom, the environmental movement is discovering that governing is a lot harder than it looks; the cracks in the coalition are easier to see in the realm of action.

Human Environmentalism

"Even though we use the phrase 'the environmental movement,' it's bullshit," said Adam Rome, a Penn State professor who is probably the world's scholarly authority on the genesis and origins of environmentalism in America.23 It's simply not an accurate depiction of the incredible variety of people who wanted to reconﬁgure our relationship with the nonhuman world. Not all of them were primarily interested in protecting biodiversity, and many of them were just ﬁne with modifying the natural environment for human ends. Historian Andrew Kirk wrote,

One of the popular misconceptions about environmental advocacy in American history stems from the desire to celebrate the few individuals who advocated the preservation of nature where humans weren't, while often ignoring those who worked to use their technological enthusiasm to beneﬁt nature. Historical actors in the drama of twentieth-century environmental advocacy are often rated on a sliding scale according to the purity of their wilderness vision.

There is an alternate vision, though, that this book has tried to highlight and that historians like Rome and Kirk have begun to excavate. From the late 1950s onward, traditional Democratic liberals -- the FDR type, not the eco type -- had a pretty coherent program for making the country better: Boost public spending on the social goods that private enterprise seemed to neglect, including environmental protection to provide "qualitatively" better lives for a large middle class that had it all.