Green plus brown equals more brown. Can this planet be saved?

An ongoing fight in the town of Johnston mirrors one in Cranston, where I live. Both communities have large swaths of former farmland and undeveloped forest that remain open space. Developers want to install large-scale emplacements of solar panels on this land. 

They call these business ventures “solar farms” to suggest they are engaging in traditional land uses and benefit from zoning regulations that allow farming by right. I prefer to call them “solar factories.”  They are a path that former farming families can take to make money from their lands, and that seems good. But they are also an exclusive, unsightly, and potentially damaging use of the land. That seems bad. 

The things that some people believe will assist us in our desire to become more friendly to our environment, and our planet, are seen by others to potentially do the opposite. Opponents of the placement of offshore wind turbines suggest they interfere with bird migrations, limit fish spawning grounds, and kill whales. They also say wind turbines impose industrial landscapes in places where natural beauty once prevailed. Concerns have also been raised about the ecological costs of mining rare minerals for electric vehicle batteries, an activity portrayed as potentially as damaging as drilling for oil. 

Are we doing this wrong?

There is no reason to assume we are automatically on the right track to slowing or reversing climate change, even with the best possible intentions. Does anyone remember, way back when, that we were told that if we recycled our cans and bottles we could save the planet? A movement led to real system change; recycling programs are ubiquitous, and often mandatory, in most communities in America. 

But while we all recycle, the results have not been exactly as anticipated. We have learned much of what we throw into our recycling bins does not actually get recycled, with too much of the plastic, in particular, ending up in our ecosystems. Perhaps the promise of recycling, only partially fulfilled, has allowed us to continue to pollute the planet in new and dangerous ways. 

The solar installations are a good and local example of how legitimately hard it is for communities, and nations, to “do the right thing.”  There is no doubt that moving away from extracted energy sources — coal, oil, and gas — will have a positive effect on our environment. Wind and solar energy, which assume we can take without harm, are obvious “good sources.” However, clearing a patch of forest, or taking an open field, to create several acres of solar panels can also have a negative impact. It is not entirely different than constructing massive buildings on the site. It interrupts the paths that wildlife may take to move between the areas still available to them, it can create water run-off problems, and it removes the vegetation that cleans our air and enriches the soil, making it hard to “re-wild” the land in the long term. 

The point here is not that environmentally-focused actions are misguided, or premature. It is rather that our world — its many ecosystems and human cultures that are indelibly connected — is extraordinarily complicated. An apparently simple fix can be hard to implement. And actions that we take in one sphere may have negative impacts on another. 

It is also really important to recognize that those who do not support “green” actions for their own reasons — economic or esthetic — know that one of their strongest tactics to prevent things like wind turbine installations is to claim that there will be negative environmental impacts, even when the evidence is thin.

Obviously, we should not stop trying to create a greener world. We just need to be really smart about it. This may mean simply banning the materials that cannot be easily recycled, as many Rhode Island communities are doing with plastic bags. It may also mean looking for non-destructive places for communities, not just individual developers, to place solar panels. Especially in locations already associated with “brown” activities, like on top of landfills or parking garages, or as part of roadbeds. 

The desire to fix something, and do it quickly, is part of the American character. If, in doing so, someone can save or make some money, all the better. But these two impulses are not enough to yield the results we seek. We must think longer term, and more inclusively, to find solutions that work.