Balance Of Power: Clean Energy And Desert Wildlife

Source: Forbes.com LLC™ | Link to article

This guest post was written by Johanna Wald, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.

I’ve had the great luck to spend my nearly forty year career protecting western lands. But about five years ago, I realized two things that changed the course of my approach to lands protection: The first was that climate change was already having real impacts on the lands and resources that I have been working for so long to protect, and second that there were numerous pending applications for renewable energy projects proposed on lands with vital wildlife habitat.

I knew then that if I wanted to achieve my goal, I’d need to find ways to balance the need for cleaner sources of energy while protecting our public lands. So I switched the focus of my work to facilitate environmentally responsible renewable energy development in the west.

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