Earth Equity News

Where Should the Wind Turbines Go? By Molly Webster, OnEarth, May 28, 2009. "Renewable-energy technologies, such as solar arrays and wind turbines, don't emit carbon dioxide, but they can nevertheless disturb habitats and cause environmental harm. How does society balance the urgent need to develop renewable energy with the protection of wild lands that happen to have significant renewable resources? NRDC has teamed up with the Audubon Society to create a powerful new mapping tool. A digital program created for Google Earth plots more than 15,000 locations in 13 western states that are either legally off-limits or are of such high natural value that 'conservation groups would fight tooth and nail to protect them,' says NRDC senior scientist Matthew McKinzie... The high-tech clean energy and conservation map is the product of a lot of old-fashioned legwork. McKinzie spent the past year hunting down the coordinates of 20 different types of land, including federal and state parks, wildlife refuges, and roadless and wilderness areas. In all, he collected records encompassing 860 million acres -- about half the land area of the lower 48 states. NRDC also located the habitats of 173 threatened species. All these data were then plotted on an interactive Google Earth map, which was color-coded to represent the different categories of public lands."