Sacrifice Zone: Yellow Pine

There is no place in Nevada’s Pahrump Valley called Yellow Pine, yet I arrive. Yellow Pine is a place invented for sacrifice. It is a new name given by NextEra Energy—a gigantic energy company from Florida worth about $175 billion—to a trapezoid of land stolen by the United States. Here, NextEra wants to build an industrial solar array on public land. Yellow Pine is located in Nevada and, preceding that place’s invention, in Newe Sogobia, unceded territory of the Western Shoshone Nation as well as the Nuwu (Southern Paiute), namely the Pahrump band of the Nuwu, themselves unrecognized by the federal government. The land is in a valley between Las Vegas and Pahrump. I grew up here. 

For years now I’ve come to Yellow Pine to witness the avoidable carnage occasioned by NextEra’s array-in-progress, one of a vast patchwork of industrial for-profit solar arrays in the works across 124,000 acres of the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin, a region its devotees call America’s Outback. Yellow Pine is home to about 90,000 old-growth yuccas and, until recently, 139 adult desert tortoises. It’s an undulating creosote sea that I credit for making the air I breathed throughout my girlhood. Shannon Salter, a friend who’s been living in a camper near Yellow Pine to document the desert’s destruction, calls Yellow Pine “5,000 acres of pure spirit.” It’s obviously true: from Yellow Pine one looks up to Mount Charleston, the highest peak in the Spring Mountains and a key site in the Salt Songs, the ceremonial creation myth song cycle of the Nuwu.