National Geographic did a pretty thorough look recently at one of the core environmental activist conflicts that we don’t hear much about, but which runs underneath the push to develop utility scale solar farms. The Obama administration is pushing hard for the allocation of federal lands for the development of wind, solar, and geothermal. This should be a win-win situation for environmentalists concerned about fossil fuel promoting pollution and climate change. But many remain more concerned about the impacts these projects have on local plants and wildlife.

BrightSource found this out the hard way when it developed the Ivanpah Solar Farm on 3500 acres of desert land. The project wound up impacting desert tortoises and BrightSource says it’s spent $22 million taking care of the animals, not to mention the business impacts of having the project delayed during a time when solar power was under extreme scrutiny.

The Bureau of Land Management is at the heart of the conflict, and has issued permits or is reviewing proposals for projects on over 300,000 acres of land, roughly the size of the Grand Teton National Park. The best case scenario here is that the permitting process improves such that the BLM does thorough environmental assessments of any proposed project, which to some extent the government body already does. But there’s just no way around the fact that taking hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land and putting solar panels or windmills on it, is going to have an impact on local plants and animals.