For Immediate Release: September 22, 2026
Contact:
- Laura Cunningham, California Director, Western Watersheds Project, lcunningham@westernwatersheds.org, 775-513-1280
- Kevin Emmerich, Co-Founder, Basin and Range Watch, emailbasinandrange@gmail.com, 775-764-1080
Conservation Groups Protest Bonanza Solar Project Planned for Crucial Mojave Desert Tortoise Connectivity Habitat
Bureau of Land Management Delays Designation of an Area of Critical Environmental Concern That Would Protect the Area
LAS VEGAS — Western Watersheds Project and Basin and Range Watch today formally protested the proposed Bonanza Solar Project final environmental review with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The BLM is siting a 5,133-acre photovoltaic and lithium battery project on public lands in high-quality, intact Mojave desert tortoise habitat, 70 miles north of Las Vegas. The area, on the north side of the Spring Mountains, has a high density of diverse cactus species such as pencil cholla, cottontop cactus, Parish club-cholla, and beavertail cactus, as well as tall flowering Mojave yuccas. An estimated 150,000 cacti and yuccas live on the desert ecosystem here.
The broad alluvial fan was a former grazing allotment, which BLM closed to cattle in order to conserve wildlife values.
A crucial tortoise connectivity corridor identified for this area maintains connectivity between mountain ranges harbors an intact, contiguous, high-quality tortoise habitat block. The Bonanza Solar Project application proposal is sited in the middle of this connectivity linkage between Critical Habitat units. The solar project would fragment intact habitat and degrade vegetation communities and soils needed by the tortoise population for survival.
“The project proponents claim they can use mitigation measures to complete an industrial-scale solar farm without taking away from the functionality of the corridor and health of the tortoise habitat and populations,” said Laura Cunningham, California Director at Western Watersheds Project. “We maintain that this cannot be successfully done and the project cannot proceed without serious harm to the critically-imperiled tortoise.”
Conservationists petitioned the BLM to designate the Cactus Springs Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) here in 2022, to protect this high-value public land tortoise habitat. The original 2012 Western Solar Plan designated this tortoise connectivity area as a solar exclusion zone due to its high tortoise habitat values.
After the Southern Nevada District Office of BLM received the nomination, the proposed solar development was increased in acreage by the BLM. This corridor is mentioned in the 2011 Mojave Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan, which states that the “Eastern Mojave Recovery Unit the Spring Mountains, which provided much of the separation between the…Northeastern Mojave and Eastern Mojave recovery units, narrowly channel gene flow through habitat corridors to the north and south, connecting this recovery unit to the Northeastern Mojave Recovery Unit.”
Yet instead of designating this ACEC to protect these resources under the Federal Land and Policy Management Act, the Nevada state office of BLM went on to consider solar developments right in the middle of this connectivity corridor. “The construction of Bonanza Solar Project would degrade habitat, block large areas of connectivity, and jeopardize tortoise viability here,” said Cunningham.
BLM now is trying to punt the designation of this ACEC to a vague future time, and rely on experimental new temporary mitigation measures to act as a placeholder to ACEC protections while simultaneously allowing the construction of a large-sale solar energy project in the connectivity corridor.
“The Interior Department has been pushing solar development on important desert tortoise habitat since 2009,” said Kevin Emmerich, Co-founder of Basin and Range Watch. “While perfectly viable alternatives for solar energy exist on rooftops and degraded lands, the industry developers want to be as close to transmission infrastructure as possible even if important species are compromised. The BLM works overtime to enable infrastructure projects on public lands but makes excuses when they reject long-term conservation proposals that could maintain imperiled species for years.”
Project mitigation relies heavily on translocating desert tortoises, but the BLM says in the Final Environmental Impact Statement that “translocated Mojave desert tortoise experience high mortality rates, over 50% mortality has been documented in the first three years following translocation, primarily from predation.”
Permanent disturbance to Mojave desert tortoise habitat would occur. The solar energy developer proposed that the solar project could be constructed in this high-quality tortoise habitat, and then the tortoises could be allowed back in the solar fields after construction and during operation, if all vegetation was not removed.
BLM found the ACEC nomination worthy, yet chose to defer designation to the future, while using unproven “temporary management” to try to stave off “irreparable damage” to relevant and important values of the public land here. The joint Protest submitted today asks BLM to designate the Cactus Springs Area of Critical Environmental Concern, as nominated and updated, and to deny approval of this solar project to truly conserve this tortoise habitat.
Photographs of the landscape proposed for industrialization are available upon request.
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The mission of Western Watersheds Project (WWP) is to protect and restore western watersheds and wildlife through education, public policy initiatives, and legal advocacy.
Basin and Range Watch is a 501(c)(3) non-profit working to conserve the deserts of Nevada and California and to educate the public about the diversity of life, culture, and history of the ecosystems and wild lands of the desert.
