Wichimi is a village of some forty families deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Solar technology transformed it. According to a report by Isabel Alarcon for the Washington Post, villagers used to pay $10 for a noisy and polluting petrol-fueled boat trip to the nearest town. Now, they glide silently through the forest for ‘free’ on a solar-powered boat. Solar has helped the school expand its subjects and attendance is up because of the ‘free’ solar travel. “Web surfing has gone from a rare indulgence to a daily activity,” Alarcon wrote. “While before every charge cost money—and pollution from gasoline generators—Kapawi residents can now charge up free.” Eco tourism is booming. The silent tourist boats can now catch wildlife unawares as eager tourists glide by, filming their golden moments for Instagram and TikTok. Before solar, when the night fell, the village quietened down. Now, street lights can be on all night, as the latest pop hits are heard echoing through the canopies. The march of the white missionaries to bring the Indigenous people out of darkness is relentless. “The forest has lost its silence,” as Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa put it. “Our mind is constantly attracted by white people’s merchandise … It will not lead to anything good … Today our eyes and ears are too often set far from the forest, elsewhere than on our own people.”

Half of insects are nocturnal. There is an insect apocalypse and street lights contribute by confusing them, deterring moths from laying eggs, altering the feeding habits of caterpillars. “We posit here that artificial light at night is another important—but often overlooked—bringer of the insect apocalypse,” Avalon Owens and other researchers have found. Not alone do night lights disturb insects; they make the leaves they shine on tough so that insects can’t eat them. It’s not simply insects that are affected. Birds are too, according to the US National Science Foundation:

Biologists found that light pollution causes birds to begin nesting up to a month earlier than normal in open environments such as grasslands and wetlands, and 18 days earlier in forested environments. The consequence could be a mismatch in timing—hungry chicks may hatch before their food is available.

Again, it’s not an energy production problem we have. It’s an energy consumption problem. We consume too much. We need to let Nature go dark, let Nature recover. Instead, we’re being sold more tech scams. All over the world, solar panels have somehow become the best friend of biodiversity, according to countless breathless reports. An example is from The Cool Down that’s quoting that august greenwasher, the New York Times:

Solar farms are stepping up their game, and it’s not just about producing clean energy. These sun-soaking powerhouses are now doubling as havens for wildlife, offering a ray of hope in the fight against biodiversity loss, according to The New York Times. Across the United States, innovative solar projects are transforming barren fields into thriving ecosystems.

The solution to biodiversity collapse is to cover the earth with solar panels? Is that it? Since the 1950s, the UK has seen a 97% loss of its flower-rich meadows, according to Martin Warren from Butterfly Conservation Europe. Driven by the ‘Green’ Revolution, these fields were replaced by monoculture croplands pumped with fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides, as they were constantly stressed and compacted by large machinery. As my brother-in-law, who has spent his life fixing tractors, sadly said to me: “These new tractors are so heavy they’re destroying the land.” This ‘Green’ Revolution has driven a biodiversity collapse. What’s the solution? More technology! Solar factories! Researchers from Cambridge University did some ‘research’ and found that where these solar factories were surrounded by hedgerows, woods and wildflower fields, bird and other populations showed some signs of recovery. They then did an Olympic leap of logic and gushed that what we now have is a ‘golden’ opportunity to generate “clean energy while restoring biodiversity at the same time.” This is what we call science.

You can’t get to clean energy through dirty mining. To save biodiversity we must rewild. We must allow for the restoration of flower-rich meadows. Instead, we are being sold the cynical lie that we can have it all. We are told that we can maintain biodiversity and have all the ‘renewable’ energy we need. Everything is twisted until its fits within a Growth Death Cult logic. The solution to deforestation becomes giant solar factories where “birds tweet from the panel structures.” In reality, of course, these solar factories are very often biodiversity graveyards, where companies such as Solar Vegetation Management advertise how to “unlock the power of solar with VegClear’s advanced vegetation management herbicide application services.”