Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes--they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescent Dunes was resisted by an environmental organization, Basin and Range, because the installation, like Father Himalaya's Pyrheliophoro, kills any birds that come near it. Basin and Range also objected to the concomitant destruction of the fragile desert environment; building Crescent Dunes required bulldozing about 2.5 square miles of arid land, including about 10 percent of the habitat of two rare beetles, the Crescent Dunes aegialian scarab and the Crescent Dunes serican scarab.