Big Solar is moving into Nevada’s public lands. A local activist is fighting back with poetryDriving west on Highway 160 between Las Vegas and Pahrump, the valley to the south looks like any other in the Mojave Desert. From the seat of a car, the land blurs by in shades of brown and beige. The eye has a funny way of gauging distance out here. The mountains across the California border seem closer than they are, and between here and there nothing. Some call it a wasteland. Others call it the void. Up close, however, the desert begins to breathe. Five-hundred-year-old yuccas lean into the wind. Kit foxes chase mice through tufts of creosote.Time works funny out here too. The land feels ancient, because it is. Most of the valley floor is coated in what geologists call desert pavement, a limestone rock surface dating back 100,000 years. Mammoths and saber-toothed cats once walked across the pebbles, which, for millennia, have been cemented together by networks of fungal mycelium, a typ