“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
We see this phenomenon in the seven states who have been drawing down the Colorado River Basin water resources to the point of an emergency, and now in the proliferation of data centers in support of AI. In both cases large scale industrial projects drive decisions rather than prudent decision making with a land ethic (meaning the best decision making by a thinking community).
Citizens are finding themselves in a water crisis across seven states who utilize Colorado River Water, or in the fact that citizens in U.S. states are in a quandary as data center developers pressure them to either sell their homes or face the whine, pollution, grid and water overuse of mega data centers built in their backyards.
These kinds of abuses and overuses of the planet’s generosity occur without an ethic that all agree upon. Aldo Leopold made the greatest contribution to this discussion in his landmark essay, The Land Ethic. Leopold considered a land ethic as a dynamic outcome of a thinking community working together for the best outcomes for both the biotic health of the land and for people. The quote above sums up the concept.
When the Colorado River Compact, which includes seven states that utilize its waters, discussed how they could work together to share this great river’s resources, they did so in spite of a basic fact: the river experiences periodic one-hundred year droughts as shown in fossil records and tree rings.
Americans living in these states have witnessed a long-term drought that has all but emptied the two giant reservoirs, Lake Mead (lower basin states) and Lake Powell (upper basin states).
Desert states like Arizona and California, have sucked the regions dry to support enormous growth in cities and agriculture. Before building the Hoover Dam to create Lake Mead, Congressmen in 1878 sent John Wesley Powell to assess the southwest region for its potential for development of the western states. He returned after 18 months to deliver a sobering conclusion: the arid region is unsuitable for large scale development based on available water supply and geological aspects of the west. Read a summary of his report here.
Today, nearly a century later, mega-wealthy oligarchs who developed artificial intelligence (AI) want to build huge (thousands of acres) data centers to power AI. The horses are ahead of the cart again as the public isn’t sure they want AI to be developed without careful discussion and oversight. Virginia, a drought-stressed state, has hundreds of data centers clustered in the northern part of the state and are salivating for land in rural area. They bully landowners, promise huge tax income while drawing large amounts of fresh water from aquifers. The trend is to push out home owners, farmers, and even small townships, by offering as much as $12M an acre. Some owners are pressured when neighbors sell and leave other land owners whose homes, farms and enterprises are their treasures. Emissions from gas-powered turbines, noise pollution, and hidden impacts such as the water required to produce the power to run the data center are unsustainable and undemocratic. Read this recent executive summary of data centers pros and cons from CERES, a nonprofit that supports sustainable business solutions.
What is missing is the values-discussion that Aldo Leopold described that is a dynamic process within a thinking community. It is an ongoing discussion that considers the health of the land when making decisions that could decrease its well-functioning. Read The Land Ethic Below. **This is one of the most downloaded files on my blog. People from all over the world read it. My own view is that no one from the scientific community has analyzed “how to live on a piece of land without ruining it” better than Aldo Leopold. See the Aldo Leopold Foundation located in Baraboo, Wisconsin for more about his legacy.
Susan Feathers 