Hi, I discovered LW recently and happily realized this is not Reddit, so, I posted right away and immediately got re-educated. I'm back now and ready to introduce myself. I'm a field environmental/ecological consultant, mostly biology and wetlands. I map my projects with GIS. I've spent probably half of my career working in remote wilderness, forests and deserts all over the U.S. with some brief international volunteerism. The other half of my career is in writing technical documents and making maps.

I did not use AI to write anything below, except to check the accuracy of my reference to Yuval Harari.

In my 40+ years working for state and federal land management BLM, Forest Service and for private and institutional utility developers, I have seen that big private institutions are able to co-opt their employees into lobbying on behalf of their employer against their own interests. And I’ve seen the governmental structures fold under the pressure. (Interesting story examples here but I digress)

I’m surprised that the same kind of corporate-driven co-option on behalf of data centers is facing resistance at a local community level. I’m surprised to not see political polarization around this issue, yet. It’s not just young college graduates, it’s full-time Mom’s and Midwest farmers and grocery clerks that are getting involved in saying, “No” to data centers in their communities.

The energy usage of these data centers are gargantuan and proposed to be using more energy that the entire economies of the communities where they may be located. I read that in Texas, they put a moratorium on data centers when they realized the annual energy demand was more than any peak annual demand in history from all uses in the state!

I first started realizing that something was up about 10 years ago, 2016, when I noticed that all of a sudden the servers that were supplying data for the federal government that I use for remote earth imagery, and census data etc. was being hosted by Amazon. I had to relearn where to get my data and how to access it as the federal government transferred its data storage to these private institutions. It scared me and I had no idea what would be coming with AI.

Now I found out that the Northern “link” of Nevada’s newest electrical transmission line is going to serve data centers not people. It’s a utility project that I had hoped to get work with. Going right through critical desert tortoise and sage grouse habitat. (I had AI make a cool graphic that shows how I feel about this better than all my words, but I'm not going to post it here now) I just finished working on solar projects that started building in 2022 in the California Mojave desert that gobbled up 8,000 acres just in one project but more like 15,000 acres within that region. Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) units were shipped in from Asia purchased by a Tesla subsidiary… so I hear. And the startup funding for the project may have come from Amazon.

But now it begins to make sense as we ponder an AI that that will be smarter than humans, and through the tool of language use, has the capacity to shape civilization. This is according to Yuval Harari, a historian who lectures on the value of story telling in shaping civilization. I see myself like the unwitting Native American trading with these Europeans who arrived on the shore in their wooden boats with metal and written language and being impressed. Feeling like, “Maybe something good can come of this?” While other tribes said, “We should kill them all while we still have a chance”. (I didn't try to make a graphic for that idea in AI)

When you think of the cultural change with the European occupation and conquest of the Americas, the loss of Eastern hardwood forests to agriculture, loss of free roaming herds of antelope and buffalo as the west was fenced and plowed. And that took a couple hundred years. This occupation by a language-bearing alien that is smarter than us and the consequences to the environment and our culture, it will happen much faster.