Mapping Our Technosphere to Discover Our Biosphere
Here’s my December 9, 2025 talk on Hart Hagan’s Climate Café: Mapping Our Technosphere to Discover Our Biosphere.
Here’s my (partial) list of resources related to this talk. I look forward to your comments and questions!
EDUCATING OURSELVES ABOUT THE BIOSPHERE AND THE TECHNOSPHERE
Educating children and ourselves as if life depends on nature
THE POWER GRID & MAKING TRANSISTORS ELECTRICALLY CONDUCTIVE
Discovering Power’s Traps: a primer for electricity users
The Big Semiconductor Water Problem
SOLAR PVs & INDUSTRIAL WIND
Why do we burn coal and trees to make solar panels? By Tom Troszak
Opening for Respectful Discussion of Solar PVs and Other Complex Technologies
21 questions for solar PV explorers
Bright Green Lies—book by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Max Wilbert; documentary by Julia Barnes.
Planet of the Humans: film by Jeff Gibbs; produced by Michael Moore
Big Solar vs. Forests by Judith D. Schwartz
BATTERIES/BESS (Battery energy storage systems)
Never Again Moss Landing: The battery fire that should change the world.
DATA CENTERS
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, by MediaJustice.org
“Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, Reimagining: Charting Challenges to Narratives of AI Inevitability,” by Tania Duarte, Ismael Kherroubi Garcia, et al. https://zenodo.org/records/17382120
More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters.
The International Energy Agency expects that data centers’ global electricity demand will double by the end of this decade. Goldman Sachs Research predicts that 60 percent of this increased demand will be met by fossil fuel sources. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-11-26/electricity-price-squeeze-somethings-going-to-give/?mc_cid=d90edeb8c6
Jim Doherty an Oregon cattle rancher and former county commissioner noticed a rise in medical conditions, surveyed 70 wells, found 68 violated the federal limit for nitrates in drinking water. Megafarms using fertilizers generate wastewater laden with nitrates. Then, to cool its servers, Amazon’s data center draws millions of gallons of water from toxic groundwater. Evaporation further concentrates the wastewater, which may contain nitrate levels eight times higher than Oregon’s safe limit.
CELL TOWERS
Cell Tower Health Effects: Science and Policy/Internationally
Electronic Silent Spring (book and website by Katie Singer)
MINING
Photographer
https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
: Over 40 years of bearing witness to the impacts of human industry on the planet
Trump’s Congo Venture: A Scramble for Minerals Under the Guise of Peace by Maurice Carney.
When Land I Love Holds Lithium: Max Wilbert on Thacker Pass, Nevada
A longer-lasting Internet starts with knowing our region’s mineral deposits
Mining the sacred: questions for a sustainable relationship with the Earth (co-authored with Aaron French)
E-VEHICLES
How/can we protect the Earth when we need a car?
Who’s in charge of EV chargers?
WASTE
Josh Lepawsky: Reassembling Rubbish; Discard Studies; Electronic Waste: A Reference Handbook.
How to prevent waste and make money (when manufacturers don’t reduce production, and consumers don’t reduce consumption)
www.ifixit.com (127,000 free repair guides
Gerry McGovern: World Wide Waste; (forthcoming) 99th Day.
RULES & REGS
Policies for More Ecologically-Sound Tech
The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA, S.1462) would fast-track large-scale logging, including in mature and old-growth forests, by gutting core environmental laws like NEPA and the Endangered Species Act. It would expand industry loopholes, block public oversight, and allow commercial logging under vague “emergency” declarations.
Several states have banned the Rights of Nature.
The Trump Administration EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers recently announced The Polluted Water Rule. If enacted, it would let polluters dump in and destroy more waters all across the country than any time in the last fifty years. For more info, see The Clean Water for All Coalition’s toolkit.
The FCC has introduced bills that would fast-track cell tower permits and end the local authority that remains over cell-site placement. To help to stop HR 2289, tell your Congressmember to vote against it.
And then come bills that support AI and data centers. In early November, The Trump Administration and big tech followed up with “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy.” If enacted, this law would penalize U.S. states that pass (or have already passed) laws that limit AI…by threatening litigation against the state and by withholding federal funds for broadband. On November 24, 2025, President Trump launched The Genesis Mission, a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery.”
Again, to resist data centers, check out The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, by MediaJustice.org.