Who will win the water: computers or living creatures?
Water doesn’t need us to save her—she needs us to remember we are her.
—Casey Camp-Horinek, Ponca Nation
Have you noticed that electronics manufacturers, telecom access networks and data storage centers can’t survive without water?
Starting with mining for raw materials, manufacturing electronics can cause lakes to disappear—and create health hazards for living creatures.
While the tech industry expands, so does its water consumption. Google’s new environmental sustainability report explains: "As our business continues to grow, so does our water use: our overall water consumption increased by 28% from 2023 to 2024.”
Meanwhile, we’re encouraged to admire children who use electronics before they have speech (or mastery of reading, writing and math on paper)—without awareness of computers’ water demands—let alone their impacts to brain development.
I blinked—and then noticed people marveling that A.I. can make us more productive and save us from ecological disaster. I noticed A.I.’s influence in doctors’ thinking, insurance company decisions, grocery stores’ shelves and children’s education. Some parents use robots to answer their kids’ questions and stop fights.
Advocating for regulations around social media use, data storage centers, solar facilities, battery storage, e-vehicles, EV chargers and other technologies…tends to result in people saying “technology is inevitable”—and dismissing its consequences.
Call this a Contest for Survival between living creatures and computers (and tech corporations). Where do households and communities have control?
To begin, we need to know what resources manufacturers, Internet providers, A.I. providers and other developments take from our watershed—and how they pollute it. We need to move toward living within our own watershed’s offerings of water, food, fuel and ores.
WATER DEMANDS AND WATER POLLUTION
Mining and smelting ores for electronics contaminates groundwater with heavy metals and radioactive chemicals—and threaten living creatures’ health.
In Memphis, Elon Musk’s massive xAI data center burns enough gas to power a small city, with no pollution controls. While its permit allows only 15 methane gas turbines, the facility’s 33 turbines increase Memphis’s smog by 30-60% and belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde, pollutants linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Once the data center becomes fully operational, cooling its servers will consume one million gallons of water daily.
In Mansfield, Georgia, Mark Zuckerberg’s two million square foot data center dirties nearby residents’ water—or shuts it off.
A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium—with plans to build 30. The site powers Anthropic, an A.I. system that aims to match the human brain. The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity—enough to power a million homes—and millions of gallons of water annually.
Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) is building a two-gigawatt data center in Louisiana. OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.
In New Mexico, Bishop’s Lodge and Auberge Resorts and their landowner, Juniper Capital, seek the state’s approval to dump partially-treated sewage from 80+ homes and the resort itself into an undersized leach field that is 75 feet from Little Tesuque Creek and the aquifer. The plan threatens the entire Tesuque region’s water supply. In response, Protect Tesuque filed a Writ of Mandamus to the NM Supreme Court requesting that Bishop’s Lodge Resort:
1. acknowledge all community needs by providing a solution that satisfies the resort’s need to dispose of its waste and the Tesuque Valley and Tesuque Pueblo residents who depend on down-gradient wells for drinking water.
2. connect treated discharge to the Municipal System. (Until this happens, require comprehensive testing of contaminants including PFAS and pharmaceuticals; increase filtration of toxic contaminants; and relocate the low dose disposal area to a higher elevation to keep effluent out of down-gradient wells.)
On July 8, the NM Supreme Court cleared the way for the resort’s wastewater plan by passing the task of issuing the permit (or denying it) to State Environment Cabinet Secretary James Kenney.
In all of these developments, no regulations protect public health or ecosystems. Protections have become corporate options.
TOWARD LIVING WITH RESPECT FOR WATER
Some individuals and communities still find ways to collaborate with nature.
After centuries of mining, deforestation and soil erosion in India’s Chamball Valley caused droughts, floods and lack of water, Dr. Rajendra Singh and his teams have increased “love of water,” rejuvenated 13 rivers and healed thousands of communities.
Alpha Lo offers ways to heal algae blooms and pollution in lakes and oceans.
In 2019, after Toledo residents overwhelmingly voted for The Lake Eric Bill of Rights, the Ohio legislature prohibited communities from enacting “rights of nature” laws. In 2020, after two communities banned single-use plastic bags, the Ohio legislature banned local “bag bans.” The Ohio Community Rights Network seeks to overturn the legislature’s rulings by asking voters on the November 2027 ballot to reject state preemption and reaffirm the right to make decisions locally.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), assists organizers like the Ohio Community Rights Network with ordinances and charter amendments that protect water, air, soil and residents. CELDF helps communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises and assert the right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective local power. On July 21, CELDF will offer a free discussion with grassroots activists from the Philippines and Appalachia about organizing more effectively, protecting ourselves and building solidarity against tyranny.
MORE OPTIONS FOR YOUR BIOREGION
· Get informed about your local water situation. How much water do farmers and residents consume? How much water goes to industry? How is polluted water treated? How can we encourage healthy water cycling and soil moisture?
· Compost food waste with worms or, in a small space, a Bokashi bin.
· According to a new study, only one country—Guyana—is self-sufficient in all seven food groups. Survey your community for skills in growing, cooking and preserving food; in self-help health care, midwifery and burial practices; in identifying edible weeds; in restoring healthy water cyles and watershed ecosystems; in repairing electronics (which impacts ecosystems less than buying new); in building tool-lending libraries; in insulating homes. Meet with neighbors who want to discover how to reduce dependence on electronics and live within your watershed’s offerings of fuel, food, water and ores.
· Create an economy that operates within planetary boundaries.
OPTIONS IN THE TECHNOSPHERE
· Starting with one substance in your computer, get informed about how computer use, Internet access and A.I. impact water health internationally.
· Read Patricia Burke’s piece about how the tech industry impacts our thinking about health.
· Buy into a corporation for investment activism. With just one share (of, say, Amazon, Google, Tesla or a utility), you’ll have rights that customers may not have and ability to influence corporate decisions.
· Wherever possible, say NO! to new tech. Given—for one example—the tech industry’s campaign to embed artificial intelligence chatbots in classrooms (and hook future customers), parents and other groups will need or organize. Challenge yourself to find one person who also aims to limit their tech use.
Can you help keep this substack going?
I keep trying to tell people that AI will use our resources that we need for mankind but everyone blows me off and keeps using more and more AI.
Great article!!