Earth to Data Centers
Earth to data centers,
A message to the City of Reno, the centers themselves, and all who will listen.
The people are screaming a message at the top of their lungs.
Our waterways, our sustenance to life, the seeds of our cities are at risk. For what? A massive hard drive to store ideas, notes, and creations so that we no longer have to think? No longer get to learn to think?
I think Ailton Krenak, in his collection of essays titled Ancestral Future, said it best: “What we’re doing by polluting the waters that have existed for two billion years is putting an end to our own existence. Water will continue to exist here in the biosphere and slowly regenerate because rivers have that gift. It’s we who have such an ephemeral existence that we’ll end up dried up, as enemies of the water”.
Of course, it is not just the people. We exist as a part of an ecosystem. A food chain and neighborhood of symbiotic mutualism. It is never just the people.
The fish will go first. The Cui-ui, the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, the Fish Lake Valley Tui Chub, the Clover Valley Speckled Dace, the Railroad Valley Springfish. Fish already listed as threatened or endangered, for which these data centers will trigger an implosion of population. The others will soon follow. No more fishing the riverbanks of the Truckee, or the deep waters of the lakes. No more splashes of rainbow-scaled tails against the ripples. The state fish will be but a memory.
One day, the ducks that hatch their eggs and raise their young on the shrubby banks of the river will find that there is not much left for their feet to paddle. That their ducklings get sicker and sicker until they begin to hatch dull and scraggly and then not at all. They will survive in small numbers until one day, walking down the path by the river in springtime, we will no longer hear the sound of the birds quacking. They will have left for clearer open waters, wherever those may have retreated to.
The snakes that slink through the clear blue waters and sun themselves against the rocks will hide away in the mud. Less and less will appear each summer until they become a story to tell to our grandchildren. “Did you know there used to be great snakes that lived in the High Sierra?” We will creek, and they will respond with a laugh that is a mirror to the disbelief we have hearing stories of the great planes of bison.
The plants will begin to wilt. It is already dry up in the High Desert, and the small rainfall their stems reach upwards to pray for is only a supplement to aid what they receive below, from the groundwater and the river. They will come back less and less every season, the roses smaller, the grass a sicklier yellow, until they stop coming naturally back at all. And the trees. The trees with their roots tapped deep into the soil, soaking up the little groundwater, they will hit a point where there are not enough nutrients to grow taller, where their leaves don’t fill out to the same shade cover, where the parks become a growth stunted monument to the deterioration of our health as a whole.
The bugs are going to thrive. Not the pollinators, those go with the flowers, nor the worms, they die off with the roots. The flies and gnats and mosquitos that live off of uncomfortable and dying things, those ones will thrive.
Terrible for property value.
Fuck property value. What about our farms? Northern Nevada is a food desert, sustained by the I-80 route bringing produce and box trucks from California. The land is stewarded by the foraging hands of the Washoe, Northern Paiute, and Western Shoshone people and the cities built on the backs of Basque farmers. What happens to it when it can no longer grow, and what happens to the people?
River Justice, an Indigenous led organization in northern Nevada, has been fighting to protect the Truckee River Watershed through countless challenges and changes, this is only the newest one. But cannot just be the people of River Justice who care. It should not be.
We have heard this a thousand times since elementary school, since 1971. “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.” and “Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
It comes off childish, to quote a children's book on an issue so real, dark, and looming, but when words are true, there is no changing them. Sometimes the most obvious and simplest way is the correct one.
So what to do? Listen, then act.
The people of Northern Nevada, of every city and town facing the construction of a data center on their waterway, are telling the world: Stop. Look around. Do not do this.
Today, the Water Over Data Alliance meets in the Reno City Council to request a moratorium on data centers in the city. This is just a step, a toe in the right direction, towards halting the progress of the Keystone and Oppidian data centers and shutting down PowerHouse, Central Digital, and Vantage data centers before they begin construction.
The most powerful detail, the one that should not be ignored, is that public comment on these meetings lasts all day. Until it is cut off. On a weekday, during working hours, the city shows up. The people stand their ground.
We say we have seen this before. We have seen the hills mined to toxicity. We have seen the trees cleared until nothing but sagebrush is left drifting the desert. We will not let it happen again. We do not need one “Hayduke” to die for the cause, nor a “Lorax” to speak as loud as he can. That does not work. We need to all do our part, say our piece, and stand together in opposition.
Ironically, in a time of extreme political polarization, this is the issue that brings us together. Where people from both sides of the aisle and all connecting doors can join together in the common realization that this is not worth the cost.
I am from rural Alaska, and I have seen this before. In Pebble Mine, where the salmon runs and water quality were threatened by the pursuit of gold. At Point Hope, where Project Chariot would have killed off both an ecosystem and a way of life. Up in the Western Arctic where the Caribou are now protected from developing petroleum reserves. In the Tongass Forest, where old-growth trees are now protected from logging. Closest to myself, in the wilderness of Denali, where the commuting corridor stretches to the side of the dirt road, heavily restricted to access, and leaves the remaining 2.14 million acres to its natural existence.
It is the words and work of the people that made all of this possible. We can do it again, here, in the Truckee River Watershed.
We need this river, in its purest form, to learn from. To live both next to and with. To shape our city and our civilization.
As Ailton Krenak has said “A river is a path within a city that allows for movement, despite the fact that it has been some time since people decided to stay put in cities. Children are taught in classrooms that one of the world’s earliest civilizations originated in the delta of the Nile River in Egypt, where the river’s waters irrigated the banks and provided conditions for agriculture – this civilizing idea. We have always been near water, but it seems that we have learned very little from the language of the rivers.”
Take the chance to learn from the river. From the waters around and the creatures that dwell amongst them. Even if you do not know them, they know you. A part of the chain, we are all connected.
Give that chance to your children, your children’s children, and to the people who will one day buy the land you now live on and transplant themselves into this dusty soil. Hope that they will grow taproots deep enough to feel the lifewater of the Truckee.
Speak out so that they can.
Krenak, A. (2024). Ancestral future (R. Carelli, A. Brostoff, & J. Pinheiro-Dias, Trans.). Polity Press.
Seuss. (1971). The Lorax. Random House Children’s Books.
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