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environment
Global Declaration Calls for 'Fossil Free Zones' to Protect Climate, Ecosystems, and Indigenous Peoples
“Fossil Free Zones are where the transition away from fossil fuels stops being a promise and starts happening on the ground.”
Nov 12, 2026
More than 40 advocacy groups on Thursday issued a declaration calling on the world's governments to establish permanent "Fossil Free Zones” to protect the climate, critical ecosystems, and Indigenous peoples and their lands from oil, gas, and coal exploration and extraction.
Unveiled at the United Nations Climate Change Conference—also known as COP31—in Antalya, Türkiye, the Fossil Free Zones Declaration urges governments to make the zones a central component of each nation's plans to transition away from oil, coal, and gas.
What is a Fossil Free Zone? As Cecilia Requena, a Bolivian senator and environmentalist, and Juan Pablo Osornio, the engagement and policy director at the nonprofit green group Earth Insight, explained:
A Fossil Free Zone is a defined area demarcated by its ecological, biodiversity, or cultural significance, where exploration, extraction, and development of fossil fuels are permanently prohibited. Think tropical rainforests, key biodiversity areas, Indigenous peoples’ territories, and critical marine ecosystems. They translate the abstract global commitment to transitioning away from fossil fuels into something tangible: a map, a boundary, a legal safeguard.
"Amid deep geopolitical fragmentation and weakening international cooperation, continued dependence on fossil fuels is further exacerbating existing vulnerabilities," the Fossil Free Zones Declarations states.
"Beyond its climate impacts, this dependence exposes countries and communities to volatile energy markets, supply disruptions, and economic instability, while undermining energy security and national sovereignty," the document continues. "Continued coal, oil, and gas extraction also causes unnecessary and avoidable harm to people and nature, including driving deforestation and biodiversity loss."
"Fossil fuel expansion continues to threaten ecosystems essential for biodiversity, climate stability, and the cultures and livelihoods of the peoples who protect them," the declaration adds. "Halting this expansion in critical territories such as forests or coral reefs is therefore an immediate, concrete step toward a just, orderly, and equitable transition, alongside plans to phase out existing fossil fuel production within key ecosystems."
The declaration—whose signatories include WWF International, Amazon Watch, the Science Panel for the Amazon, and Parliamentarians for a Fossil Free Future—calls for halting new fossil fuel exploration and expansion while prioritizing the responsible closure of existing projects in areas of climatic, ecological, and cultural importance.
“Fossil Free Zones are where the transition away from fossil fuels stops being a promise and starts happening on the ground," said Earth Insight senior associate for diplomacy Ignacio Arróniz Velasco. "When governments permanently close critical ecosystems and Indigenous territories to oil, gas, and coal extraction, they protect ecosystems, uphold the rights of the peoples who steward nature, and take a concrete first step towards a full, fair phaseout."
"This can be done with existing tools like nature protection laws or land tenure recognition," he stressed. "This is what implementation looks like. COP31 gives governments a real chance to work together on Fossil Free Zones and build them into their national roadmaps, so the just transition starts in the places that matter most for climate, nature, and people.”
Noting that "the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and should be the most obvious place to draw the line against new fossil fuel development," Susanne Waage, WWF Norway's fossil fuel transition lead, lamented that "Norway continues to explore aggressively for new oil and gas in one of the world's most vulnerable regions."
Waage added that the European Union, "Norway's largest oil and gas customer, has already said no to new Arctic oil and gas. Norway should listen, stop exploring for new oil and gas resources, and help make the Arctic a Fossil Free Zone."
Pascal Mirindi, Democratic Republic of Congo national coordinator of the group Our Land Without Oil, asserted: "We cannot claim to protect forests, peatlands, and vital ecosystems while opening the door to oil and gas within them. In the DRC, these projects threaten territories and the communities who depend on them for their livelihoods."
"Fossil Free Zones offer a concrete and immediate solution," Mirindi added. "Here at COP31, we are calling on governments to end all new exploration in critical ecosystems, to recognize these zones in their national roadmaps, and to guarantee a just transition centered on the rights of communities."
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'Horrific': Supreme Court OKs Trump’s Border Wall Construction in Big Bend
"The damage done to Big Bend will be felt for future generations of Texans and Americans," one advocate said, "and this administration will bear responsibility for the natural heritage we lose.”
Nov 09, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Monday lifted a court order that had halted construction of a barrier wall and roads across Big Bend National Park and the surrounding region, but advocates warned that the "firestorm of outrage" unleashed by the Trump administration waiving of dozens of environmental laws to build the wall would only intensify.
In an 8-1 vote, with Democratic appointee Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the high court lifted an injunction that had been issued October 2 by US District Judge Kathleen Cardone, a Republican appointee in the Western District of Texas.
Cardone handed down the injunction after the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), Friends of the Ruidosa Church, and a Big Bend-area river guide and landowner filed a lawsuit challenging the administration's decision to waive laws including the Endangered Species Act, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the National Park Service Organic Act, arguing that such waivers violate the major questions doctrine, which requires congressional approval for actions with major economic and political consequences.
The majority ruled that construction can continue as the lower court considers its legality, finding that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is permitted by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to waive environmental laws and has “broad authority to construct border barriers and roads."
In August, despite a separate coalition's lawsuit, bulldozers appeared at Big Bend and began leveling part of the national park before the October ruling halted construction.
Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The New York Times he was "completely devastated" by the ruling.
Customs and Border Protection has indicated the agency plans to build vehicle barriers and patrol roads across the national park, including in the remote Mariscal Mountain region, which would require "extensive dynamite blasting," according to CBD.
“The Trump administration and its contractors are hell-bent on destroying one of America’s greatest national parks, and the Supreme Court just gave them the green light,” Jordahl said in a statement. “This horrific decision clears the way for contractors to bulldoze pristine desert and dynamite canyon walls before the courts have even decided whether this destruction is legal. They’re signing off on the permanent destruction of the wildest place in Texas, and the theft of a great American river from all of us.”
Sierra Club also expressed outrage, and US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) said the decision would only "destroy the nature and wildlife that we love at Big Bend."
"The corrupt and far-right Supreme Court just gave [President Donald] Trump the OK to rip up Big Bend with a border wall. No one will be safer or freer," said Casar. "Democrats, Republicans, Texans of all backgrounds all agree: Leave Big Bend alone."
Jordahl emphasized that the court had ruled in favor of the Trump administration less than a week after two Texas Democrats, Sen.-elect James Talarico and Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, stunned the Republican Party with their electoral victories in the longtime GOP stronghold.
Texans “roundly rejected the destruction of this national park and border wall destruction at large," Jordahl told the Times, adding that Mullin's agency “would be wise to listen to Texans and pump the brakes on this project.”
In a statement, he warned that "Americans care deeply about this extraordinary national park and they won’t stand by quietly if its irreplaceable landscapes are butchered and paved over."
"The damage done to Big Bend will be felt for future generations of Texans and Americans," he said, "and this administration will bear responsibility for the natural heritage we lose.”
Hillary Pierce, director of communications for the group No Big Bend Wall, which also sued the administration in September, noted that officials haven't "answered why the government is building a wall in one of the least-crossed stretches of the southern border."
“Once the bulldozers cut through a canyon or a family's ranch gets walled off from the Rio Grande, there's no undoing it," said Pierce. "This isn't the end of our fight. The justices didn't decide whether Big Bend actually qualifies as an area of high illegal entry. That matters because the administration used that designation to justify building the wall and bypassing environmental protections. The government's own numbers show Big Bend has the fewest Border Patrol apprehensions along the southern border. That's exactly what we're challenging in our lawsuit in Washington.”
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Finnish Petition Demands Data Center Regulation After Google Felled 250,000 Trees to Make Way for AI Project
“It has been done in the wrong way," said one resident of the Finnish town of Muhos. "American style. No sense. No sense at all."
Oct 22, 2026
A petition calling for more regulation of data centers in Finland has gathered more than 96,400 signatures—nearly twice the amount needed to force the Finnish Parliament to formally take up the petition for a debate—after Google infuriated residents and officials of two towns where the tech giant illegally chopped down an estimated 250,000 trees across 815 acres of forest after purchasing the land area.
The company felled the trees and stripped the entire area of its top soil without conducting a legally required environmental impact assessment, prompting the Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority (LVV) to order Google to suspend all "measures that significantly change the environment."
The company was given a deadline of October 23 to halt the work in the rural towns of Muhos and Otanmäki, and LVV said it would consider enforcement proceedings and fines if Google does not comply.
Google's Finland country manager, Antti Järvinen, said last week that the company had acted “on the best understanding we had of the legislation at the time" as it cleared the land for its €13 billion ($14.5 billion) artificial intelligence infrastructure projects.
With 145 new data centers planned in Finland, where vast swaths of uninhabited land and the cool climate have attracted AI companies looking to rapidly build out the massive facilities, the petition proposed by citizens calls on Parliament to draft legislation that would ensure data centers are subject to "conditions and restrictions [in] connection to the electricity network."
The legislation must take "into account the capacity of the electricity network, mandatory reserve power, and the utilization of waste heat," reads the petition. "The aim of the legislative drafting is to ensure the adequacy and affordability of electricity for households and other industries."
Citizens are also calling for a "data center fee" to be imposed, "the basis for which must correspond to the environmental damage caused by the operation and the resources used (e.g. electricity, water, land use) to act as a system that compensates for these disadvantages."
Across the US and in other countries, the rapid AI data center build-out pushed by President Donald Trump, tech CEOs, and other leaders has prompted outcry in numerous communities, where residents have led grassroots efforts to block the construction of the centers.
Public approval for data centers has plummeted as residents have raised concerns about the facilities hiking household energy bills, guzzling water supplies, and providing few, if any, long-term jobs.
But Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo of the conservative National Coalition Party has called attracting investment from AI firms a "top priority" for the Nordic country and has promised that Google's development will “deliver lasting benefits for both parties."
Speaking to The Guardian Thursday, Jussi Kangasharju, a computer science expert at the University of Helsinki, was skeptical of those claims.
“Really, for Finland, there are no benefits,” he told the outlet. “They are international companies serving international customers. Very little corporate taxes go to Finland. Data centers ultimately have very little benefit for others except the data center operator.”
Hanna Halmeenpää, chair of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (SLL), expressed disbelief over Google's destruction of the country's prized forests.
“I have never heard that any company has done anything like this in Finland," Halmeenpää told The Guardian Thursday. “They bought the vast land area, and they just started to cut it, just like that... It’s pure arrogance."
Another SLL official, Vesa Hyyryläinen, told the newspaper that wildlife in the forest that used to surround Otanmäki, including nesting woodpeckers, had been pushed out, while a resident whose family has lived in the town for generations explained how Google may have endangered locals by cutting down the biodiverse forest.
“We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest,” Anni Ranta told The Guardian.
Conservationists were unimpressed Thursday with Google's pledge to plant trees across 130 hectares in the Muhos area and to work to protect water quality in the town following the destruction of the forest.
“It has been done in the wrong way," Muhos resident Aantti Jakonen told The Guardian. "American style. No sense. No sense at all."
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'Historic Victory': Judge Blocks Trump's Big Bend Border Construction—For Now
"This fight is far from over," said one campaigner. "We won’t rest until Big Bend’s environmental protections are fully restored and the illegal waiver that allowed so much destruction is gone for good.”
Oct 02, 2026
A federal judge in El Paso on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from continuing construction of border barriers, roads, and other infrastructure across the Big Bend region, a win for environmentalists, landowners, and other Texans from across the political spectrum who are united in their opposition to the project.
US District Judge Kathleen Cardone—who was appointed by former President George W. Bush—granted a preliminary injunction sought by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other plaintiffs.
"The court finds that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of at least one of the claims in [their] suit, that there is a likelihood that they will suffer serious, irreparable harm without an injunction, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest weigh in their favor," Cardone wrote in her two-page decision.
BIG WIN FOR BIG BEND!! A federal judge just issued an emergency injunction to block border barrier and road construction across the #BigBend region. The injunction will remain in place while the court considers a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s waiver to fast-track construction.
— Center for Biological Diversity (@biologicaldiversity.org) October 2, 2026 at 2:18 PM
Cardone's order immediately prohibits the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies from building “border barrier or related infrastructure” or engaging in “any construction or ground-disturbing activities” in the Big Bend Sector until they comply with applicable laws. It also stays the effect of three Trump administration waivers that had allowed officials to bypass numerous federal protections.
“This is a historic victory for Big Bend and everyone who loves this wild corner of Texas,” said Laiken Jordahl, CBD's national public lands advocate. “No administration has the right to destroy a crown-jewel national park for political theater."
"With a federal court ordering the bulldozers to stop, Big Bend gets to breathe," Jordahl added. "But this fight is far from over. We won’t rest until Big Bend’s environmental protections are fully restored and the illegal waiver that allowed so much destruction is gone for good.”
Clara Bensen, director of communications for No Big Bend Wall and a board member of Conserve Big Bend, also welcomed the ruling.
"For months we've watched the federal government send bulldozers into a national park that belongs to all of us. Today a federal judge told them to stop," she said in a statement.
"Since we learned the Trump administration planned to seize public and private land and destroy the Big Bend region as we know it, this community has come together across the political aisle to fight back," Bensen added. "The government tried to ignore the law to build unnecessary border infrastructure, and the court made clear it can't. This is a victory, but we are not letting our guard down."
🚨 BREAKING NEWS: A federal judge just HALTED the destruction of Big Bend.This is a massive victory for the landowners, local communities, and everyday Texans who stood up to protect one of our state's greatest treasures.The fight isn't over, but today, the people won.
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— Clayton Tucker (@claytontuckertx.com) October 2, 2026 at 2:16 PM
The ruling comes after contractors began bulldozing roads and building other infrastructure in and around Big Bend National Park in August, including near Santa Elena Canyon and Mariscal Mountain. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) temporarily halted construction on August 17, but that pause expired earlier this week.
The Trump administration has argued that the project—which initially included plans for a 30-foot-high reinforced steel wall—is necessary to achieve what it calls “operational control” of the border. Plaintiffs in the case challenged the administration's determination under Section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that the region is an area of “high illegal entry,” noting that the government's claim is contradicted by its own statistics.
The Big Bend Sector is among the least-trafficked portions of the southern border, accounting for roughly a quarter of the international boundary's length, but no more than 3% of annual migrant apprehensions. The sector recorded just 1.3% of total border apprehensions in 2025, according to CBP data.
Plaintiffs in the case argued that the administration unlawfully used extraordinary powers to waive environmental and other laws, including the Endangered Species Act, National Park Service Organic Act, and National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Indigenous groups alleged violations of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act.
At Friday's hearing, Rio Grande river guide and landowner Danny William Miller described the prospect of a barrier cutting across his property and blocking access to the river as “a bullet to the head," according to The Big Bend Sentinel.
Miller testified that once the landscape is altered, it cannot simply be restored. His guide work, he said, would become “a tour of the military-industrial complex, rather than a tour of the wilderness.”
Another local resident, Bill Guerra-Addington, told the court, “They’re taking the river away from us, and it’s devastating.”
Friday's injunction is temporary. The underlying lawsuit will continue, and the broader legal battle over Trump's Big Bend border project—and the administration's legally dubious waivers—remains unresolved. On Wednesday, US District Judge Orlando Garcia, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, rejected a request from an Indigenous group and business owners for a temporary restraining order in one of several separate cases seeking to halt work on the project.
Still, National Parks Conservation Association president and CEO Tiernan Sittenfeld called Cardone's order “a victory for Big Bend and for all of America’s national parks.”
"While national park advocates are grateful for this halt to border construction in Big Bend, the devastating toll it has already taken on this national park must be studied and remediated," she said. "The administration must repair the damage it has done to the beautiful, fragile desert ecosystems that make Big Bend National Park one of America’s most iconic places."
“The administration’s border plan at Big Bend has faced strong bipartisan opposition from local landowners, experienced local borderland sheriffs, and conservationists alike," Sittenfeld added. "Big Bend is no place for border barriers. It’s time for the administration to come to the table with the border communities that know Big Bend best, repair the damage from this ill-conceived project, and find new solutions.”
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Groups Call Senate Permitting Deal a 'Blatant Giveaway to Big Oil and Big Tech'
"If it comes to pass, this deal would bulldoze America’s most important wildlife law," said one campaigner.
Sep 30, 2026
A bipartisan Senate proposal to overhaul federal permitting rules drew fierce opposition Wednesday from environmental and wildlife advocates, who warn that the legislation could significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act and other key protections in service of boosting President Donald Trump's pro-fossil fuel and artificial intelligence agenda.
Senate negotiators—chiefly Democrats Martin Heinrich (NM) and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Republicans Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Mike Lee (Utah)—reportedly reached an agreement Monday on the text of a sweeping permitting package intended to speed construction of energy and infrastructure projects.
While the full legislative text of the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026" had not been publicly released as of Wednesday, reported provisions have prompted alarm among conservation groups, who warn that the proposal would weaken endangered species protections, shift federal authority and responsibility to states, limit scientific review and judicial oversight, and exempt some projects from key environmental consultations.
“If it comes to pass, this deal would bulldoze America's most important wildlife law,” Defenders of Wildlife president and CEO Andrew Bowman said Wednesday. “We can build the infrastructure America needs without sacrificing the wildlife we have a responsibility to protect and that Americans cherish. Development should not come at the expense of science, accountability, or the ability of America’s most imperiled wildlife to survive.”
Oil Change International called the proposal "a blatant giveaway to Big Oil and Big Tech."
“This ‘dirty deal’ threatens to raise electricity prices for working families by accelerating the buildout of energy-guzzling AI data centers and liquefied natural gas export projects," said Oil Change International US campaigns manager Collin Rees. "Our recent research shows that the Trump administration’s support for reckless AI development and greater gas exports drives up energy costs for households."
Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), said that “this is a climate kill shot that condemns our most vulnerable communities to suffer decades more fossil fuel pollution."
"It’s absurd to ensure our planet chokes with greenhouse gases, gut endangered species protections, and eviscerate the Clean Water Act for what seems to be a nearly meaningless victory against Trump’s war on offshore wind,” Hartl continued. "The minor benefits for renewable energy corporations are massively dwarfed by the gifts to the fossil fuel industry."
"If this grotesque legislation becomes law, the paltry increases in renewable energy will be instantly devoured by AI data centers," he added. "The only winners here are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, tech oligarchs, and the shareholders of fossil fuel companies.”
According to CBD:
Today’s package contains numerous provisions that lock in thousands of fossil fuel projects, including oil and gas pipelines, [liquefied natural gas] export terminals, and expanded fossil fuel drilling onshore and offshore approved by President Trump over the past two years. It also ensures that future fossil fuel pipelines and methane gas-generated electricity can never be challenged in court.
Additional provisions gut parts of the Clean Water Act, including the Section 401 authority of states to protect their rivers and streams from the impacts of building pipelines and the [Environmental Protection Agency's] Section 404(c) permit veto authority, which has been used to stop projects like the Pebble Mine in Alaska.
The legislation weakens the National Historic Preservation Act and Tribal consultations, leaving most Tribal nations with no meaningful way to protect their sovereignty when faced with potential fossil fuel projects on their lands.
Furthermore, CBD noted, "the legislation guts the Endangered Species Act by allowing states to take over the Section 7 consultation process with minimal safeguards, turning one of the law’s strongest provisions into a state-run rubber stamp of dangerous projects."
The Western Environmental Law Center described the proposal as a “five-alarm fire,” warning that it could weaken the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, [National Environmental Policy Act], and other safeguards.
“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water, and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, the group's executive director, who warned that the measure could ultimately “hobble the ability of future administrations to enact an ambitious climate and conservation agenda.”
Hartl called out Democrats Heinrich and Whitehouse for "giving away our most cherished environmental laws based on fantastical models that project a renewable energy utopia."
"They’re rewarding a ruthless fossil fuel industry that will always put its quarterly profits ahead of a livable planet and future generations,” he said. "Trump promised fossil fuel companies that he’d do everything in his power to assist them in his second term, and Sen. Heinrich and Sen. Whitehouse seem hell-bent on helping Trump fulfill that promise."
Bowman contended that "Congress should be looking for ways to make permitting more efficient rather than a Trojan horse to weaken the Endangered Species Act."
“Efficiency and conservation are not opposing goals," he added. "A durable permitting bill should deliver both. Congress should not lock in permanent damage to the Endangered Species Act simply to get a deal today.”
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Trump Pushes AI Data Centers on Public Land as Big Tech Reaps Billions in Tax Breaks
One expert asserted that "the tax breaks are a windfall rewarding Big Tech companies for building what they would build anyway."
Sep 18, 2026
The Trump administration is considering construction of at least a dozen artificial intelligence data centers on thousands of acres of public land across six Western states, reporting revealed Friday, while a separate analysis found that Big Tech is receiving tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks for AI investments they were already likely to make.
The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is reviewing proposals for at least 12 data centers and related infrastructure projects on 17,600 acres of public land across Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming, according to an investigation published Friday by The Washington Sun's Mara Hoplamazian and Jade Lozada. Many of the proposals had not previously been publicly reported.
The Sun's report came on the heels of an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) analysis published Thursday that found that five major technology companies—Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle—received approximately $70 billion in federal tax breaks in 2025.
The Trump administration is considering proposals for at least 12 data centers and data center-related infrastructure projects to be built on federal public lands — far more than previously known.
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— The Washington Sun (@washingtonsun.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 4:00 AM
Matthew Gardner, who authored the ITEP analysis, wrote that "AI leaders have acknowledged that the demand from other companies for data centers is 'insatiable,' suggesting that the tax breaks are a windfall rewarding Big Tech companies for building what they would build anyway."
According to Gardner:
Few investments in the American economy look less in need of encouragement right now than the hundreds of billions of dollars the world’s largest technology companies are already racing to spend on AI. And it’s hard to think of an investment that American taxpayers value less: Polling shows that Americans dislike data centers, distrust AI, and are concerned about the economic and environmental effects it may bring.
At the same time, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has directed BLM officials to identify federal lands "ripe for data center development," according to the Sun. State BLM officials were reportedly given only three days to compile lists, with the effort described as a "top priority."
Burgum has also been meeting with Big Tech executives about accelerating data center development, an effort stemming from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in July 2025 directing the federal government to identify lands that could be used for data centers.
Mary Jo Rugwell, president of the Public Lands Foundation—a nonprofit advocacy group—and a former BLM state director, recently accused the Trump administration of “bending [the] knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do” without adequate consideration for the impact of data centers on public lands.
Environmentalists warn that building on public land would help tech companies skirt growing public opposition to data centers, which is increasingly transcending the political divide. It would also have outsized consequences for Western states where public lands comprise a disproportionate share of total land area.
“In Oregon, this would be a really bad precedent,” Ben Brint , the senior climate program director at the Oregon Environmental Council, told the Sun. “Some very large percentage of the state is public lands, and if we’re starting to allow that, that’s large swaths of the state that really could be at risk of further development.”
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Elevating Data Center Activism for the 2028 Election
To fight back against Big Tech, the movement must articulate a clear diagnosis of the problem, adapt to changing political landscapes, translate early wins into lasting policy, and forge broad alliances.
Sep 13, 2026
As data centers sprout across the nation, a new movement is emerging to challenge the tech companies building them. The rapid spread of these facilities raises critical environmental, health, economic, and political questions, positioning health, climate, and social justice activists to play a central role in elevating these questions for the 2028 elections.
To date, the movement against data centers has made impressive gains. In the first four months of 2026, local opposition disrupted at least 75 data center projects worth approximately $130 billion. In June 2026, more than 200 advocacy organizations urged Congress to reject legislation fast-tracking the financing and permitting for large AI data centers. By July, New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul imposed a statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers—a model other states and cities are considering. National groups such as Food and Water Watch, the NAACP, Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Democratic Socialists of America have distributed resources to support local campaigns.
Public opposition has shifted dramatically alongside this activism. In August 2025, a poll of 4,000 Americans showed 43% supported having a data center built near their home. Just eight months later, in Spring 2026, support plummeted to 21%—a drop described by the pollster as “a scale of change in public opinion that I didn’t know was still possible in the US.”
However, the movement also faces significant headwinds. Big tech companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to support new data centers to meet AI’s growing computing demands. As Karen Hao explains in Empire of AI, tech owners believe being first and largest will ensure dominance, driving relentless expansion.
Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits?
Earlier environmental movements received some support from presidents seeking environmental legacies, but President Donald Trump provided public subsidies enabling the AI industry to bypass opponents.
Despite widespread local opposition to data centers and bipartisan support for regulation, the movement lacks a comprehensive national narrative to counteract the industry claim that AI will solve all problems. To tell such a story, previous and current movements must articulate a clear diagnosis of the problem, adapt to changing political landscapes, translate early wins into lasting policy, and forge broad alliances. My analysis of past successes of health and environmental movements suggests five strategic pathways emerge for the data center movement.
Connect Concerns About Data Centers to Other Issues People Care About
Successful movements link distinct problems to create multiple paths into activism. The women’s movement brought together advocates for sexual and reproductive healthcare, women of color, working women, lesbians, and people with disabilities. This inclusive alliance built the power needed to expand access to abortion, ban pregnancy discrimination, and protect women from insurance industry bias. Even when differences among its supporters emerged, the movement’s unifying goals provided a framework for common action.
Data center activists have raised health, environmental, and social justice concerns: increasing air pollution, water depletion, and excess noise. One study estimates that by 2028, the annual public health costs of data center air pollution will reach $20 billion. Activists also recognize that data center expansion enables AI and tech companies to deepen surveillance, target harmful social media campaigns, and facilitate harms to mental health.
Organizers can build a unified constituency by addressing both immediate harms (unregulated construction) and systemic issues (AI expansion enriching billionaires at public expense).
Build Crosscutting Coalitions
Effective movements united diverse groups around shared economic and social interests. The Fight for $15 movement successfully raised the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, in at least 68 cities, counties, and states, winning more than $150 billion in higher pay for more than 26 million workers. It united low-wage workers, unions with the resources to pay organizers, and activists from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.
Data centers activists can replicate this coalition approach. They can link residents concerned about the impact of local data centers and workers and labor unions whose jobs will be displaced by the growth of AI. They can enlist advocates for democracy, social justice, and tax reform who object to the political influence and low taxes of tech billionaires.
Pursue Transitional and Transformative Goals
Movements frequently debate whether to emphasize immediate or long-term goals. In the movement for universal healthcare, organizers argued whether to support the Affordable Care Act as a step forward or to demand Medicare for All to reduce healthcare industry power.
Mark Hannay, from Metro New York Health Care for All, suggested a “both-and framework.” Metro fought for Medicare for All, but also for funding for New York City’s public hospitals and Medicaid and stronger regulation of the healthcare industry.
Data center and AI activists adopt this approach by pairing immediate demands—such as construction moratoria and stronger air and water protections—with long-term systemic reforms, including antitrust enforcement, elimination of corporate subsidies, and higher taxes on tech billionaires.
Use Multiple Strategies to Achieve Policy Goals
ACT UP, a leading force in the fight to get the government to respond more effectively and rapidly to the AIDS epidemic, used inside-outside, disruptive and conventional, and litigation and community organizing to achieve its goals. ACT UP found that multiple approaches increased pressure on the government to respond and mobilized more constituencies.
The data center movement has already used community organizing, demonstrations, litigation, legislation, and media campaigns to advance its goals. Maintaining this diversity, aligning its deployment to maximize impact, and developing a strategic plan for 2028 and beyond will help sustain momentum and drive policy wins.
Articulate a Vision
Enduring movements unite people around a vision grounded in shared values. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a world where character triumphed over skin color provide a moral vision for the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, environmental justice activists have proposed that all people have the right to environmental protections and a voice in shaping their communities’ environments. This expansive vision has enabled this movement to win local, state, and national policy changes and bring together environmental, climate, people of color, and women’s activists across the country.
Data center and AI activists are raising core questions: Who should decide whether communities allow data centers? Who pays the long-term costs and reaps the benefits? What role should voters—rather than tech industry executives—have in directing the future of AI?
By offering clear, practical answers and using the experiences of past activist campaigns, the growing data center-AI movement can put these questions on the nation’s electoral and political agenda. In doing so, they can become a powerful force for healthier, safer, and more just communities and a world where AI is used to benefit humanity.
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The Time Has Come for a 'Right' to Clean Water
Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
Sep 10, 2026
Sometimes defeat can be clarifying.
Last week, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit against the City of Jackson, Mississippi, in which the plaintiffs alleged that city officials knowingly allowed residents to drink water that was unsafe, tainted with lead and dangerous microbes.
The facts are not in dispute. “The City’s public-water system is fraught with vexing shortcomings,” the court found. “In recent years, it produced water containing lead, E. Coli, and other bacteria, allegedly violated the Safe Drinking Water Act and EPA regulations, shut down and left residents without water for weeks, and necessitated the issuance of dozens of boil-water notices.”
Despite this, the court ruled that the lawsuit could not move forward. The problem for the plaintiffs, as the court found, was that these harms do not rise to the level of constitutional harm. “These deprivations, while grievous,” the court wrote, “do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.” And so the court rejected their arguments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press.
What are we to make of a situation where a city can neglect its responsibilities, knowingly expose its residents to dangerous and life-altering contamination, and get away with it because, in the eyes of our legal system, “mismanagement of the public-water system resulting in Plaintiffs’ lead exposure is wholly different” from “sexual assault by a police officer,” “forced surgical examination,” “forced stomach pumping for evidence,” “and medicating prisoners against their will”?
Is it truly all that different? Just because the law excuses it, should we truly accept injustices that contaminate our bodies, make us sick, and cause lifelong learning disabilities in children?
We don’t have to–there is another option. We regroup. We reorganize. And we fight back. And in this case, we have a solution.
“It is undisputed that the [US] Constitution does not guarantee clean water,” the court wrote. That’s true. But it's not the whole story.
In Mississippi and in most states across our nation there is no constitutional right to clean water. But in three states, with dozens more on the same path, there is.
In Pennsylvania, the Commonwealth’s Constitution guarantees the “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and esthetic values of the environment.” It adds: “Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come,” and requires all government officials–both state and local–to conserve and maintain the state's natural resources for the benefit of the people.
The State Constitution of Montana recognizes the inalienable right “to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities.”
And New York’s constitution declares, “Each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”
It’s called a Green Amendment, and it is explicitly designed to protect people from harm like that suffered by the residents of Jackson, Mississippi.
Green Amendments are self-executing provisions added to a state constitution’s Bill of Rights or Declaration of Rights that recognize, protect, and guarantee the inalienable rights of all people to an environment of quality, including pure water, clean air, a safe climate, and healthy environments.
Green Amendments legally elevate our rights to a clean, safe, healthy, and quality environment to the same level as our rights to speech, religion, and a free press. Green Amendments are clear in their protections, deriving their strength from plain and clear language, proven legal theories, and robust constitutional court precedent.
In short, Green Amendments rely upon the highest legal authorities we have in the US–our state and federal constitutions–and use their placement within the Bill of Rights to make environmental rights an unquestionable, enforceable legal entitlement for everyone.
When our rights to free speech or religion, to a free press or freedom of assembly are infringed upon by government action, we do not sit idly by and accept it. We rise up and demand our rights be protected, secure in the knowledge that we are backed by the clear and powerful language of our constitutions. Why should our right to pure water, clean air, or a healthy environment be any different? With Green Amendments they do not have to be.
Today pollution and environmental desecration are seen as entitlements of powerful industrial and political interests. Recall that in Sterling v. City of Jackson the court agreed that the city was poisoning its residents–but wouldn’t let the plaintiffs sue to rectify it with a remedy that protected all city residents from harm. Instead the court suggested that pursuit of tort claims, likely resulting in money damages for those who could document harm from the contaminated water, was good enough. That’s just the way it is, the court shrugged.
With Green Amendments, we transform this expectation. Our entitlement to a clean, safe, and healthy environment becomes the baseline government must responsibly protect.
Environmental issues are all around us these days: rising carbon emissions driving ever-hotter summers; PFAS, lead, mercury, and other toxic chemicals leaching into our drinking water; the hyperscaling of data centers slurping up ever growing amounts of land, water, and power.
With Green Amendments we may not always win when we experience environmental injustice, but they give us the constitutional ability to say, “No,” to push back, and to fight for our rights.
A Mississippi Green Amendment could have meant a very different outcome for communities living in the City of Jackson.
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Trump EPA Takes 'Yet Another Sledgehammer' to Clean Water Act
"This proposal declares open season on the nation's waterways," one critic charged.
Sep 04, 2026
President Donald Trump's administration sparked fresh fury on Friday when it proposed a supplemental rule to further gut Clean Water Act protections for streams and wetlands in the wake of a "catastrophic" US Supreme Court ruling three years ago.
The supplemental proposal from the Department of the Army and Environmental Protection Agency builds on their widely criticized proposed rule from November for defining "waters of the United States" (WOTUS)—both of which go further than the high court did with its 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA.
While the American Petroleum Institute and some Republicans in Congress joined Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in promoting the new proposal, environmental and public health advocates sounded the alarm.
"What the Supreme Court did in its Sackett decision was an inexcusable assault on clean water," Jon Devine, director of freshwater ecosystems at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a Friday statement. "Communities and wildlife will pay the price until Congress fixes it. The Trump administration's answer has been to make a bad situation worse."
"This proposal declares open season on the nation's waterways. It denies federal protection to virtually all wetlands and more than three-quarters of our streams, endangering drinking water supplies and flood-prone communities—and the agencies admit it themselves," he noted. "The proposal would virtually eliminate protection for freshwater wetlands. Their own analysis says most streams would lose protection, with the West hit hardest."
Food & Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen declared that "Trump is taking yet another sledgehammer to our bedrock Clean Water Act, shamelessly doubling down on his initial terrible proposal to strip protections from countless streams and wetlands."
"Make no mistake: This unlawful proposal gives bad actors the green light to fill, drain, and poison sensitive waterways from coast to coast," she warned. "The result will be dirtier water for everyone. The administration must reverse course on this dangerous proposal."
Gary Belan, senior director of American Rivers' Clean Water Program, stressed that "our nation's water resources are precious and increasingly at risk. This is not the moment to be jeopardizing the nation's water security by narrowing the safeguards of the Clean Water Act."
The public comment period for the initial proposal has closed but, as Belan noted, the publication of the supplemental rule in the Federal Register kicks off a new 30-day period. He said that "while we appreciate EPA's effort to seek more public comment, the proposed changes will have consequences that will impact communities across the nation if finalized."
"The proposed definitions do not reflect the established science on how rivers function and would significantly reduce the scope of the Clean Water Act," he continued. "When headwater and intermittent streams and wetlands lose protection, downstream flooding worsens, the costs of drinking water treatment rises, and water supplies become less reliable."
Jim Murphy, the National Wildlife Federation’s associate vice president for legal advocacy, pointed out that "this is now the fifth effort to define the scope of the waters protected by the Clean Water Act in the past decade. We need Congress' help to get off this merry-go-round at a place that protects our waters, our wildlife, and our way of life."
"The administration is clearly struggling to craft a rule that will hold up in court while satisfying their donors' desire to effectively scrap these protections wherever possible," he added. "One thing is clear: If we don’t protect our streams and wetlands, the cost of dirtier drinking water and increased flooding will flow downstream to households at a time when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck."
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The Blessings of Wendell Berry in a World Cursed by Men Like Elon Musk
Musk indulges in the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.
Sep 01, 2026
Wendell Berry, who died Monday at the age of 92, was such a great man that I hardly know where to start. He was on the very short list of the best writers of our time: His essays on rural America were the words that launched 10,000 farmers markets; his poems, the staple of many happy weddings (and I’ve peed in a dozen different bathrooms where the Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front was framed above the toilet). If you’ve never read his short stories of the Port William Membership, or his finest novel, Jayber Crow, you can count yourself lucky that you’ll get to encounter them for the first time.
Berry was also, of course, politically engaged. I remember standing with him 20 years ago, at a protest against the Capitol Hill power plant that I’d asked him to attend. It was a bitterly cold day, and at one point he turned to me and smiled and said, "Do you think maybe they’ll arrest us soon?" He didn’t particularly like movements, but he understood the power of moral witness; he occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, in a protest against mountaintop removal coal mining, with a toothbrush and volume of Shakespeare in his pocket.
And, perhaps above all, his life was a work of both art and politics—his decision to give up a New York lit’ry career and to return instead to the Kentucky of his boyhood, settling along the Ohio River where he and his wife Tanya farmed and he wrote, embodying the commitment to place and community that animated his writing. (His family is asking that in lieu of flowers people might send a donation to the Berry Center that is carrying on his agrarian work).
I was very lucky that my wife handed me a copy of his essay collection Home Economics about 40 years ago, when we were still courting. If I hadn’t fallen under his spell I’m not sure I would have spent my life in rural America, red state and blue; I know that he taught me how to see my town and my county, and my country and my species, in new-old ways that have undergirded all my work. And I’m very glad that we became friends, visiting and writing back and forth. His droll good humor rarely faltered, in my experience. I did not agree with him at all times, nor he with me—though he had solar panels behind his house, for instance, he didn’t think they belonged on farmland, while I think they’re a boon to both farmer and planet. But we agreed on most things of real dimension, and I was always delighted to see in the mailbox a letter with the return address of Port Royal Kentucky. He was one of the last people with whom I had a true written, as opposed to electronic, correspondence. Sometimes he’d tap things out on a manual typewriter, but more often it would be in pencil, on lined yellow paper.
The most recent arrived in July, and after news about grandsons and granddaughters it contained his newest discovery, a 1940 volume titled Stops, A Handbook for Those Who Know Their Punctuation and Those Who Aren’t Quite Sure. He was recommending it to me on the grounds that it is the “only book of my acquaintance that makes grammar delightful,” but also because he’d noted that it was published by the press (now defunct) at Middlebury College, where I teach. So while the rest of us were figuring out how to enlist Claude to help with our composition, one of the best writers of our age was still enjoying sharpening his prose, just as he enjoyed sharpening the tools of his work in field and forest. “I’m writing this on the porch of the ‘camp house,’ still unwired, built, I think, in 1964, in the woods between the river and the road.” He died on that farm on Monday, surrounded by family.
I got the news about his passing even as I was trying to grapple with the latest from a man who will attract more notice when he dies, but less affection. Elon Musk is always advancing his own vision of the world, of course—in fact, he’s just pledged to spend $100 million helping Republicans this fall. Or maybe $200 million—neither would be a noticeable sum to a trillionaire, of course. Whatever good he did with his early advocacy for electric vehicles has now been undone 100 times over with his advocacy for the people who hate EVs and all the other things we need. (He’s, as of last week, building gas turbines to make more electricity for his right-wing Grok AI project, already polluting the air of Black neighborhoods in Memphis).
He offers the Nazi salute; we are at his behest settling thousands of refugees from white South Africa (and no others) in our country; his rancid racism has destroyed Twitter. It would be a pleasure never to think of him again, but because he’s the richest man in the world, one has to monitor what he says. And here’s Monday’s installment, from of course his own social media site:
Extremely severe extinction events happen every 100M years or so and just switching to sustainable energy will not be enough to stop them.
Space satellites to control temperature and massive geo-engineering will be needed or it will be game over.
The disingenuousness of this is remarkable. Extremely severe extinction events have indeed happened just five times in the last half-billion years, which means it would be extremely unlikely we’d spontaneously come across one any time soon: Human civilization is, after all, just 10,000 years old. And yet of course we face one, not because of anything nature has done, but because we’ve filled the air with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel, which his allies wish to continue indefinitely. “Just switching to sustainable energy” is in fact the one good, scalable weapon we have to fight that, but since he’s a part of the political movement against this idea, he is now backing an alternative: “space satellites to control temperature,” which he further explains will be accomplished by a “super-intelligent swarm” of “sentient satellites, launched into Earth-Sun Lagrange points by mass drivers on the Moon.”
This is the kind of fantasy that drove Berry to distraction (and to work)—all about control and domination, all done by the few to the many, utterly ignorant of context. Immodest in every way.
But in Musk’s case it was accompanied by another revelation that began to emerge over the weekend. It turns out that the human toll of the horrific rampaging floods on the Nepal-Tibet border may well have been exacerbated by Musk’s decision to destroy the US Agency for International Development early in the DOGE assault on our government. USAID, in collaboration with NASA, helped maintain a network of monitors high in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. Musk, in February 2025, “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.” One casualty was apparently this network. As Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw America’s response to the 2015 Nepal earthquake, wrote this weekend on (ironically) X:
DOGE famously used keyword searches for terms like "climate" to terminate federal grants. Among the victims: a collab between USAID and NASA for flood prediction, early warning, disaster readiness, glacier inventories, and mapping dangerous glacial lakes in Nepal.
As Konyndyk added:
Could these programs have helped foresee or mitigate this week's glacial flooding catastrophe? Hard to say with an outlier event like this. But that was their purpose.
Sadly, it's hard to anticipate or mitigate climate hazards which your ideology has decreed do not exist.
Musk’s victims already number in the millions—a Lancet study predicts 14 million by 2030 as the indirect results of shutting down America’s humanitarian work, which puts him up there in the Stalin-Mao category, and almost certainly the most deadly human of this millennium. So maybe a few thousand more people hardly matter.
But contrast what Musk did with the actions of a principal at a school along the river. When a friend upstream phoned one of his teachers a blurted warning, he immediately evacuated the entire student body, saving at least 900 lives. Given a warning, he acted (precisely what the world has not done with climate change). “I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Rajendra Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”
Principal Dawadi will spend the rest of his life going to the weddings of the students whose lives he saved, and I imagine there will be no small number of babies named in his honor. Elon Musk’s name will be cursed—the richest man in human history, who used his wealth and power to kill the most vulnerable people on the planet.
Here is a recent poem of Wendell Berry’s, published in The New Yorker less than a year ago and titled "The Loved Ones":
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.
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