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environment
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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Wendell Berry, Writer and Activist Who Fought Corporate Takeover of US Farming, Dies at 92
“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” Berry said in 2009.
Sep 01, 2026
The death of poet, activist, and conservationist Wendell Berry on Monday was called by one labor organizer "a loss of morality and clarity and compassion," as admirers of Berry's lifelong crusade to defend the environment honored his memory by sharing favorite poems and other works.
Berry died at the age of 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he spent decades writing about his farming the land, teaching, and writing about the need to fight "the concentration of farmland into larger and larger holdings and fewer and fewer hands," as he wrote in one of his best-known works, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.
"The true measure of agriculture is not the sophistication of its equipment, the size of its income, or even the statistics of its productivity, but the good health of the land," wrote Berry in the essay collection, published in 1977.
He stressed that the "increase in overhead, debt, and dependence on machines" in the agricultural sector "is a matter of complex significance, and its agricultural significance cannot be disentangled from its cultural significance."
The Unsettling of America was one of more than 50 works published by Berry, whose commitment to interdependent community-building, small farms, and the protection of nature was woven into his fiction, poems, and essays alike.
In America magazine in 2021, Jon Sweeney wrote in a review of What I Stand On, a collection of Berry's writing, that "he writes about what he has experienced, what he has learned, and always with humility for what he does not know."
"The natural world is his primary teacher: its rhythms, its largesse, its mysteries,” Sweeney wrote. “And in the essays, the natural world often reflects how change in humans is also natural, inexplicable, and possible. I think this is what many who love his writing appreciate most about Berry, whether they realize it or not."
Berry traveled and taught briefly at New York University as a young man before returning to his Kentucky roots, remaining there for six decades. He told The New York Times in 2018 that writing and working in rural Kentucky "made a permanent connection between me and my native place, and with its landscape. The landscape was there to check me if I was wrong. I could never go away and make up stuff at cocktail parties about the backwoods of Kentucky. I worked with people here in all walks of life and learned from them."
In his 1969 essay "The Long-Legged House," named for the two-room cabin his ancestors had lived in, to which Berry returned to write his books and other works, he offered an early warning about the harm humans and their industries—agribusiness and fossil fuels—were doing to the Earth.
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world," wrote Berry. "We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
The writer Joyce Carol Oates said on social media on Monday that "long before it became a more familiar subject, Wendell Berry was conscious of the endangered natural environment; indeed, Berry helped to raise this consciousness."
In addition to making his views on the environment and corporate control over the natural world known through his writing, Berry took part in direct actions to protest mining, war, and capital punishment.
He rallied against the US war in Vietnam, saying, "Peace is more important than victory," and was arrested in 1979 for protesting the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant in Madison, Indiana. Thirty years later he was one of thousands who marched on Washington against the Capitol Power Plant, and two years after that, in 2011, Berry spent the night at a sit-in in the Kentucky governor's office to protest mountaintop removal mining.
In 2009 he also withdrew his writings from the collection of University of Kentucky, his alma mater, to express opposition to the university's $7 million donation from a coal producer; the school then named a dormitory Wildcat Coal Lodge.
“I was taught that taking care of land was one of the primary human responsibilities,” Berry told the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, at the time. “In the long run, the top soil, the forests, and the woodland of this state will be more valuable than the coal deposits.”
Silas House, another writer who hailed from Kentucky, said that with Berry's death, "another great light" had gone out.
House described the writer as "complex. Brilliant. Revolutionary."
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Overflowing Bins in Bethlehem Tell a Bigger Story
They are telling the story of a city under pressure, a story of institutions struggling to maintain essential services, a story of workers trying to do their jobs under increasingly difficult circumstances.
Aug 23, 2026
The world knows Bethlehem as the city of the Nativity. It is a city of churches, olive groves, ancient stone streets, and a history that attracts pilgrims and visitors from across the globe. For many, Bethlehem symbolizes peace, hope, and human resilience.
Yet in recent weeks, another image has emerged. Overflowing garbage containers. Piles of waste left uncollected for days. Unpleasant odors drifting through neighborhoods. Stray dogs searching through torn plastic bags. Flies, rodents, and growing public concern about health and sanitation.
For residents, these scenes are disturbing. For visitors, they are difficult to reconcile with the image of one of the world's most recognized and beloved cities. But the garbage accumulating in Bethlehem's streets is not the real story. It is merely the most visible symptom of a much larger crisis. The question is not why a container is overflowing. The question is what happened to the system behind it.
At first glance, it may seem like a simple municipal problem. A shortage of fuel. A broken truck. Workers on strike. Delayed collection rounds. The reality is far more complicated.
The environment does not understand politics. It understands only what we do—or fail to do—to protect it.
Waste management depends on an entire chain of institutions, workers, vehicles, roads, fuel supplies, disposal facilities, municipal revenues, and public cooperation. When enough pressure is placed on that chain, it begins to break. And in Bethlehem, pressure has been building for years.
The city has suffered repeated economic shocks. The tourism sector, once a major source of income, was devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Before it could fully recover, the war and the broader economic crisis brought new hardships. Businesses struggled. Workers lost jobs. Household incomes declined. Many families found themselves prioritizing food, rent, and basic necessities over municipal fees.
As revenues declined, local institutions found it increasingly difficult to sustain essential services. At the same time, operational costs continued to rise. Fuel became more expensive and, at times, harder to secure. Vehicles required maintenance. Equipment aged. Service providers struggled to balance growing needs with shrinking resources.
The crisis does not stop there.
Road closures, military gates, and movement restrictions have increasingly complicated daily life throughout Bethlehem Governorate. What should be a routine collection route can suddenly become longer, slower, or more expensive. A delayed truck today may become an overflowing container tomorrow.
Even the final destination of the waste is not immune from these pressures.
The Al-Minya landfill, which serves communities in southern parts of the West Bank, represents a critical component of the region's waste management system. Any disruption affecting access, transportation, security, or operations along this chain eventually reaches the streets of Bethlehem and surrounding communities.
The result is a problem that residents experience every day. A container left uncollected. A street corner filled with waste. A smell that lingers in the summer heat. A growing sense that something is no longer working as it should.
When waste accumulates, the consequences extend beyond appearance.
Overflowing garbage attracts stray dogs, insects, rodents, and other disease vectors. It increases environmental risks and can create fire hazards during hot weather. It affects public health, community well-being, and the quality of life in neighborhoods already facing multiple challenges.
This is why waste management should never be viewed as a secondary service. It is not simply about removing garbage from the street. It is about protecting public health. It is about preserving human dignity. It is about maintaining the environmental quality of cities and communities. It is also about protecting the people who perform this difficult work.
One night, at around 2:00 am in the morning, I drove into Bethlehem to take my wife to catch an early bus to Allenby Bridge Boarder with Jordan. While most of the city slept, sanitation workers were already on the streets. Wearing reflective orange uniforms, they swept roads, emptied containers, and loaded waste onto trucks. Few residents would ever see them. By sunrise, most traces of their work would have disappeared.
Their presence reminded me that waste management is not an abstract system. It depends on real people working under difficult conditions, often exposed to hazards that most citizens never think about.
But workers alone cannot solve this crisis, neither can municipalities, nor can citizens. Responsibility is shared.
Citizens must reduce the waste they generate, support cleaner public spaces, and contribute to the sustainability of essential services whenever possible.
Municipalities and service providers need stronger planning, better resource management, and long-term financial stability.
National institutions must support local governments struggling under extraordinary economic and political pressures.
And international partners should recognize that environmental services are not luxuries. They are fundamental to public health, social stability, and human dignity.
There is another reason this issue deserves greater attention. Pollution does not recognize borders. Smoke from burning waste does not stop at a checkpoint. Contaminated water does not respect political divisions. Air pollution travels wherever the wind takes it.
The environment does not understand politics. It understands only what we do—or fail to do—to protect it. That is why environmental protection requires cooperation, shared responsibility, and long-term vision.
Bethlehem does not simply need more garbage trucks or more containers. It needs investment in sustainable solutions. It needs stronger institutions. It needs public awareness. It needs serious efforts to reduce waste generation, expand reuse and recycling, and create economic opportunities through a circular economy approach.
Most importantly, it needs recognition that environmental challenges are not isolated technical problems. They are deeply connected to economic conditions, governance, public services, and the daily lives of ordinary people.
The overflowing containers seen today across Bethlehem are telling a much bigger story. They are telling the story of a city under pressure, a story of institutions struggling to maintain essential services, a story of workers trying to do their jobs under increasingly difficult circumstances, a story of economic hardship, environmental vulnerability, and a community searching for sustainable solutions.
And perhaps they are also reminding us of something simple: Garbage does not appear overnight. Neither do environmental crises. Both are the result of problems left unresolved for too long.
If Bethlehem is to remain the beautiful city that the world knows and cherishes, addressing those problems can no longer wait.
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Almost Overnight, the Data Centers Were Everywhere in My Community—Don't Let This Happen to You
Virginia spent years asking how quickly it could build data centers. But Maryland and other states have an opportunity to ask a better question: How do we embrace innovation without sacrificing the affordability, environment, and quality of life that make our communities worth living in?
Aug 21, 2026
I’ve lived in Northern Virginia my whole life, but no one told us we would soon be living alongside one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world.
No one asked our community whether we wanted them. No one explained what they would mean for our neighborhoods, our landscape, or our monthly bills. Then, almost overnight, they were everywhere. Massive industrial buildings rose where open space once stood. The constant hum became part of daily life. And one month, our electricity bill didn't gradually creep upward, it nearly doubled.
We were told these projects would bring jobs, innovation, and economic growth. What we weren't told was what residents would be expected to give up in return.
Now, as I watch Maryland debate whether to accelerate data center development, I can't help but feel like I've seen this story before.
As someone living with the consequences of Virginia's choices, my advice is simple: Don't wait until the bills arrive, the forests are gone, and the data centers are already built to ask whether they were worth it.
For years, Virginia has been held up as the nation's data center success story. But if Maryland leaders only see Virginia's balance sheet, they're missing the growing backlash from the people who live here.
I have watched forests disappear, industrial buildings replace open land, electricity demand surge, and communities be transformed by sprawling server farms. Everyone I know is asking whether the promised economic benefits outweigh the environmental and financial costs.
Maryland has a choice. You can rush to replicate Virginia's model, or you can learn from our mistakes before it's too late.
The conversation surrounding data centers has largely centered on artificial intelligence and economic development. But too often, what gets left out are the communities expected to absorb the costs.
Supporters frequently describe data centers as major job creators, but the reality is more complicated. Construction creates temporary employment, yet once operational, many hyperscale facilities require relatively few permanent workers. Communities are often asked to trade farmland, forests, neighborhoods, and increased pressure on utilities for projects that may never deliver the long-term economic engine they were promised.
That trade-off deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
The race to build data centers is being driven largely by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence. Every major technology company wants more computing power, faster infrastructure, and greater capacity. But history teaches us that economic booms rarely continue unchecked. America has seen speculative waves in office construction, shopping malls, and commercial real estate that far exceeded demand before markets eventually corrected.
No one can say with certainty whether today's data center boom will follow the same path. But uncertainty itself is reason for caution, not acceleration.
Maryland should pause before repeating Virginia's mistakes. A statewide moratorium would give policymakers time to complete a comprehensive assessment of the environmental, economic, and energy impacts of these facilities; strengthen safeguards for communities; ensure developers bear the costs of new infrastructure; and give the public a meaningful voice in decisions that will shape their neighborhoods for generations.
Virginia spent years asking how quickly it could build data centers.
Maryland has an opportunity to ask a better question: How do we embrace innovation without sacrificing the affordability, environment, and quality of life that make our communities worth living in?
As someone living with the consequences of Virginia's choices, my advice is simple: Don't wait until the bills arrive, the forests are gone, and the data centers are already built to ask whether they were worth it.
By then, the answer may come too late.
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'Ecocide': Israel Accused of Deliberately Starting Wildfires in Lebanon
“They had already bulldozed the whole village," said one mayor of a southern Lebanese town. "Then they set fire to the trees."
Aug 12, 2026
Environmental and rights advocates are condemning what one academic called "the latest in a neverending series of international crimes" by the Israel Defense Forces as firefighters and residents in southern Lebanon report that the IDF has purposely started destructive wildfires by continuing to bomb the region.
The blazes are an attempt, one town mayor said Wednesday, to make it appear "as though nobody had ever lived here.”
Israel renewed attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon in March, as the US-Israeli war on Iran widened across the Middle East. Following a "ceasefire" agreement in June, Israeli forces have continued occupying about 20% of Lebanese territory after forcibly displacing over 1 million people from the southern part of the country.
Israeli officials have said they aim to apply the "Gaza model" to Lebanon, deploying the kinds of attacks that have destroyed 90% of civilian infrastructure in Gaza since the IDF began attacking the exclave in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz recently boasted that the IDF had destroyed 24 villages “that had existed for hundreds of years."
Now, Hafez Ghasham, mayor of the southern town of Yaroun, told The Guardian, “they are trying to make the land uninhabitable."
“They had already bulldozed the whole village. Then they set fire to the trees. What remained in this particular area were the olive trees—large groves, with very old olive trees," Ghasham told the newspaper. “Many of these trees, most of them, in fact, were inherited from our grandparents and parents. They have enormous sentimental value. The trees were also an important source of income for the people of the village."
Residents who had been forced out of Yaroun said they learned from people in nearby Christian towns that their olive and fruit groves as well as many homes had been set on fire by Israeli soldiers.
The head of Civil Defense in the Nabatieh region said about 30-40% of the land in the area had been affected by the fires, and firefighters have been forced to withdraw as they've tried to extinguish the flames as the IDF has launched drone strikes after the initial attacks that sparked the fires.
"There are enormous areas of woodland that have burned," Hussein Fakih told The Guardian.
Kelley B. Vlahos, editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, noted that "while the rest of the world is trying to put out forest fires this summer, Israel reportedly started them as a military tactic," even following the Lebanon ceasefire.
Last Friday, large wildfires were caused by Israeli munitions and drones that struck woodlands in Kfarchouba and in the area between Jezzine and the western Bekaa valley.
The Israeli military has accused Hezbollah of using woodland areas as cover for its military outposts and tunnels. The IDF has similarly defended extensive bombing of Gaza's schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure by claiming Hamas operates in tunnels beneath the buildings.
In a statement, Hezbollah's media relations officials said the fires represent "a continuation of urban destruction, the bulldozing of infrastructure, and the theft of ancient olive trees."
"The party called on the government, the Ministry of Environment, and all relevant authorities to speak out and act immediately to halt Israeli savagery against the environment, human life, and infrastructure," reported Al Mayadeen.
Hisham Younes, the founder of Lebanese conservation group Green Southerners, told The Guardian that Israel's bombing of forested areas amounts to "ecocide."
“These are long-established woodlands," said Younes. "They perform critical functions. The wider area is also an important passage and resting ground for migratory birds."
“It is not about any single fire or attack, but a pattern of destruction that progressively erodes the ability of ecosystems to function, regenerate, and sustain life," Younes added. "When those cascading effects also undermine livelihoods and people’s ability to return to and remain on their land, environmental destruction becomes inseparable from the wider transformation of the territory itself.”
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Amazon Says New Texas Data Center Won't Raise Utility Bills—But It Will Supercharge Pollution
"Instead of building a modern, clean energy source to power its increased AI-driven electricity demand, Amazon chose to invest in a massive natural gas power plant to fuel its giant Texas data center."
Aug 10, 2026
Amazon is boasting that the new data center it plans to build in Pecos County, Texas will be self-sustaining in its use of electricity, as the company has acquired permits to build a 7.65 gigawatt gas plant to power the massive facility, ensuring it won't raise electricity prices for households in the area.
But the savings on utility bills will likely come at a cost for the US at large and the planet, as well as locals in West Texas.
According to reporting from Cleanview Newsletter on Friday, the site acquired by Amazon, GW Ranch, has a permit from the state allowing the construction of a gas power plant that could emit 33 million tons of carbon pollution, which would make it by far the largest single source of pollution in the US.
The James H. Miller Jr. Power Plant, which burns coal in Quinton, Alabama, is currently the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, sending about 16 million tons of pollution into the atmosphere each year.
Power plants generally emit less than the maximum amount of carbon permitted, but the unprecedented limit for the new plant, which is being developed for Amazon by Pacifico Energy and will have 35 natural gas turbines, means it is likely that the company's project will far exceed the pollution caused by the plant in Alabama.
The permits viewed by Cleanview, which tracks data centers and sustainable energy development, show that the power plant would be disconnected from the state's electricity grid, at least at first, and an Amazon spokesperson said the company "believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations" and would not "raise electricity costs for Texas families."
The on-site power generation will be "designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection timelines allow," the spokesperson added—suggesting the data center could ultimately raise household electricity costs as well as supercharging carbon pollution in the area.
The company further tried to allay fears of the impact of the new data center and its dedicated power plant by saying it plans to use brackish water that isn't safe for irrigation or consumption at GW Ranch; along with data centers' impact on utility costs, communities have protested against the facilities across the country due to their massive water consumption.
But the advocacy group Climate Action Campaign said Sunday that in its rush to join the nationwide artificial intelligence data center buildout as President Donald Trump has demanded, Amazon "chose dirty power over clean."
"Instead of building a modern, clean energy source to power its increased AI-driven electricity demand, Amazon chose to invest in a massive natural gas power plant to fuel its giant Texas data center," said Margie Alt, the group's director. "During this excessively hot and dry summer, riddled with forest fires and unbearable air pollution, a move like this is truly unacceptable."
With Amazon pledging to eliminate its pollution-causing emissions by 2040, the company's decision to join Meta, Microsoft, and Google in investing in its own power plant to build a data center was an example of "yet another major corporation dodging accountability," said Alt.
"This isn’t innovation," she said. "Despite its massive resources, Amazon is shirking its own responsibility and the industry’s promises of computing progress without the economic or health burdens to local communities. The result of that broken promise is that communities will pay the consequences with their health and their wallets."
According to Cleanview, Pacifico Energy has plans to eventually build up to 750 megawatts of solar generation and 1.8 gigawatts for battery storage capacity at GW Ranch.
As it potentially doubles the amount of planet-heating carbon emissions that are currently sent into the atmosphere by the James H. Miller Jr. Power Plant, the plant at the GW Ranch site could heighten the risk of developing heart disease, asthma, chronic respiratory illnesses, and other health problems for people living and working in the area.
"Progress shouldn’t come at the expense of the rest of us just to power billionaires’ ambitions," said Alt. "Shame on you, Amazon!”
The project, Kathryn Guerra, a campaign director at the watchdog group Public Citizen, told The New York Times, will "absolutely have a huge impact on the environment, and on public health."
The project was made public weeks after Trump insisted that "smart" communities want data centers to be built in their vicinity—but numerous polls have shown the facilities, which offer few long-term jobs as they raise costs for families, are sparking outcry from across the political spectrum.
About 70% of respondents to a Gallup poll in March said they would oppose the construction of a data center in their area. About half of those who expressed opposition said they were mostly concerned with the environmental impact associated with data centers, or the potential for resources to be gobbled up by the facilities.
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Trump Administration Proposes Gutting Environmental Rules to Speed Space Race
"This would put untold species directly in harm's way," the Center for Biological Diversity warned.
Jul 29, 2026
Under pressure from companies owned by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the Trump administration announced this week that it will waive what it called "unnecessary environmental laws and regulations" in order to expedite the approval of commercial rocket launches.
The US Department of Transportation's (USDOT) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is proposing to waive numerous environmental review requirements and related federal laws that currently apply to commercial space launches, citing legal authority Congress granted to the secretary of transportation.
The proposed changes—on which the public has 30 days to comment—would make it much faster and easier for space profiteers to get permission to launch rockets or operate commercial spaceports in the United States by allowing the FAA to waive part or all of over a dozen laws and rules, including National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
“America won the first space race, and we can do it again—but only if we get government red tape out of the way,” US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Tuesday. "That’s why President [Donald] Trump has charged USDOT with unlocking the final frontier and reestablishing the United States’ dominance in space."
Trump’s FAA announced today that it intends to exempt #space launches and spacecraft reentries from complying with environmental laws like the #EndangeredSpeciesAct. This will put untold species directly in harm’s way.You can be sure we’ll fight this obscene giveaway to special interests 🚀🚀
— Center for Biological Diversity (@biologicaldiversity.org) July 28, 2026 at 4:08 PM
The USDOT said that other federal agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) or the US military, may still be required to conduct environmental reviews under the law for launches on some federal property.
The proposal follows Trump's August 2025 executive order, "Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry," which critics charge was issued to benefit Musk, the world's richest person, and his company SpaceX, which is seeking to dramatically increase launches and landings and has suffered a series of rocket explosions. Trump has boosted other companies—including X and Tesla—led by Musk, who served for a period last year as de facto head of the president's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Opponents warn that, if approved, the proposed changes mean that the FAA would generally no longer require environmental studies or consultations before issuing commercial space licenses.
“NASA has conducted space launches for decades in a responsible way, but now Trump wants to gut even the most basic environmental safeguards to enrich some of the world’s wealthiest people,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “We’ve seen real environmental damage from the exploding rocket toys of the superrich. You can be damn sure we’ll fight this obscene giveaway to special interests.”
In 2024, SpaceX was punished with a paltry $150,000 in fines for violating the Clean Water Act after it discharged tens of thousands of gallons of industrial waste from a launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas.
CBD and other green and Indigenous groups last month sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service in a bid to stop the Trump administration from handing over 715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas to SpaceX in exchange for 683 acres elsewhere.
On Wednesday, CNBC revealed that six US lawmakers from both major parties—including five who sit on committees that regulate SpaceX—had or have family investments in the company, raising concerns over apparent conflicts of interest.
In addition to environmental concerns, Trump has also come under fire for militarizing space in contravention of the Outer Space Treaty—which the US has ratified—by launching the Space Force as an official service branch during his first term.
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Remembering Richard Heinberg, Who Challenged Us to Live Well and Love the Earth
What Richard would want is for each of us to redouble our efforts toward his vision of people and nature thriving within ecological limits. One full of bird song, music, and laughter.
Jul 27, 2026
This is the hardest article I’ve ever had to write.
On Sunday July 19th we lost our kind, brilliant friend and colleague, Richard Heinberg.
The world has lost a voice of clear, truth-telling wisdom—a man whose work reached millions of people and fundamentally changed the lives of thousands. Perhaps that includes you. It certainly does me.
Richard died after a short, brutal illness. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just two weeks before his passing. As you can imagine, we’re reeling and gutted.
In ways big and small, Richard displayed humility, gentleness, and joy—especially for someone grappling with such complex and difficult subject matter.
If Richard’s contributions impacted you in any way, we’d love to hear your reflections. Please visit his memorial site to share your own stories or learn more about Richard.
Countless people came to know Richard only through his books, articles, lectures, and interviews. Yet many felt as though they knew him personally. That was one of his remarkable gifts. He challenged people to face difficult truths without giving up on beauty, community, or the possibility of living well within Earth’s limits.
There’s so much I can and simply cannot say about Richard as a person and as a writer and teacher. Working alongside Richard for the last 18 years has been one of the biggest gifts in my life. In ways big and small, Richard displayed humility, gentleness, and joy—especially for someone grappling with such complex and difficult subject matter. An inveterate introvert, Richard was often quiet in groups but when he spoke it was additive, given with generosity, kindness, and humor, and always with a focus on the greater good.
When he wrote, on the other hand, it was with such powerful clarity, unflinching truth telling, and a talent for presenting complex issues in a brilliantly accessible way. He could weave together ecology, thermodynamics, history, anthropology, behavioral psychology, politics, and more into expansive explorations, as he did with his 14th and final book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, or into succinct storytelling, as he did when narrating the award-winning animation, “300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds.” He could jump from writing about the collapse of industrial civilization to writing about what he learned from chickens. Perhaps the best example of Richard’s breadth is this recording of him playing the violin and giving a talk on “Post-Carbon Music” at the New England Conservatory of Music.
I’ll miss Richard’s smile, his laugh. I’ll miss the few times when I got to see him get mad at the stupidity or cowardice of those in power. I’ll miss hearing him talk about trying to conquer an early jazz tune or the simple joy he got from his afternoon chocolate or shot of espresso. I’ll desperately miss the way he could take my meandering ideas for topics to explore and turn them into brilliantly cogent essays in a matter of hours or days. I simply loved our collaborations.
While grieving and in shock, and frankly a little lost about how Post Carbon Institute will find its voice without him, I think what Richard would want is for each of us to redouble our efforts toward his vision of people and nature thriving within ecological limits. One full of bird song, music, and laughter.
We would love to hear from you. Please share your remembrances of Richard here.
With a heavy heart,
Asher Miller
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