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environmental justice
Virginia's Data Center Alley Reveals Big Tech's Vision for America
Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another noisy, polluting data center hub, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process.
May 09, 2026
Even if you’ve never stood next to a data center, you’ve probably felt its impacts. For instance, if you’re one of the 65 million people served by regional transmission giant PJM in the eastern United States, a huge spike in projected demand for electricity, driven almost entirely by proposed data centers, has raised your electric bills. But standing next to a data center—or worse, living next to one—is where you can really feel the totality of its impact. I didn’t fully realize this until I spent time in the belly of the beast.
In January, I took a trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, home of the notorious Data Center Alley, to do research for my new podcast project for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance called “The Data Centers Are Coming.” I wanted to learn about how ever-expanding data center facilities impact their neighbors. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw as I crested a rise on the freeway: 199 operational data centers laid out before me and around 100 more under construction, densely packed together and sprawling to the horizon. So much digging and building left everything covered in red dust, giving the whole scene an eerie, Martian feel. The noise was unbelievable, clanking metal and chugging diesel engines all atop a deep industrial hum.
The people that live here are experiencing negative health effects stemming from pollution and chronic severe noise exposure. I talked to people in neighborhoods where folks no longer hang out in their yards because of the noise, in turn becoming isolated from their neighbors. I heard about people spending thousands on renovations just so they can sleep through the noise. One Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch—equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.
People die here, too. I visited Tippets Hill Cemetery, a historic Black burial ground dating to before the Civil War, now surrounded on three sides by monumental, noisy data centers. It was like nothing I’d ever seen or heard.
As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
This is Big Tech’s vision for America. Their behavior reveals an air of entitlement to turn any community they choose into another Data Center Alley, extracting massive resources and tax breaks in the process. Elon Musk built what he called the world’s biggest supercomputer next to the Boxtown neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee. Dismayed at the idea of waiting for a grid connection to power his massive electricity needs, he plopped more than 30 huge generators in the parking lots next to his Colossus data center, essentially building an unregulated gas power plant himself. This, of course, circumvented any regulatory processes, spewing dangerous pollution into adjacent Boxtown.
It’s worth noting that Boxtown is a historically Black neighborhood, founded by freedmen after the Civil War. But according to the logic of data center proponents, the land was already a lost cause. One podcast guest said, “Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he’s also doing it in an area where there’s like, a bigger natural gas plant right next door and like, a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby, right?” By this logic, the presence of other polluting facilities somehow gives data centers permission to pollute more. Industry has already colonized these communities, so what’s a bit more colonization?
My research travels also took me to remote, mountainous Tucker County, West Virginia, home to a few idyllic small towns and a thriving outdoor recreation economy. A mysterious shell company, Fundamental Data, is trying to build a data center and power plant next to the landfill between the towns of Davis and Thomas. Many residents there have concluded that Fundamental Data saw old strip-mined land behind a landfill and considered it theirs to extract from.
Nikki Forrester is one such resident refusing to accept this data center land grab. An organizer with Tucker United, she argues that thinking the only use for old strip-mined land is industrial development is a failure of imagination: “You could do a lot of restoration and trail development and all sorts of stuff on old strip mine land. We bike on awesome bike trails through old strip mines all the time.” Restoring this land for outdoor recreation would keep with what people love about Tucker County, not to mention what drives much of the local economy. Building a data center on that land threatens all of that.
The story of companies seeing community resources and assuming that they can easily extract them because “nobody is using them anyway” is not new. Indeed, such thinking runs beneath America’s 250-year history and beyond, from the seizure of Indigenous lands to highway expansion, from industrial agriculture to today’s data center boom. But another undercurrent of American history is localized resistance to corporate power and extraction, from the Boston Tea Party to the West Virginia Mine Wars, from the Great Railroad Strike to the successful unionization at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.
We see that resistance today as vibrant and fearless coalitions form across the country to resist the corporate extraction of data center construction. These coalitions are so strong in part because people of all stripes, across the political spectrum, resent the idea of tech corporations feeling entitled to their local resources. As West Virginia advocate and researcher Cathy Cunkel told me, the data center issue “isn’t about Left vs. Right, it’s about Up vs. Down.”
When framed this way—the powerful and rich vs. the people they’re trying to extract resources from— the data center fight becomes another chapter in a long American history of resisting corporate extraction enabled by feckless, unimaginative politicians.
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The Climate Reckoning That the Nuclear Arms Control Can’t Ignore
Climate change and nuclear weapons reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
May 07, 2026
At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945, a 9,000-pound atomic bomb detonated 1,900 feet above Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing another 40,000.
The sheer scale of destruction—that humans could annihilate each other by means as violent as a nuclear blast—ensured that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would become the defining images of nuclear weapons in the American imagination. According to a 2025 Pew Research survey, 83% of Americans reported knowing at least something about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan. However, increasingly large numbers of younger Americans don’t know enough about nuclear weapons today to give an opinion on their role in national security.
What is often remembered as the only detonation of nuclear weapons in history remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in warfare. While Americans looked overseas at the devastation in Japan, fewer recognized that nuclear weapons were also transforming the American environment at home.
For decades after World War II, nuclear weapons reshaped landscapes and communities across the United States. Between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,030 nuclear tests, while producing tens of thousands of warheads during the Cold War. At its height, the US nuclear stockpile comprised 31,255 warheads, with the last fully functional nuclear weapon being produced in 1989. The environmental and human consequences of this effort extended far beyond test sites and production facilities. Yet, the US government kept the public in the dark, leaving a generation born in the 21st century to bear the consequences of its obfuscated proliferation campaign.
The Nuclear Transformation of Marginalized America
Consider that the plutonium used in the first nuclear test in New Mexico and in the Nagasaki bomb was produced at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Between 1945 and 1970, Hanford’s reactors discharged roughly 444 billion gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Columbia River basin, a watershed that today supports over 8 million residents.
Other sites tell similar stories. In South Carolina and Georgia, rural communities were displaced to make way for the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons facility, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste were stored in underground tanks.
Make no mistake, the United States federal government was calculated in its targeting of marginalized communities to isolate radioactive material from the general population. These facilities were often located in rural or economically disadvantaged areas, where political resistance was limited and land was cheaper.
Nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Currently the only permanent waste site for nuclear material in the United States, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, collects plutonium-contaminated waste to be buried over 2,000 feet underground a salt flat formation. Framed as a barren wasteland far from major population centers, WIPP is in Eddy County, New Mexico—home to a population of over 61,000 people, of which 64% identify as people of color. Many communities face contaminated water supplies and elevated rates of respiratory illness, kidney disease, and cancer: a pattern sometimes described as “radioactive colonialism.”
Despite the government’s efforts to isolate nuclear activities and waste disposal, radioactive contamination did not respect geographic boundaries. Research released in 2023 found that nuclear tests conducted between 1945 and 1962 distributed radioactive fallout across 46 of the lower 48 contiguous states in the United States, as well as parts of Canada and Mexico. As a result of nuclear tests conducted by both the United States and other nuclear-armed powers, radioactive isotopes released into the atmosphere spread throughout the world in communities far from test sites. By the 1960s, “there was no place on Earth where the signature of atmospheric nuclear testing could not be found in soil, water, and even polar ice.” Radioactive isotopes entered the food chain through plants and animals, creating pathways of exposure far from any test site.
For most people living far from testing areas, these exposures were small. But they illustrate a fundamental reality of nuclear weapons: Even carefully controlled programs produce global environmental consequences. Even when the government attempted to isolate radioactivity and testing in supposedly remote communities, contamination from weapons production, testing, and disposal still spread far beyond those sites, affecting environments across the world.
The Renewed Nuclear Arms Race
While the United States has not conducted a full-scale nuclear test since 1992, nuclear competition is accelerating again.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, with estimates suggesting that its stockpile could exceed 1,000 warheads by the early 2030s. At the same time, arms control agreements that once constrained the world’s largest nuclear powers are eroding. The expiration of the New START treaty in February 2026 removed the last formal limits on US and Russian strategic nuclear forces.
Even if informal limits remain in place, the collapse of binding agreements signals a shift toward a less regulated nuclear environment. Some policymakers have suggested that renewed nuclear testing may be necessary in response to foreign advances, which would risk repeating many of the mistakes of the Cold War.
Consider that for the first time in history, the new nuclear proliferation environment includes a three-way standoff between three major armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia.
Mutually Assured Climate Destruction
A global nuclear war alone would be enough to trigger catastrophic climatic effects. Even a limited nuclear exchange could inject vast quantities of smoke and soot into the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering global temperatures. The use of a mere 2% of the world’s current arsenal could trigger severe cooling and agricultural disruption, leaving 2 billion people at risk of starvation in just the following two years. If nuclear winter renders any use of nuclear weapons as unsurvivable, then deterrence may be an inadequate strategy, since the consequences of a miscalculation or accidental launch would increase dramatically.
This erosion of international nonproliferation channels comes as climate change fuels geopolitical instability by intensifying resource competition, migration pressures, and regional conflicts, increasing the risk of confrontation among nuclear-armed states. Climate change and nuclear weapons therefore reinforce one another in dangerous ways: Environmental stress increases the risk of conflict, while nuclear conflict would produce environmental consequences on a planetary scale.
Bridging the Gap: Building the Next Generation of Advocates
Despite these connections, environmental and social justice concerns remain peripheral in most nuclear policy debates. Discussions of deterrence and arms control typically focus on military balance and strategic stability, while the environmental legacy of nuclear weapons receives far less attention.
This gap may help explain why nuclear policy often struggles to engage younger generations.
Surveys consistently show that climate change is one of the defining concerns of younger voters. Roughly 70% of young people report deep anxiety about environmental degradation and say they are likely to support candidates who prioritize climate policy. Nuclear weapons policy rarely speaks to these concerns directly. Yet nuclear weapons represent one of the most profound environmental risks humanity has ever created.
Reframing nuclear policy to include environmental and social justice considerations would not only reflect historical reality, but also make nuclear policy more relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.
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'This Is a Fight for Humanity': Meet the 2026 Winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize
“The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress," one foundation leader said.
Apr 20, 2026
The Goldman Environmental Foundation announced the six winners of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday, honoring an all-female slate of advocates who protected wildlife, took on extractive industries, and won important legal victories in the movement to halt the climate crisis.
The announcement comes as world leaders have failed to make progress in addressing environmental challenges, and President Donald Trump, leader of the world's largest historical climate polluter, has withdrawn the US from the Paris Agreement, rolled back climate and environmental regulations domestically, and made efforts to supercharge the extraction and use of fossil fuels.
“While we continue to fight uphill to protect the environment and implement lifesaving climate policies—in the US and globally—it is clear that true leaders can be found all around us,” John Goldman, vice president of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, said in a statement. “The 2026 prize winners are proof positive that courage, hard work, and hope go a long way toward creating meaningful progress."
The 2026 prize is notable because it marks the first time that all of the winners—Iroro Tanshi of Nigeria, Borim Kim of South Korea, Sarah Finch of the United Kingdom, Theonila Roka Matbob of Papau New Guinea, Alannah Acaq Hurley of the US, and Yuvelis Morales Blanco of Colombia—are women.
'There's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
"I am especially thrilled to honor our first-ever cohort of six women, as this is a powerful reflection of the absolutely central role that women play in the environmental community globally,” Goldman said.
The winners also exemplify the prize's 2026 theme "Change Starts Where You Stand," as each of them began with a fight to protect a local community or ecosystem that has global implications for the climate, biodiversity, and environmental justice.
As US-based winner Alannah Acaq Hurley said, "At the end of the day, this is a fight for humanity, and, honestly, our ability to continue as humans on this planet."
Here is how six remarkable women waged this fight and won.
Iroro Tanshi
Iroro Tanshi is a Nigerian conservation ecologist who has worked successfully with local communities to protect endangered bats and their rainforest habitat from wildfires.
Tanshi was elated in 2016 when she discovered the short-tailed roundleaf bat, previously believed to be extinct in the area, living in Nigeria's Afi Mountain Wildlife Sanctuary. However, two weeks later, a devastating wildfire ignited, forcing Tanshi to evacuate and ultimately impacting around half of the park.
Tanshi then turned her attention to preventing wildfires, which are sparked by traditional farming practices rubbing against the climate crisis.
"The way people manage these farms is they use fire to clean the farms every year, but climate change has completely toppled the pattern of rainfall and people can no longer predict when to burn safely," she explained in a video.
Tanshi and her team worked with local communities on a Zero Wildfire Campaign, which includes educating farmers on when it is safe to burn and forming a team of "forest guardians" to patrol and fight fires on high-risk days. Due to her efforts, these guardians put out 74 fires between 2022 and 2025, preventing any of them from becoming major blazes.
"My hope for the future is that people would take these small-scale projects as signals for what the future should look like," she said. "Let's stay nimble. Let's try to work in our small communities and solve those problems there on the ground."
Borim Kim
Borim Kim helped win Asia's first successful youth climate lawsuit, inspiring people across the region to demand government action on climate.
Kim was first motivated to take collective action when a heatwave baked Seoul in 2018, killing 48 people including a woman near her mother's age, who died in her home.
"I realized that even home wasn't safe from the climate crisis," she said in a video. "I started looking for what I could do."
Inspired by the international youth climate movement, she founded Youth 4 Climate Action (Y4CA) and helped organize school strikes and walkouts. After her activism led to meetings with policymakers, she realized that national leaders had no real plans to address the climate crisis. In 2020, she and Y4CA mobilized 19 young people to sue the South Korean government for violating the constitutional rights of future generations. Once the case was launched, she also continued to build a social movement for climate action.
In August 2024, the country's Constitutional Court ruled in favor of the young people, mandating that South Korea reduce its emissions in line with the scientific consensus, a decision the environmental minister accepted. The ruling is projected to prevent between 1.6-2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere.
"Youth may be seen as having a lower position in society, but now this decision has affirmed our right to live safely and the state's duty to protect us," Kim said.
Sara Finch
On the other side of the world, Sarah Finch also secured a precedent-setting legal climate victory.
Finch lives in a part of southeastern England called the Weald. While it is currently a rural area, it hosts oil and gas reserves that were eyed for exploitation during the fracking boom of the 2010s. Finch helped form the Weald Action Group to push back against many potential wells, but they were not able to stop the Surrey County Council from approving the operation and expansion of a drilling site called Horse Hill in 2018.
In gearing up to challenge the decision, Finch discovered that the council's environmental impact statement had only considered emissions from direct drilling at the site, but not the emissions generated from the burning of the fuel once it was extracted, also known as Scope 3 emissions, which make up around 90% of oil and gas' contribution to the climate emergency.
"It became apparent that it was actually the norm that Scope 3 emissions were being emitted from these kinds of decisions, and we realized that actually it was happening everywhere and in much bigger developments than Horse Hill," Finch said in a video.
She and her team challenged the environmental impact statement over its failure to consider Scope 3 emissions, losing multiple times before finally securing a groundbreaking victory from the UK Supreme Court in 2024, which has come to be known as "the Finch ruling."
The UK government cited the "Finch ruling" when it revoked its backing of two North Sea oil developments. Overall, the projects canceled or delayed in 2024 due to the ruling would have generated enough Scope 3 emissions to equal the UK's domestic greenhouse gas emissions that year.
"It wasn't just a win on Horse Hill," Finch said. "It wasn't even just a win on a handful of sites. It was a win on the whole future of the UK oil and gas industry. And I feel like, there's lots of people doing really good things and, together, we are going to make the world a better place than it would otherwise have been."
Theonila Roka Matbob
Theonila Roka Matbob was born into an environmental disaster. Rio Tinto's Panguna Mine had devastated the ecosystem of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB), destabilized its society, and led to a civil war that killed 15,000-20,000 Bougainvilleans, including her father.
"Our environment was tortured, and then the land was tortured, and the third party that was tortured were my people," Roka Matbob said in a video.
Rio Tinto closed its copper, silver, and gold mine in 1989 due to the war, but had done nothing to clean up the 150,000 tons of tailings it had dumped into local rivers or take responsibility for the havoc the mine had caused. As an adult, Roka Matbob began to wonder why justice had not been done and to gather testimony from people impacted by the mine.
This led to a successful campaign that persuaded Rio Tinto first to fund an assessment of the mine's impacts and then to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2024 to act on the assessment's findings and develop a plan with local communities to remediate the area.
"It doesn't mean we will restore everything as it was, but at least the story that my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren can remember [is] that our grandparents fought," she said.
Alannah Acaq Hurley
As Theonila Roka Matbob secured justice for the impacts of one major mine, Alannah Acaq Hurley helped prevent another one from being dug in the first place.
Hurley grew up as a member of the Yup’ik Indigenous group in Alaska's Bristol Bay, a haven of biodiversity that also hosts the world's largest wild sockeye salmon run. But in 2001 a new danger emerged: Canadian company Northern Dynasty Minerals announced plans to construct the Pebble Mine, the largest open-pit mine in North America.
"The pit would be so big, you could literally see it from the moon," Hurley said in a video. "It didn't take long for us to understand the level of threat that this mine posed—acid mine drainage, toxic tailings left in perpetuity. It was not a matter of if something goes wrong, it was a matter of when."
Chosen to lead the United Tribes of Bristol Bay in 2013, Hurley built a coalition to oppose the mine, uniting tribes, commercial fishers, and environmentalists to make their cause to the US Environmental Protection Agency and push back against the company's multiple attempts to move forward with the copper-and-gold mining project. Finally, in 2023, the EPA canceled the project via its rarely used veto power.
"It's just really a testament to the power of the people," she said. "We just never stopped until we were heard."
Yuvelis Morales Blanco
Yuvelis Morales Blanco also defended her community from an extractive industry.
Blanco was born to subsistence fishers on Colombia's Magdalena River in the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches.
“We had nothing but the river—she was like a mother who took care of me," she said in a statement.
However, even as a child she saw the river was threatened by oil spills from Ecopetrol, Colombia's leading oil company headquartered nearby. The potential threat level was raised even further when she learned while attending college in 2019 that Ecopetrol planned to build two pilot fracking projects near Puerto Wilches.
"Man, I'm like, 'They're going to do that in Wilches?' No sir!'" she recalled in a video.
Blanco joined the Colombia Free from Fracking Alliance and began to raise awareness in her community about the plans. As the campaign's momentum grew, so did her reputation as a spokesperson. This ultimately led to threats of violence against her that forced her to seek asylum in France in 2022, yet she continued to mobilize against the fracking plans from abroad.
She and the alliance saw success in 2022, as a local court halted the permitting process, newly elected President Gustavo Petro pledged there would be no fracking during his administration, and Ecopetrol suspended its contracts. In 2024, the Colombian Constitutional Court further ruled that the fracking projects had violated the Afro-Colombian community of Puerto Wilches' right to free, prior, and informed consent.
Blanco continues to fight for a ban on fracking and for legal protections for environmental defenders—over 140 of whom were reported missing or killed in 2024, the most recent year for which Global Witness has a full tally. Colombia was also the most dangerous countries for defenders that year, with 48 deaths.
"I am very hopeful because I have a river that always accompanies me, and I know we're going to win," she said.
The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by Rhoda and Richard Goldman, and has since honored 239 winners in 37 years. The 2026 awards will be presented live in San Francisco on Monday evening at 8:30 pm ET. Watch it on YouTube here.
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