Our Citizen's Forum: Earth to Data Centers
Photos and contribution by Em Tomeo
Earth to data centers,
A message to the City of Reno, the centers themselves, and all who will listen.
The people are screaming a message at the top of their lungs.
Our waterways, our sustenance to life, the seeds of our cities are at risk. For what? A massive hard drive to store ideas, notes, and creations so that we no longer have to think? No longer get to learn to think?
I think Ailton Krenak, in his collection of essays titled Ancestral Future, said it best: “What we’re doing by polluting the waters that have existed for two billion years is putting an end to our own existence. Water will continue to exist here in the biosphere and slowly regenerate because rivers have that gift. It’s we who have such an ephemeral existence that we’ll end up dried up, as enemies of the water”.
Of course, it is not just the people. We exist as a part of an ecosystem. A food chain and neighborhood of symbiotic mutualism. It is never just the people.
The fish will go first. The Cui-ui, the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, the Fish Lake Valley Tui Chub, the Clover Valley Speckled Dace, the Railroad Valley Springfish. Fish already listed as threatened or endangered, for which these data centers will trigger an implosion of population. The others will soon follow. No more fishing the riverbanks of the Truckee, or the deep waters of the lakes. No more splashes of rainbow-scaled tails against the ripples. The state fish will be but a memory.
One day, the ducks that hatch their eggs and raise their young on the shrubby banks of the river will find that there is not much left for their feet to paddle. That their ducklings get sicker and sicker until they begin to hatch dull and scraggly and then not at all. They will survive in small numbers until one day, walking down the path by the river in springtime, we will no longer hear the sound of the birds quacking. They will have left for clearer open waters, wherever those may have retreated to.
The snakes that slink through the clear blue waters and sun themselves against the rocks will hide away in the mud. Fewer and fewer will appear each summer until they become a story to tell to our grandchildren. “Did you know there used to be great snakes that lived in the High Sierra?” We will creek, and they will respond with a laugh that is a mirror to the disbelief we have hearing stories of the great plains of bison.
The plants will begin to wilt. It is already dry up in the High Desert, and the small rainfall their stems reach upwards to pray for is only a supplement to aid what they receive below, from the groundwater and the river. They will come back less and less every season, the roses smaller, the grass a sicklier yellow, until they stop coming naturally back at all. And the trees. The trees with their roots tapped deep into the soil, soaking up the little groundwater, they will hit a point where there are not enough nutrients to grow taller, where their leaves don’t fill out to the same shade cover, where the parks become a growth stunted monument to the deterioration of our health as a whole.
The bugs are going to thrive. Not the pollinators, those go with the flowers, nor the worms, they die off with the roots. The flies and gnats and mosquitos that live off of uncomfortable and dying things, those ones will thrive…
Read Em’s full essay on this website: https://emmatomeo.wixsite.com/storytellersoup/post/earth-to-data-centers