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OpenClaw Soil

Maybe we should be looking to soil and microbial networks for our multi-agentic frameworks rather than human constructed (and flawed) org charts…

OpenClaw Emperors – by JingYu – ChinaTalk:

This brings us to one of the most fascinating phenomena currently tearing up the developer ecosystem: the wildly popular open-source project on GitHub known as “Edict” (三省六部).

While developers have spent the last year building Multi-Agent frameworks (like AutoGen or CrewAI) based on the principles of Silicon Valley flat hierarchies —throwing five AI agents into a “group chat” to brainstorm and hoping for the best — a community of Chinese developers took a radically different approach. They looked past the modern tech paradigms and drew inspiration from the zenith of classical Chinese political architecture: the Three Departments and Six Ministries (三省六部) system, pioneered in the Sui Dynasty and perfected in the Tang.

What the Soil Remembers

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

But according to a growing body of research, it has been doing something else during that time too… something largely invisible and harder to name. Beneath the soil, networks of fungal threads connect the roots of the walnut to other plants and organisms in ways scientists are still working to describe. And the question those networks keep raising is not simply biological. It is perceptual. It is asking us whether we know how to pay attention to what is right beneath us.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Princeton University working across institutions in the United States and Europe published new findings on mycorrhizal fungi (the microscopic threads that link plant roots underground). Using imaging techniques refined over several years, they mapped not only how the architecture of these underground networks forms, but also the fluid motions occurring inside fungal tubes roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, through which nutrients flow back and forth throughout the organism. These networks move carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus across remarkable distances through the soil, allowing plants and fungi to exchange resources through a shared infrastructure that predates our street, our city, and the entire textile economy that built it.

As one researcher put it simply, there are all these things happening underground that no one ever thinks about because they cannot see them.

That invisibility is part of what makes this hard to talk about in practical terms. We tend to extend moral consideration to what we can perceive… and the soil beneath the tulip poplars and white oaks lining the creek corridors through Spartanburg is not legible to us in ordinary ways. But legibility is not the same as presence.

The forests surrounding Greenville and Spartanburg sit at a remarkable ecological threshold. The southern Appalachians are considered one of the most biologically diverse regions of the temperate world, according to the South Carolina Native Plant Society, and the Piedmont foothills carry that diversity into the clay-heavy, iron-stained soils that anyone who has gardened here knows immediately. Those soils formed over millions of years as the ancient Appalachians weathered and eroded, leaving behind a mineral complexity that still shapes which species grow where, which fungi partner with which roots, which relationships persist, and which collapse under pressure.

The forests here also carry a complicated history. The mid-twentieth-century abandonment of row crops allowed forests to return to the Piedmont, though not the oak and hickory that typified earlier centuries. Loblolly pine colonized the abandoned cotton fields first. Sweetgum, tulip poplar, and red maple followed. The visible forest changed, but the deeper processes in the soil continued shaping recovery in ways the canopy did not reveal. Seedbanks persisted underground while fungal communities survived in fragments. Mycorrhizal networks that had supported older forests were interrupted but not entirely erased. When we walk through Croft State Park today, or along the Pacolet River corridor, we are moving through forests still rebuilding themselves after those earlier disturbances. The soil carries those histories in its structure and microbial communities. In that sense, the forest remembers… not through anything like human memory, but through ecological processes unfolding across decades.

Plants and fungi developed a partnership lasting over 400 million years, one that may have enabled plants to colonize dry landmasses and transform them into prolific habitats for terrestrial life (Springer). The relationship is not incidental to the forest, but is constitutional. Mycorrhizal fungal networks linking the roots of trees facilitate inter-tree communication via resource sharing, defense signaling, and kin recognition, influencing what researchers describe as sophisticated behavior among neighboring plants (ResearchGate). Some researchers have gone further, exploring what a recent paper in Symbiosis called “extended plant cognition” and the possibility that plants benefit from the cognition and behavior of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance their own survival, including foraging complementarity, expanded perception of the below-ground environment, and shaping the mycorrhizal community to meet survival needs.

The language here is careful and contested, and it should be. This is not the same as saying trees think in the way we do. But the underlying ecological picture is not nothing. Responsiveness within a forest does not appear to reside solely within individual organisms. It emerges through relationships linking plants, fungi, and soil communities in ways that begin to look less like isolated biological transactions and more like what phenomenologists might call a field of distributed perception… awareness that is not located anywhere in particular but present throughout the whole.

I have been exploring this idea in my own writing as ecological intentionality (the practice of attentive presence that recognizes humans as participants in, not observers of, the living world). What the mycorrhizal research keeps returning me to is how thoroughly that participatory logic runs through the forest itself. The sweetgums and beeches, the stands of loblolly along the old field margins, the black walnut in the backyard… each of these participates in a network of exchange that extends through the soil and across time in ways that our usual categories of “individual” and “organism” struggle to hold.

This matters for more than philosophical reasons here in the Upstate. As I wrote earlier this year about Project Spero (the proposed AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park), the questions it raised were ultimately about more than megawatts and gallons of water. They were about what kinds of relationships between land, water, and intelligence we are willing to normalize in this place. The project was eventually withdrawn after months of community opposition (a moment of civic attention worth studying carefully). But the broader pressure it represented has not disappeared. Proposals like it will keep arriving in communities like ours, asking us to decide how much of the landscape’s capacity (including its soil capacity, its fungal capacity, its slow-built ecological memory) should be redirected toward sustaining planetary-scale computation whose primary benefits flow elsewhere.

The question for a forest, if we can ask it that way, is not whether development will come. It is whether the networks beneath the soil can persist through what arrives. Those networks are not infinitely resilient. Mycorrhizal interactions play a foundational role in global patterns and structures of forest diversity, with mycorrhizal tree type systematically mediating the strength of competitive and cooperative dynamics within communities (Nature). What that means at the scale of a particular watershed is that the diversity and responsiveness of a forest depend not only on which species are present aboveground, but on the web of relationships in the soil (many of which are species-specific, many of which take decades to establish, and all of which can be severed quickly).

Donna Haraway has a word I keep returning to in this context, one I thought about recently when writing about the first signs of spring… composting. The idea that life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them. The brown leaves underfoot right now on the trails at Croft carry last year’s sunlight and last year’s rain into the soil that is already shaping what grows next spring. The forest floor is composting memory into future life.

The black walnut in our backyard does not need me to make this argument. It has been making its own version of it for longer than the street has had a name, through a language of carbon, phosphorus, and fungal exchange that we are only beginning to have instruments sensitive enough to partially read.

The question is not whether that language is happening. The question is whether we are willing to develop the kind of attention it requires… and whether we can build that attention into the civic and ecological decisions we are already making about this place.

More Reading…

Simard, Suzanne W., Ryan, Teresa L., and Perry, David A. “Response to Questions About Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (January 2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1512518/full

Ma, Xiaofan and Limpens, Erik. “Networking via Mycorrhizae.” Frontiers in Agricultural Science and Engineering 12, no. 1 (2025): 37–46. https://journal.hep.com.cn/fase/EN/10.15302/J-FASE-2024578

“Research Reveals the Underground Traffic Between Fungi and Plants.” Princeton University, March 25, 2025. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/03/25/research-reveals-underground-traffic-between-fungi-and-plants

Leyval, C. et al. “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Could Extend Plant Cognitive Processes.” Symbiosis (2025). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13199-025-01065-y

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) — Global Mycorrhizal Mapping Initiative: https://spun.earth

South Carolina Native Plant Society — Upstate Chapter https://scnps.org/upstate

Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Further Reading

Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution
Bergson’s classic work introduces the concept of durée, or lived duration, and explores how life unfolds through continuous creative evolution rather than mechanical time.

Edith Stein – On the Problem of Empathy
Stein’s phenomenological study of empathy remains one of the most careful explorations of how we encounter the inner lives of others without reducing them to our own perspective.

Gay A. Bradshaw – Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
Bradshaw’s research on elephant societies and trauma reveals the depth of elephant social memory and the psychological consequences that follow when those structures are disrupted.

Khatijah Rahmat – Research on Elephant Temporality
Rahmat’s work explores how elephants experience time through individual history, eco cultural identity, and human impacted landscapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s reflections on ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge traditions offer a powerful reminder that attentiveness to other beings and their rhythms has long been part of how humans learn to live with the land.

Eyes of the World and The Spiritual Discipline of Paying Attention

One of the hardest spiritual disciplines (for me at least) in the modern world is simply “paying” attention. I’m not sure why we use the word “pay” here. Interesting etymology if you’re into such things, though.

Not productivity. Not efficiency. Not the curated forms of “mindfulness” from TikTok and Instagram influencers that often end up just another optimization technique. I mean something simpler and more ancient with the slow, patient act of noticing the world around us.

Early this morning, before most of the neighborhood was awake, I stepped outside with my coffee for a brief moment and stood quietly in the backyard. The woods behind our house here in Spartanburg were still mostly gray from winter, and the time change has our morning hours dark again. The forest floor is covered in the same brown leaves that have been gathering there for months now, slowly breaking down into the soil and composting into new things that will soon be green while the billions and billions of microbes in the soil go about their work.

But if you linger for a few minutes, small changes start to appear. A shift in birdsongs, a few red maple buds are even beginning to emerge. The subtle warmth of the air that wasn’t there two weeks ago as our planet tilts and wobbles (in this part at least) back towards our closest star.

None of this is dramatic. Most of it would pass unnoticed if you were scrolling your phone while walking across the yard. But that quiet shift is exactly the sort of thing that attention makes visible.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested that perception is not a passive reception of information. It is a relationship. We do not simply observe the world from a distance. We are entangled within it, bodies among bodies, participants in a shared field of experience.

That idea alone is enough to challenge the way many of us move through our days. Because modern life trains us almost constantly to disengage from that relationship and look down at that black slab of glass, with components extracted from the planet in unscrupulous ways, all in the name of having us pay attention to it to extract our human data.

We move quickly. We skim. We multitask. Our devices offer an endless stream of stimuli that reward speed over depth. Even our forms of entertainment are often designed for rapid consumption and never-ending video loops that tickle our hippocampus (or amygdala).

But the living world does not operate at that pace.

To perceive it well requires something closer to patience.

Edith Stein, writing about empathy in her early phenomenological work, argued that encountering another being is never simply a matter of gathering data. It requires a kind of openness… a willingness to allow the presence of another to disclose itself gradually. That insight is usually discussed in the context of human relationships, but it applies just as much to the more-than-human world.

A tree does not reveal itself all at once. Neither does a landscape. And certainly not a season.

Anyone who has spent time listening to the Grateful Dead knows something about this kind of attention. Their music often unfolds slowly, building through long improvisations that only make sense if you are willing to stay with them. A song like “Eyes of the World” (my fav version) doesn’t rush toward its conclusion. It wanders, explores, returns, and gradually reveals patterns that were invisible at the beginning.

The same could be said of Wilco’s quieter moments. Songs that feel almost fragile at first listening begin to open up if you give them time.

Willie Nelson, in a completely different musical tradition, once described his phrasing as intentionally relaxed… letting the melody stretch and bend so that the listener has space to hear what’s happening between the notes. It’s fascinating to see Willie Nelson perform live because (like Dylan), his phrasing morphs and shifts and relaxes rather than sticking to a script like so many pop culture stadium shows today.

That space between the notes is where attention lives.

Carl Sagan famously wrote that we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. It’s a beautiful line, often quoted for its sense of wonder. But it also carries a kind of responsibility.

If the universe becomes aware of itself through conscious beings like us, then our capacity for attention matters. The quality of our perception becomes part of the story of the cosmos itself.

And yet the ecological crisis we face today might be understood, at least in part, as a crisis of attention.

Species disappear quietly while rivers change course slowly, often not due to their natural inclination but human direction, and soils degrade over decades as we extract nutrients for monocrop agriculture.

These processes rarely produce the kind of spectacle that captures headlines or social media feeds. They unfold in subtle ways that are easy to ignore if we are not paying attention.

The result is that by the time we notice something has changed, the transformation has already been underway for years.

Ecology, at its root, is simply the study of our home. But to study a home well, familiarity is required. It requires noticing seasonal rhythms, life patterns, and the relationships between species and place.

In other words, ecology begins with attention.

Theologians have long understood this, even if they used different language. Many monastic traditions described attention as a form of prayer. Simone Weil famously suggested that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

To pay attention is to offer the world the gift of your presence… not as a detached observer, but as a participant within a living system of relationships. That might sound abstract, but it often begins with very ordinary practices.

Standing quietly in a backyard at dawn.

Learning the names of the trees in your neighborhood.

Listening to birds long enough to recognize the difference between their calls.

Watching how the light changes across the same patch of ground throughout the year.

These acts do not solve the ecological crisis, but they do something equally important. They restore our capacity to perceive the world we are trying to care for.

Because it is difficult to love what we do not notice, and it is impossible to protect what we have never truly seen. In the end, the spiritual discipline of paying attention is not about mastering a technique. It is about learning, slowly and imperfectly, to inhabit the world more fully. Like a good song that reveals itself only after repeated listening.

Or the first subtle signs of spring that appear quietly in the woods, long before the leaves return.

The world is always speaking.

The question is whether we are willing to listen.

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
But the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own…”

Why Optimism Requires Imagination Right Now

If you spend any amount of time paying attention to the world, news, or social media feeds, it is obviously difficult to justify optimism. But I want to use the context of the ecological crisis we face (not just environmental, but ecology in the broader sense of the term, meaning our study of home and how we relate to it) to think about optimism not as a “hope” but as something deeper and transformative. This topic comes up so much in my studies, conversations at church, Reddit posts I read, etc.

The ecological crises we face are real and accelerating. Species loss continues at a staggering rate. Climate disruptions are becoming more visible and more costly. Our oceans are changing with acidification, polar instabilities, and the Gulf Stream showing signs of weakening. Political systems across the world feel brittle and polarized while we drop bombs and kill children to address “problems.” Technological change and AI are unfolding faster than our cultural or ethical frameworks can adapt. Even the hopeful language of “solutions” sometimes feels thin against the scale of the problems we face.

It is understandable that many people feel drawn to some form of resignation. The mood of our time often oscillates between anxious urgency and quiet despair.

But lately I’ve been thinking that optimism isn’t the opposite of realism. Instead, optimism may depend on something deeper… imagination.

Not imagination in the sense of fantasy or wishful thinking. What I mean is the ability to perceive possibilities that are not yet fully visible within the present order of things.

This kind of imagination has always been a driver of cultural change. Long before societies shift in practice, they shift in perception. People begin to see the world differently. They begin to tell different stories about what reality is and what human life is for.

Much of the ecological crisis we face today is rooted in a particular story we tell and spread about the world. For several centuries, Western industrial society has tended to imagine the Earth as a collection of resources existing primarily for human use. Forests are timber inventories. Rivers are units of water allocation. Land becomes real estate to be bought and sold. Even the atmosphere becomes something that can be modeled primarily as a carbon sink while we apply more sunscreen.

Within that story, the natural world is fundamentally passive. It is a background stage on which human economic and technological activity unfolds.

But there have always been alternative ways of seeing.

Writers like Wendell Berry have spent decades reminding us that the land is not an inert backdrop to human life but a living community in which we participate. Berry often points out that good farming, good culture, and good imagination are inseparable. We cannot care for the places we inhabit unless we can imagine ourselves as belonging to them.

Similarly, thinkers like Joanna Macy have argued that what she calls the Great Turning begins with a shift in perception. The modern industrial growth society is built on the illusion that humans exist as isolated individuals competing for control of a passive world. But when we begin to perceive the depth of our interdependence with other beings and systems, new forms of action become possible.

This shift in perception is not merely intellectual. It is experiential.

It happens when we recognize that a forest is not simply a collection of trees but a living network of relationships. It happens when we realize that a river flowing through a town is not just a resource to be managed but part of the community’s own body. It happens when we understand that our food, our breath, our culture, and even our thoughts emerge from a vast web of relations extending far beyond the boundaries of the human.

In my own work, I have been exploring this through the idea of ecological intentionality. Phenomenology reminds us that consciousness is not something sealed inside the skull. Our awareness is always directed outward, into a world already structured by relationships, meanings, and histories.

When our perception shifts, our possibilities shift with it.

Optimism, then, is not simply the belief that everything will turn out fine. It is the conviction that reality is richer and more open than the narrow frameworks through which we often perceive it.

If the ecological crisis is partly a crisis of perception, then imagination becomes a practical and even ethical skill. We need the ability to imagine forms of life that are not organized around endless extraction and consumption. We need to imagine communities that measure success not only in economic growth but in ecological health and relational well-being.

And we need to imagine ourselves differently.

Not as isolated individuals navigating a neutral landscape, but as participants in a living world that has been unfolding for billions of years and will continue long after we are gone, as trees, soil, and our oceans will be here in some condition long after we’re all gone from this mortal life.

This kind of imagination does not ignore the seriousness of the moment we are in. In fact, it requires facing that seriousness honestly. The challenges before us are immense.

But imagination reminds us that history is not static.

Human societies have reinvented themselves many times before. Cultural assumptions that once seemed permanent have often dissolved within a generation or two. Entire ways of living have emerged that earlier generations would have struggled even to conceive.

Optimism grows in that space.

It grows in the recognition that the future is not simply an extrapolation of present trends. It is something that emerges from the interplay of perception, imagination, and action.

And those capacities are still very much alive.

Sometimes optimism begins not with a grand technological breakthrough or a sweeping political reform, but with something quieter. A new way of seeing a landscape. A deeper sense of kinship with other beings. A small community choosing to organize its life around care rather than extraction.

Those shifts may appear small from a distance. But historically, they are often where the most important transformations begin. If the crises of our time require courage, they also require imagination.

And perhaps optimism, at its most honest, is simply the decision to keep that imagination alive.

I’d be curious how others are thinking about this right now. Where are you finding signs of imagination in your own communities or landscapes? Are there writers, thinkers, or traditions that help you keep a sense of possibility alive in a time when the future can feel uncertain?

If you’d like, share your thoughts below or send me a note. These kinds of conversations are part of how we learn to see differently together.

Here’s a reading list if you’re interested in exploring this thought more as well:

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture
https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/the-unsettling-of-america/
Berry’s classic reflection on land, culture, and imagination. Few writers have done more to challenge the industrial view of the Earth as merely a set of resources.

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy
https://www.activehope.info/
A powerful exploration of the emotional and imaginative work required to face ecological crisis without falling into despair.

Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future
https://www.bellarmine.edu/bearberry/the-great-work/
Berry argues that the central task of our time is the transition from an industrial growth society to a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the Earth.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321482/the-spell-of-the-sensuous-by-david-abram/
A beautiful phenomenological exploration of perception, embodiment, and the living world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s work brings Indigenous ecological knowledge, botany, and storytelling into conversation in ways that open new imaginative possibilities for relating to land.

Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy
https://archive.org/details/stein-problem-of-empathy
A foundational phenomenological text exploring how we come to know and participate in the experience of others.

Joanna Macy, “The Great Turning” (essay)
https://greatturning.org/vision/
A concise introduction to Macy’s idea that our era is defined by a civilizational shift in how humans perceive and relate to the Earth.

Edith Stein and the Lost Art of Understanding Another Being

We often talk about empathy as if it were simply a moral virtue. We tell children to “be more empathetic,” or we describe someone as lacking empathy when they seem indifferent to the suffering of others. Empathy, in this everyday sense, becomes something like kindness or compassion.

But for the philosopher Edith Stein and, later, as the Carmelite St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, empathy was something much deeper. It was not primarily a moral instruction. It was a structure of perception.

Stein (1891–1942) was a German phenomenologist and a student of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In her early philosophical work On the Problem of Empathy (1917), she explored a deceptively simple question: How do we know that another person has a mind at all?

After all, we never directly experience another person’s inner life. I cannot feel your thoughts. I cannot directly access your emotions or sensations. All I ever encounter is your presence in the world: your gestures, your voice, your expressions, your actions.

And yet we rarely doubt that other people are conscious.

We move through the world constantly encountering others as beings who perceive, feel, hope, suffer, and rejoice. Stein wanted to understand how this is possible.

Her answer was empathy. She writes:

“Empathy is the experience of foreign consciousness in general.”
— Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy

That phrase may sound abstract at first, but Stein’s insight is actually quite intuitive. When we see someone wince in pain, we do not simply observe a physical movement. Nor do we literally feel their pain ourselves. Instead, we encounter their expression as the expression of another experiencing subject. Their suffering appears to us as theirs.

Empathy, in this sense, is neither emotional projection nor detached observation. It is the way consciousness recognizes another center of experience. It is how the presence of another mind becomes visible in the world.

And importantly, Stein insists that empathy always preserves difference. When I empathize with another person, I do not become them. Their experience remains irreducibly theirs. Empathy allows us to approach another’s experience without collapsing it into our own. This small philosophical insight carries enormous implications.

Because if empathy is a structure of perception, then the ethical life begins long before moral decisions are made. It begins with how we see. Before we decide how to treat another being, we must first encounter them as a being at all. In my opinion, that may be where many of our contemporary problems begin.

We live in a moment shaped by powerful technologies, accelerating ecological crises, political fragmentation, and deep cultural anxiety. In response, many discussions revolve around solutions: better policies, better systems, better innovations.

But beneath these debates lies a quieter crisis. It is a crisis of perception. More and more of the world appears to us as background… as resource… as infrastructure… as data.

Other people become categories. Landscapes become economic zones. Forests become board-feet of timber. Rivers become a water supply. The world flattens into utility.

Stein’s philosophy points in the opposite direction. She reminds us that our most basic encounter with reality is not with objects but with presences. We are constantly surrounded by other centers of life. However, this does not apply only to human beings.

Anyone who has spent time closely observing animals, forests, or even a single tree begins to notice how quickly the language of “objects” breaks down. The living world presses back against our assumptions. It asks to be encountered differently.

In my own small way, I experience this most mornings sitting near the black walnut tree in my backyard here in Spartanburg. I am not imagining that the tree possesses consciousness in the human sense. But the encounter still shifts something in perception. The tree ceases to be merely part of the scenery. Its form, its rhythms, its seasonal changes begin to register as expressions of a living presence. The experience is subtle but unmistakable. The world becomes populated again.

Stein helps us understand why this matters. Empathy, properly understood, is not simply a feeling we extend toward others. It is a capacity that allows us to perceive the world as filled with beings whose lives unfold alongside our own.

And once that perception awakens, the ethical implications follow naturally.

If the world is full of beings who experience life in their own ways, then the question of how we live together becomes unavoidable. Ethics grows organically from perception. But if perception collapses… if everything appears merely as matter to be manipulated… then empathy fades before ethics even has a chance to begin. This is why phenomenology still matters today.

Husserl, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, and others in the phenomenological tradition were not merely interested in abstract philosophy. They were trying to recover something that modern life had begun to obscure: the richness of lived experience and the relational character of reality.

Stein’s work on empathy remains one of the clearest windows into that project. She reminds us that the world is not made up only of things. It is made up of encounters. Perhaps in a time defined by distance, screens, distraction, and abstraction, recovering that simple insight is more important than ever.

Empathy, in Stein’s sense, is not sentimental. It is perceptual. It is the quiet realization that we are never alone in the world we inhabit.

What Spartanburg Learned About Data Centers and Why Marion County Should Pay Attention

Something remarkable happened here in Spartanburg this week. After months of debate, public meetings, and growing resident concern, the developers of the proposed Project Spero AI data center withdrew it. The company simply said, “Alignment ultimately has not been achieved.” Corporate language has a way of smoothing the edges of conflict, but the meaning here is not difficult to read. The community began asking questions, and those questions changed the story.

Over the past months many of us in Spartanburg began focusing less on the polished language that accompanies projects like this, words such as “innovation,” “investment,” and “economic development,” and more on the physical realities beneath the proposal. Water withdrawals, electricity demand, infrastructure strain, and long-term ecological impacts slowly entered the conversation. Once those realities became visible, the narrative began to shift. What had initially been presented as an inevitable step forward for economic growth began to look more complicated. Projects of this scale rely on momentum, and momentum depends heavily on public perception. When perception changes, momentum slows.

That shift in perception did not come from any single person or group. It emerged through conversations, public meetings, local reporting, and the steady work of people simply asking better questions. What began as curiosity gradually became scrutiny, and scrutiny eventually became hesitation among local leaders who realized that the community was no longer convinced that the project’s benefits clearly outweighed its risks.

Now a similar conversation is beginning to unfold elsewhere in South Carolina, including a place that is very personal to me.

Marion County and the Expansion of AI Infrastructure

In Marion County, South Carolina, where I grew up in Mullins, another major data-center proposal has appeared on the landscape. According to reporting from the Post and Courier, developers have proposed a facility associated with Stream Data Centers that would bring a large-scale digital infrastructure project to the region. For many residents, the announcement came quickly, and questions about the project’s scope and long-term impact began surfacing almost immediately.

For rural communities, projects like this can arrive with a sense of inevitability. The promise of economic development, construction jobs, and tax revenue often accompanies announcements of new industrial infrastructure. Yet residents in Marion County have already begun raising concerns about the speed of the process and the lack of clear public information about the project’s environmental demands. These concerns are not rooted in opposition to technology or economic growth. Rather, they reflect a deeper question that rural communities across the country are beginning to ask: what does this kind of infrastructure actually require from the land and water systems that sustain the communities where it is built?

That question becomes particularly important when the proposed infrastructure is designed to support artificial intelligence systems that require enormous computing power. Data centers are not abstract digital clouds floating somewhere beyond the horizon. They are intensely physical systems that depend on massive flows of electricity, water, and cooling infrastructure. The sleek digital services they support are grounded in very real ecological and material demands.

Why Rural Communities Are Being Targeted

Across the United States, large technology companies are increasingly looking to rural regions as potential sites for data center expansion. Several factors make these areas attractive. Rural counties often have large tracts of available land, proximity to high-capacity power transmission lines, and fewer zoning restrictions than major metropolitan areas. Local governments may also see such projects as opportunities to attract investment in regions that have struggled economically for decades.

Yet these same conditions can create vulnerabilities. Smaller local governments may have fewer resources available to evaluate the long-term environmental and infrastructural consequences of major industrial projects. Residents may not initially have access to the technical information needed to fully understand the scale of resource consumption involved. As a result, communities can find themselves navigating decisions that will shape their landscapes and water systems for generations with limited time and incomplete information.

This is why the conversation around data centers is beginning to shift nationally. Researchers and policymakers are increasingly acknowledging that the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing infrastructure is placing new demands on electricity grids and freshwater systems. These facilities require enormous energy inputs and significant water use for cooling processes, particularly in warmer climates. In regions where water resources are already under pressure from agriculture, drought, or population growth, those demands can become a critical factor in long-term planning.

The Real Resource Question: Water

When development projects are introduced to communities, the conversation often begins with jobs, investment, and economic opportunity. Those questions are important and deserve careful consideration. But in many cases they are not the most fundamental questions communities should be asking.

The most important question is water.

Freshwater is not simply another economic resource that can be substituted or relocated once it is depleted. It is the foundation of ecosystems, agriculture, and community survival. Rural landscapes like those in the Pee Dee region are shaped by the rhythms of rivers, wetlands, rainfall, and soil. Decisions about large-scale industrial water use can alter those systems in ways that persist long after the original economic promises have faded.

This is precisely why the conversation in Spartanburg shifted so dramatically once residents began focusing on water. People began asking straightforward but essential questions. How much water will the facility require each day? Where will that water come from? What happens during periods of drought? And who ultimately decides how water is allocated when industrial demand begins competing with agriculture, ecosystems, and residential use?

Once those questions entered the public conversation, the entire narrative changed. The project was no longer simply about economic opportunity. It became a discussion about long-term stewardship of shared ecological resources.

The Power of Perception

The most important lesson from the Project Spero debate is not simply that a data center proposal stalled. The deeper lesson is that perception changed. For generations many rural communities have been encouraged to see development as something that happens to them rather than something they actively shape. A corporation proposes a project, local officials negotiate incentives, and construction begins.

But communities are beginning to recognize that they have agency within these processes. They can ask questions. They can demand transparency. They can insist that decisions about land and water reflect the long-term well-being of the people who live there rather than the short-term interests of outside investors.

In Spartanburg, that shift in perception slowed the momentum that large infrastructure projects typically rely on. When residents began reframing the conversation around water, energy, and ecological responsibility rather than simply economic development, the project’s assumptions became less stable. Local leaders recognized that the community wanted more clarity and accountability before moving forward. In that space of uncertainty, the project lost its footing.

Rural South Carolina Deserves a Voice

The situation unfolding in Marion County deserves careful attention. Mullins and the surrounding Pee Dee region are not empty spaces waiting to be filled by industrial infrastructure. They are landscapes shaped by agriculture, rivers, forests, and generations of families who have built their lives there.

I grew up in Mullins. I know the fields, the creeks, and the quiet roads that run through that part of the state. Those landscapes carry histories that stretch far beyond the timelines of corporate development proposals.

Communities across rural South Carolina deserve the opportunity to decide what happens to their land and water. That does not mean rejecting every form of development. It means ensuring that decisions about the future of these landscapes are made with full transparency, careful ecological consideration, and meaningful public participation.

The story that has unfolded here in Spartanburg shows that communities are not powerless when they begin asking the right questions. Sometimes the most important shift begins not with a protest or a vote but with a change in how people see the land and water around them. When perception changes, the conversation changes, and once the conversation changes, the future becomes something communities can shape rather than simply accept.

What Marion County Residents Can Do Now

People in Marion County have already begun asking what they can do as conversations about the proposed data center continue. The experience in Spartanburg offers a few practical lessons.

The first step is simply paying attention to water. Large data centers depend on enormous volumes of water for cooling systems. Residents should ask local officials clear questions about how much water the facility would require, where that water would come from, and what contingency plans exist during drought conditions. Water withdrawals, discharge permits, and cooling systems are often where the most important long-term impacts appear.

Second, transparency matters. Many large development projects involve non-disclosure agreements between companies and local governments during early negotiations. While that is common in economic development deals, it can also leave communities without the information they need to understand what is being proposed. Residents have the right to ask for clear information about energy use, water demand, tax incentives, and infrastructure commitments before major decisions are finalized.

Third, local meetings matter more than most people realize. County council meetings, zoning hearings, and planning commission sessions are often where the most significant decisions take place. Even a small number of residents asking informed questions can dramatically change the tone of those discussions.

Finally, it helps to change the conversation itself. When discussions focus only on jobs or tax incentives, communities can feel pressured to accept projects quickly. When the conversation includes water rights, long-term land stewardship, and ecological responsibility, the decision becomes more balanced and thoughtful.

The lesson from Spartanburg is simple. Communities are not powerless when they begin asking better questions.

Reading Acts with Middle Schoolers: Waiting, Seeing, and Stepping Forward

This Sunday, I began leading a Sunday School class of middle schoolers on the New Testament book of Acts at First Presbyterian here in Spartanburg, and I find myself looking forward to it in ways that feel deeper than simply preparing a lesson series. Acts has long been one of those texts that quietly works on me over time, shaping how I understand faith, community, and change. Stepping into it with young people now feels especially fitting, not only because of where they are in life, but also because of the questions our broader current moment is placing before all of us.

Acts is not, at its core, a book about certainty. It is a book about beginnings. Its story opens in a space of waiting and confusion rather than clarity. The disciples and 120 or so members of the community that followed Jesus to his death and resurrection do not understand what is happening or what comes next. They ask Jesus if this is finally the moment when everything will be restored, when history will resolve into something stable and predictable. They are looking for a plan, for an answer that would make the future legible. Same as many of us do most days.

Instead, they are told to wait.

What comes is not a roadmap but courage. The Spirit does not arrive with instructions for building an institution or managing a movement. It changes how they see and how they attend. Wind, fire, speech, gathering… these are not merely supernatural signs but shifts in perception on Pentecost. The vicious violence that met the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry in the flesh has to still be raw for them as they gather and wait. But then the world that had seemed dangerous and closed off begins to appear open and alive with possibility. The people around them are no longer threats or strangers but interlocutors. The city of Jerusalem is no longer a place to hide from but a place to enter.

This is one of the ways Acts intersects so closely with the phenomenological work that shapes my doctoral studies at CIIS. Phenomenology, at its heart, is about attention. It asks how the world shows up for us and how our habits of seeing shape what becomes possible. My own work on ecological intentionality circles around the idea that participation in the world begins not with mastery but with perception. Before we act, we notice. Before we organize, we attend. The texture of reality shifts when our mode of attention shifts.

Acts is, among other things, a narrative of transformed attention. The disciples begin by asking questions framed by old expectations. They are still looking for restoration in familiar political or cultural terms. Pentecost does not hand them new information so much as it alters their field of awareness. Suddenly, they hear languages where before they heard noise. They see neighbors where before they saw differences, and they perceive opportunity where before they perceived danger.

This is why the movement in Acts unfolds the way it does, I think. It does not grow because its members possess certainty. It grows because their way of encountering the world has changed. They step forward not because they know exactly what will happen, but because they can notice new openings and respond to them. Faith here is less about holding the correct ideas or doctrinal points and more about cultivating a posture of attention that makes participation possible. It’s a reason that Acts is such an alluring text to many of us Baptists, in my opinion (with talk of “New Testament Church” and “house church” approaches being popular over the last few decades).

Middle schoolers are already negotiating this terrain. They are learning, often without naming it, that belonging depends on how we see one another and where we direct our attention. They know that a classroom can feel welcoming or hostile depending on subtle shifts in perception (both for teachers and students, as I learned in my two decades in Middle School classrooms!). They know that a friend group in the cafeteria can expand or contract based on who is noticed and who is ignored. In that sense, Acts meets them where they already live. It offers a story in which change begins not with certainty but with a reorientation of attention that makes new forms of community imaginable.

In an age marked by ecological strain, technological acceleration, and social fragmentation, political strife, and war… there is a strong pull toward waiting for perfect clarity before acting. Acts suggests another path. The story begins when people are willing to step into a world they do not fully understand, trusting that attention and courage will carry them further than certainty ever could.

Following Jesus did not make life predictable for what would become the earliest church. It made life larger, not by solving uncertainty but by opening their perception to a shared and unfolding world.

My hope in the weeks ahead is that these young people will glimpse that faith is not about resolving every question in advance. It is about learning to notice, to attend, and to take part in something that continues to unfold in our own communities today.

The Overstory

Reading The Overstory felt less like moving through a novel and more like being slowly re-schooled in perception. Which is something I study intently, so the book was an ongoing wonderful surprise (much as its structure itself).

Richard Powers does not simply tell stories about trees here, but rearranges the conditions under which we notice them at all through various timelines (some that fracture) and characters. I wasn’t sure what I was reading for the first few hours, but the unfolding leaves of the book flowered over time.

Early in the book, one of the most quietly destabilizing lines appears:

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind.”

That line could easily pass as a reflection on politics (especially currently) or culture, and became an entry in my own notebook. But within the arc of the novel, it becomes ecological. The crisis is not primarily informational. It is perceptual. We do not fail to act because we lack data. We fail because we do not see.

This is where the novel began to move into territory that those of us working in phenomenology and ecological theology will recognize immediately. Powers is not asking us to care more about trees, and this is not a tree-huggers’ guide to discourse. He is asking us to experience the field of relation differently, in which care might even arise.

Another moment comes when the text reminds us:

“This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees.”

That reversal landed with philosophical force for me. It unsettles the background assumption that the human is the measure of belonging on this planet. Trees are not an object of the landscape. They are participants in the very conditions that make landscapes, histories, and even narratives possible.

In this sense, The Overstory mirrors the kind of ecological intentionality I have been trying to tease out in my own work and writings. The novel dramatizes what Edith Stein might call the givenness of another’s reality, not as projection, not as abstraction, but as presence that precedes our categories. The trees in Powers’ narrative are never romanticized into human likeness. Nor are they reduced to inert matter. They are encountered as beings whose temporalities, communicative capacities, and communalities exceed our usual frames.

At one point, the novel observes:

“The tree is really a kind of massively branched, above-ground root.”

The sentence is biologically true. Yet, it also works metaphysically. It dissolves our habit of separating what is visible from what sustains. The forest becomes less a collection of individuals and more a process of relation.

Process thought and panpsychism came to my mind many times as well. Whitehead’s sense that reality consists of interdependent occasions rather than isolated substances finds narrative embodiment here, with connections appearing from the soil of the novel in curious ways. No character stands alone. Each life is drawn into wider systems of exchange, decay, regeneration, and memory.

Memory is central throughout the book. Powers repeatedly insists that trees are temporal beings whose scale stretches beyond our narrative patience. One of the most haunting insights comes in the simple observation:

“Trees pass messages to one another through the air.”

The novel treats this not as a metaphor but as an ecological truth. Chemical signaling, fungal networks, shared stress responses. Yet what matters is less the mechanism than the invitation. If communication extends beyond language, then relation extends beyond recognition.

This is where the book becomes moving rather than merely informative in my opinion (though the opening 1/3 with character vignettes is superbly done).

We begin to sense that our estrangement from the more-than-human world is not caused by distance but by habit in the phenomenological sense. We have trained our perception to notice speed, novelty, and control. Trees operate through slowness, repetition, and persistence. They are, in Powers’ framing, beings whose stories unfold on temporal scales that challenge narrative closure and who live much longer than humans.

In a line that feels almost like a thesis for the whole work, we are told:

“The seeds of things are in trees.”

Not just biological seeds, but imaginative ones. The possibility of another way of inhabiting the world.

The novel does not pretend that this shift of perception or attention is easy. The human characters struggle, fail, and fracture, as do some of the timelines. Some become activists, some become disillusioned, some turn inward, and some choose to end their human lives. Yet across these divergent arcs runs a shared realization that the world we inhabit has never been exclusively ours.

There’s a common refrain harkening back to Ovid’s Metamorphosis:

Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

For me, the most powerful effect of The Overstory was the way it mirrors the experience of sitting with a particular tree over time. The black walnut I have been tracking in my own work comes to mind. Powers captures that strange sensation that the longer one attends, the less the tree appears as an object and the more it becomes a presence that gathers relations.

In one passage, the novel notes:

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are.”

The line is not accusatory. It is clarifying. It suggests that our dominance has always depended on a background we barely perceive.

What the novel offers, finally, is not an argument but a reorientation. It does not insist that trees are sacred in a theological sense. Yet it quietly renders them neighborly in a phenomenological one with a story to tell us if we have ears to hear.

And once that shift occurs, the ethical implications follow without coercion.

The brilliance of The Overstory lies in this restraint. It does not preach (as some reviewers on subreddits hold). It attends. It does not collapse human suffering into ecological process, nor does it elevate the nonhuman into sentimental purity. Instead, it invites us to inhabit a layered world where grief, endurance, and regeneration are shared conditions.

It leaves us with a sense that the crisis we face is not simply environmental but relational. We have forgotten how to perceive participation.

Powers helps us remember.

When Intelligence Becomes Land Use (or When the Cloud is Made of Land)

Much of the conversation around Project Spero, with the proposed AI data center here in Spartanburg, has revolved around a few similar questions that we keep hearing as a framework for processing development in general. How many jobs will it bring? How much tax revenue will it generate? Will it strain our power grid? Will it draw too heavily from our water systems? What are the environmental impacts?

These are certainly necessary questions. They are practical, measurable, and tied to the immediate realities of governance and infrastructure. However, they are not the only questions worth asking, nor are they the origin of where our concern or attention should stem from, despite the competing marketing messages meant to shape public discourse.

Beneath the debates about megawatts and gallons per minute lies a quieter transformation that is harder to see but just as consequential. Projects like this do not simply add another industrial facility to the landscape. They introduce a new kind of presence into a place. They materialize intelligence.

For generations, land use in the Carolina Piedmont has followed recognizable patterns. Fields became suburbs, forests became highways, and rivers became reservoirs, while textile mills rose and fell. Logistics hubs replaced smokestacks. Each phase reorganized the landscape around a dominant economic logic… agriculture, manufacturing, distribution.

Now something different is emerging. Proposed AI infrastructure here in Spartanburg and throughout the Southeast of the United States does not primarily produce goods, textiles, or even physical services. Its purpose is to process cognition. To store, refine, and distribute decision-making capacity and contribute to the global chain of commodifying intelligence.

In effect, this all turns land into substrate for thinking.

This may sound abstract, but its implications are intensely material. Data centers are among the most physically demanding infrastructures ever built. They require enormous electricity flows, steady access to water for cooling, stable transmission corridors, and continuous connectivity. They generate heat that must be managed. They demand redundancy and resilience. In other words, they reorganize ecosystems to support continuous computation.

The Piedmont is not being asked simply to host an industry, but to sustain a new layer of perceived planetary intelligence to meet the resource needs of large language models. I think that changes the conversation.

When farmland became suburbia, we asked whether roads could handle the traffic. When distribution centers arrived, we asked whether zoning permitted increased truck traffic. But when intelligence becomes land use, the questions shift in both ontological and material ways that we’re not processing.

How much river becomes cooling capacity? How much forest becomes a transmission corridor? How much atmospheric stability becomes heat dissipation? How much regional resilience is redirected toward maintaining uninterrupted cognition?

Human systems do not float above ecological limits. They are embedded within them. AI infrastructure does not escape this reality at all; rather, it intensifies it.

What we are witnessing in places like Spartanburg is not simply economic development. It is the localization of a global cognitive metabolism. Decisions made in distant financial centers or algorithmic markets are beginning to rely on landscapes like ours for their material continuation.

The cloud, it turns out, is made of land.

This does not make projects like Spero inherently good or bad. But it does make them more consequential than the language of “jobs versus environment” suggests.

We are no longer deciding whether to permit another factory or mill. We are deciding whether this landscape will participate in sustaining planetary-scale computation, and it’s a different kind of civic choice.

It asks us not only to measure output and impact, but to reflect on orientation. What kinds of futures are we grounding here? What relationships between land, water, and intelligence are we normalizing? And perhaps most importantly… what forms of attention will this infrastructure train us to attend to (or be attended by)?

Because once intelligence becomes land use, the question is no longer only what we build on the land. It is what kind of world the land is being asked to think into being.

Project Spero and Pauses… Real Questions Are Just Beginning

When I last wrote about Project Spero earlier this month, the proposed AI data center slated for the Tyger River Industrial Park here in Spartanburg County, the story felt like it was accelerating toward inevitability. However, something interesting has happened.

Momentum has slowed.

According to recent reporting, Spartanburg County Council now appears weeks away from a third reading and final decision on whether to grant the tax incentives needed to bring TigerDC’s massive facility here. Yet a council member who previously supported the project is now signaling that it may not move forward at all, following widespread public opposition and mounting questions about infrastructure readiness.

Thousands of residents have signed petitions opposing the project, and hundreds have shown up at recent hearings to raise concerns about energy demand, water use, and long-term environmental impacts.

In other words, this is no longer just a development story or possibilities, but is becoming a community discernment moment about what kind of intentional development we want in the local context.

The Shape of the Project Is Becoming Clearer

We are finally learning more about what Project Spero entails.

TigerDC has indicated the facility could eventually reach up to 400 megawatts of energy demand, with an initial phase closer to 100 MW. For perspective, that level of power draw is often compared to the energy consumption of a mid-sized city like Spartanburg.

Company representatives say the project would rely partly on on-site natural gas generation (which, in itself, raises a number of issues) while also drawing from the regional grid, and they insist that the buildout would strengthen infrastructure rather than strain it. They also point to potential economic benefits, including a limited number of jobs (50?) and hundreds of millions in projected tax revenue over decades.

But the concerns voiced by residents cut to the heart of a deeper issue…even if this project is financially beneficial (for whom?), is our ecological and civic infrastructure prepared to absorb it?

Because data centers do not simply sit on land. They metabolize it.

The Infrastructure Question Has Come Into Focus

Opposition to the data center has wisely moved beyond the “is AI good or bad?” rhetoric, as far as I’ve been reading, to focus on whether Spartanburg’s systems are ready. Residents have raised concerns about electrical grid capacity, water use for cooling, air emissions from on-site generation, and noise from proximity to residential communities.

These are not abstract worries. Large-scale data centers are known to consume vast amounts of both electricity and water, and local critics are asking whether the Upstate’s systems, already under seasonal strain, can realistically support another industrial-scale load.

So the main infrastructure question (in my mind) should be “What will this require from the land and the people who live here long-term?”

A key turning point for moving ahead with Project Spero and receiving the County Council’s blessing may be the proposed tax arrangement. County leaders are considering allowing TigerDC to pay a reduced fee-in-lieu-of-taxes rate of 4% rather than the standard 10.5% for up to 40 years. That incentive appears crucial to the project’s viability and existence given the financial stakes for TigerDC.

If a project requires long-term public subsidy to arrive, who carries the long-term ecological cost once it does?

This Is No Longer Just About Technology

Across the political spectrum, residents are beginning to articulate a shared concern that growth is not neutral in our local communities. The siting of digital infrastructure is also the siting of energy systems, water systems, emissions, and land-use transformations. AI is often described as weightless or virtual or “cloud-based” in clever marketing and PR speak. But the reality is quite the opposite. Data centers are grounded in turbines, pipelines, cooling systems, transmission lines, and land that not-so-quietly consumes incredible amounts of water, power, atmospheric quality, and community well-being.

In other words, in ecology.

Questions That Still Need to Be Asked

Even as the project’s future remains uncertain, several key questions remain unanswered:

How much water will be required at full buildout?

What happens to regional grid stability during peak demand or extreme weather events?

How will emissions from on-site gas generation be monitored?

What guarantees exist regarding long-term infrastructure upgrades?

What happens if the project expands beyond its initial phase?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who gets to decide what kind of future Spartanburg is building?

Hope, in the Older Sense

It’s worth remembering the meaning behind the name Spero…

“While I breathe, I hope.”

Hope, in this older sense, is not optimism. It is attention.

The recent slowing of this project does not mean it will disappear. A final vote is still approaching, regardless of the third reading’s outcome. But it does suggest something healthy that our community pauses long enough to ask what kind of relationship it wants with the infrastructures shaping its future.

That pause may turn out to be the most important development of all!

Empathy and Imagination as Practices of Hope

It’s not difficult to feel pessimistic right now, especially after last night’s State of the Union and all of its divisiveness on all sides of the aisles, all impotent with the seemingly slouching towards Gomorrah.

The thing that we’re all afraid of has multiple names beyond human words.

Every morning news cycle seems to stack another layer onto an already crowded horizon from ecological instability, biodiversity loss, accelerating AI systems, widening economic uncertainty, political fracture, school shootings, and the persistent drumbeat of conflict. None of these is an abstract trend. They show up in the texture of daily life… in energy debates here in the Carolinas, in conversations about data centers and water use, in classrooms, churches, and family tables, and even in the quiet unease many of us feel about the technological systems reshaping our attention and labor.

The temptation is to respond with denial, despair, or an eternal, paralyzing grief. Denial insists things aren’t really that bad. Despair insists nothing can be done. Both short-circuit meaningful engagement. The algorthims program us to this more than we program the algorithms. Same as it ever was.

But for me, the path toward something like grounded optimism has increasingly come down to two intertwined capacities: empathy and imagination.

Not optimism as cheerfulness or optimism as naive confidence. But optimism is a disciplined openness to possibility within real limits.

Empathy as a Way of Knowing

Empathy is often treated as a moral trait, something we either have or lack (or should eschew). But phenomenologically, it is better understood as a mode of perception.

Edith Stein described empathy not as projecting ourselves into another, nor as observing them from a safe distance, but as a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to us as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully present. Empathy does not collapse difference. It allows relation without possession.

When expanded beyond human-to-human encounters, this becomes an ecological capacity.

To practice ecological empathy is to recognize that forests, rivers, species, and landscapes are not merely resources or backdrops. They are participants in shared conditions of life. Sitting with the black walnut in my backyard here in Spartanburg has taught me more about this than any abstract theory. The tree does not “speak” in human language, yet its seasonal rhythms, vulnerabilities, and persistence disclose a form of presence that invites response. Empathy here is not sentimental projection. It is attentiveness to relational reality.

This matters for optimism because despair often grows from abstraction. When the world is reduced to statistics, models, and catastrophic projections, it becomes psychologically uninhabitable. Empathy returns us to situated relation. It anchors concern in concrete encounters rather than overwhelming totals.

We do not save “the environment.” We learn to live differently with the places and beings already shaping our lives.

Imagination as the Extension of Empathy

If empathy opens us to the reality of others, imagination opens us to possible futures with them.

Imagination is frequently dismissed as escapist or unrealistic, but historically it has been one of humanity’s most practical tools. Every social institution, technological system, ethical reform, or ecological restoration effort began as an imagined alternative to what currently existed.

The crises we face today are not only technical. They are narrative and perceptual. Climate models can tell us what may happen. Economic forecasts can outline risks. AI researchers can map trajectories. But none of these, by themselves, generate livable futures. That requires the imaginative capacity to envision forms of coexistence that do not yet fully exist.

This is why ecological thinkers from Thomas Berry to Joanna Macy have emphasized the importance of story. Without imagination, data produces paralysis. With imagination, data becomes orientation.

Imagination does not deny danger. It prevents danger from becoming destiny.

Why These Matter in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence intensifies this dynamic.

AI systems increasingly mediate how we work, communicate, and interpret information. They promise efficiency while also raising questions about labor, creativity, authorship, and the ecological costs of computation itself. It is easy to frame this moment as a competition between humans and machines, or as a technological inevitability moving beyond human control.

Empathy and imagination disrupt that framing.

Empathy reminds us that technological systems are embedded in human and ecological contexts. Data centers draw on water and energy. Algorithms shape social behavior. Design choices reflect values. These systems are not autonomous destinies but relational infrastructures whose impacts are distributed across communities and landscapes.

Imagination, meanwhile, allows us to ask better questions than “Will AI replace us?” Instead we can ask: What forms of human and more-than-human flourishing should technology support? What would a genuinely ecological technological future look like? What practices of attention, education, and governance might guide development in that direction?

Without imagination, AI becomes fate, but with imagination, it becomes a field of ethical and ecological design.

Optimism as a Practice, Not a Prediction

The kind of optimism I find credible today is not based on predictions about outcomes. It is based on practices that keep possibilities open.

Empathy keeps us relationally awake.
Imagination keeps us temporally open.

Together, they resist the two dominant distortions of our moment: the reduction of the world to objects and the reduction of the future to inevitabilities.

When we practice empathy, we perceive that the world is still alive with agencies, relationships, and meanings that exceed our control. When we practice imagination, we acknowledge that the future is still under construction, shaped not only by systems but by perception, story, and choice.

This does not eliminate risk. It does not guarantee success. But it sustains participation.

And participation, more than prediction, is what hope requires.

A Quiet Form of Hope

Some mornings, optimism looks less like a grand vision and more like a small act of attention.

Watching the black walnut shift through seasons. Seeing our children learn to perceive and adapt to new challenges, from math problems to social interactions to losing the championship in a youth basketball league, and listening carefully to a student’s question. Reimagining how a church, classroom, or local community might respond differently to ecological pressures. Writing, teaching, or building something that nudges perception toward relation instead of domination.

None of these solves global crises on its own, but they do cultivate the perceptual habits from which meaningful change becomes thinkable.

Empathy grounds us in the reality of shared life while imagination opens that shared life toward futures not yet fixed.

In a time when so much feels predetermined, these two capacities remain profoundly human… and profoundly necessary.

And for me, that is reason enough to remain cautiously, actively optimistic.

Presentation at Yale on “Returning to the Roots: Edith Stein, Empathy, and Ecological Intentionality”

Here’s my full presentation for Yale Divinity’s 2026 Graduate Conference in Religion and Ecology that was held last week (February 2026)… what a great time to be back at Yale Divinity after graduating in 2002!

Roots of Cruciform Consciousness: Edith Stein, Empathy, and the Ground of Ecological Intentionality

Sam Harrelson, PhD Student, California Institute of Integral Studies
Yale Graduate Conference on Religion and Ecology
February 2026

The theme of this gathering invites us to consider whether what we need for the future might already lie beneath our feet. Such language can easily be heard metaphorically, pointing toward ancestral wisdom, inherited traditions, or the rediscovery of forgotten practices. Yet phenomenologically, the claim may be more literal and methodological than it first appears. What lies beneath our feet is not only soil or memory but the perceptual ground through which the world becomes meaningful at all. The question of roots is therefore not only historical or ecological but experiential. It concerns how the world appears to us, and how we appear within it.

This paper proposes that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a way to rethink ecological consciousness precisely at this level of perception. Stein’s account of empathy, developed in her early work On the Problem of Empathy, does more than explain how one human being understands another. It articulates the structure through which another center of experience becomes present to consciousness at all. When considered in light of contemporary ecological crisis, Stein’s analysis suggests that the breakdown we face is not only technological, political, or economic. It is also perceptual. The challenge before us may therefore involve not simply new policies or innovations, but a re-rooting of awareness itself.

Empathy as the Disclosure of Another Life

Stein famously resists two common misunderstandings of empathy. Empathy is neither projection nor inference. It is not the imaginative insertion of myself into another’s position, nor is it a logical deduction based on external signs. Instead, empathy is a distinctive intentional act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs. I encounter the other not as an extension of myself, nor as a merely observable object, but as a subject whose interior life is present while remaining irreducibly other.

This formulation is subtle but decisive. Empathy preserves difference while establishing relation. It allows proximity without collapse, recognition without possession. The other’s experience appears as both accessible and inexhaustible. I grasp something of their joy, suffering, or intention, yet never exhaust it. Their life exceeds my comprehension even as it becomes present to me.

What is often overlooked is that Stein does not treat empathy primarily as a moral achievement. It is not first a virtue or emotional capacity. Rather, empathy belongs to the ontological structure of consciousness itself. The world we inhabit is never neutral or empty. It is always already populated by other living centers of activity whose presence shapes the field of experience. Empathy, in this sense, is not an optional addition to human life but a basic condition for the appearance of a shared world.

Seen from this perspective, empathy precedes ethics. It grounds the possibility of ethics by disclosing that we do not inhabit the world alone. The recognition of another’s interiority is not a later interpretive step but an original feature of how the world shows up at all.

Ecological Crisis as Perceptual Crisis

If Stein is right, then the ecological crisis may be understood partly as a crisis in this very structure of perception. The devastation of ecosystems is not only the result of poor management or technological excess. It is also enabled by a way of seeing in which the natural world appears primarily as an object rather than as a community.

Forests become timber, rivers become resources, soil becomes substrate, and landscapes appear as inventories of use-value rather than as living fields of relation. In phenomenological terms, the world is flattened into availability. Once this perceptual reduction takes hold, exploitation follows almost inevitably. What no longer appears as expressive or relational becomes disposable.

This does not mean that ecological destruction results simply from individual failures of empathy. Rather, it suggests that modern technological culture has cultivated a habitual mode of perception in which relational presence is systematically obscured. The more-than-human world becomes intelligible primarily through abstraction, measurement, and utility. The experiential sense of encountering other forms of life as centers of activity recedes from view.

Stein’s phenomenology offers a way to articulate what has been lost. If empathy is the structure through which another life becomes present, then ecological renewal may require not only new forms of governance but renewed perception. The task is not to sentimentalize nature or project human consciousness onto nonhuman beings. It is to recover the capacity to encounter the world as populated by lives that exceed our own perspective.

Toward Ecological Intentionality

To name this possibility, I use the term ecological intentionality. In phenomenological language, intentionality refers to the directedness of consciousness toward the world. Ecological intentionality designates a mode of awareness oriented not toward mastery or control but toward participatory belonging.

Such intentionality recognizes that existence unfolds within networks of interdependence. Living beings present themselves as centers of activity whose interior dynamics cannot be reduced to mechanical explanation alone. Their life is not identical to ours, yet neither is it merely inert. Stein’s careful distinction between empathy and projection is crucial here. We need not claim to fully understand another life in order to acknowledge that it exceeds objecthood.

Ecological intentionality, therefore, involves a shift in posture rather than an expansion of knowledge. It is less about acquiring new information and more about recovering a different way of encountering what is already present. The world begins to appear again as a field of relations in which we are participants rather than external observers.

The Cruciform Pattern of Ecological Life

At this point, the cross can be reexamined phenomenologically. Within Christian theology, the cross is often interpreted primarily as the site of human redemption or divine sacrifice. Yet it can also be read more broadly as a pattern of relational existence. The cross marks the intersection of vulnerability and renewal, finitude and transformation. It signifies that life does not persist by escaping death but through processes that pass through it.

When viewed in ecological terms, this pattern becomes strikingly familiar. Soil forms through decay. Forest ecosystems depend upon cycles of decomposition and regeneration. Nutrients circulate through networks of exchange among fungi, plants, animals, and microorganisms. Life flourishes not despite finitude but through it. Descent into the earth becomes the condition for new emergence.

The cruciform pattern therefore resonates with the very processes unfolding beneath our feet. It names a structure in which loss and renewal, limitation and possibility, are inseparable. Such a reading does not reduce theology to biology or vice versa. Instead, it reveals a shared logic of relational becoming that traverses both domains.

Embodiment, Finitude, and Participation

Stein’s later philosophical and spiritual writings deepen this ecological resonance. In Finite and Eternal Being, she portrays the human person as simultaneously grounded in finitude and opened toward transcendence. This openness does not remove us from the world but situates us more deeply within it. Embodiment is not an obstacle to spiritual life but its very condition.

Through our bodies, we are always already embedded within networks of dependence. We breathe air shaped by ecosystems, consume food produced through soil and climate, and live within material processes we neither originate nor control. Finitude, for Stein, is not deficiency but location. To be finite is to be situated, and to be situated is to belong.

Her reflections in The Science of the Cross extend this insight into explicitly theological territory. Transformation occurs not through domination or escape but through participation in patterns of vulnerability and love. Read ecologically, this suggests that the way forward lies not in transcending earthly conditions but in entering them more fully. The acceptance of interdependence becomes the ground of spiritual as well as ecological maturity.

Place-Based Attention

These themes remain abstract unless they are anchored in lived experience. For me, this anchoring occurs quite literally in the Carolina Piedmont, where I live and work. As part of my research practice, I track the seasonal rhythms of a black walnut tree in my yard. Over the course of the year, I watch its cycles of dormancy, budding, leafing, fruiting, and decay.

Such observation does not transform the tree into a human subject. Yet neither does it remain a mere object. It appears instead as a living center of activity whose rhythms intersect with mine. Its shade shapes my summer afternoons. Its leaves enrich the soil each autumn. Birds and insects inhabit its branches. Time itself becomes visible through its changes.

This practice does not solve climate change or halt biodiversity loss. But it reconfigures perception. The tree ceases to be a resource or backdrop and becomes a participant in a shared field of life. Stein’s phenomenology helps articulate what occurs in such moments. Empathy, understood broadly as the disclosure of another center of life, makes possible a renewed sense of belonging within the world.

Returning to the Roots

To return to the roots, then, is not primarily to recover a lost past. It is to return to the participatory ground of perception itself. When this ground is obscured, the world appears inert and disposable. When it is recovered, the world appears again as expressive, relational, and alive.

From this perspective, ecological responsibility no longer presents itself merely as an external obligation imposed by ethical systems or environmental policies. It emerges instead as the natural expression of inhabiting a shared world. The recognition of belonging precedes and grounds the call to care.

In this sense, what we need may indeed already lie beneath our feet. Not only in the soil and its intricate networks of life, but in the deeper phenomenological roots through which the world first becomes present to us at all.

References

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. Waltraut Stein. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being. Trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Trans. Josephine Koeppel. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

What is Ecology?

My PhD work at CIIS is in Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion (and my dissertation is on what I call the Ecology of the Cross… hence the subtitle of my site here).

Most people hear the word ecology and think of recycling bins, endangered species lists, or debates about climate policy. Ecology gets filed under “environmental issues,” which usually means something happening out there in forests, oceans, or polar ice.

But ecology did not begin as a political category, and it is not primarily about “nature” as something separate from us.

Ecology, at its root, is about home.

The word comes from the Greek oikos, meaning household, dwelling, or place of belonging, combined with logos, meaning study, account, or pattern of understanding. Ecology, then, is the study of the household… the attempt to understand how life lives together.

From the beginning, this includes humans. It always has.

The more scientific discipline of ecology emerged in the nineteenth century to describe relationships among organisms and their environments, but the deeper intuition is older and wider. It asks a simple but destabilizing question:

What does it mean to live within a shared world rather than on top of one?

When we reduce ecology to environmental management, we shrink this question into something technical. Forests become “resources.” Rivers become “water supply.” Soil becomes “land use.” Even conservation can slip into a language of control… how do we preserve, maintain, or optimize the system?

But ecology, in its fullest sense, is not about control. It is about relation.

An ecological perspective notices that nothing exists alone. A tree is not just a tree. It is soil, fungi, rainfall, insect traffic, bird migration, sunlight history, and deep time woven into a living form. A river is not just flowing water. It is geology, watershed, climate, agriculture, policy, memory (human and more-than-human), and story moving together across a landscape.

And a human being is not an isolated self, navigating a neutral backdrop. We are bodies shaped by air, food, language, microbes, culture, ancestry, and place. Even our thoughts emerge within networks of relation… familial, social, historical, material.

Ecology, then, is not merely a branch of biology. It is a way of perceiving reality (which is why I focus so much on empathy as an ontology, or way of thinking).

It invites us to see the world not as a collection of separate objects, but as a field of entanglements. Not as a machine assembled from parts, but as a living household whose members continually shape one another.

This shift is not only scientific. It is existential.

If ecology means household, then ecological crisis is not just environmental damage. It is disordered belonging. It signals that we have forgotten how to live within the home that sustains us.

This forgetting shows up in obvious ways… collapsing biodiversity, warming climates, polluted waters. But it also shows up in quieter, more intimate forms: chronic distraction, alienation from place, the sense that life is happening somewhere else while we scroll through representations of it.

In that sense, ecology is also about attention.

To live ecologically is to learn again how to notice where we are. It is to recognize that the ground beneath our feet is not generic “environment” but a specific, storied place. The Carolina Piedmont is not interchangeable with anywhere else. The black walnut in a backyard is not just another tree. It is a living participant in a shared field of existence… shaping shade, soil, insects, birds, and even the rhythms of a person who chooses to sit beside it each morning.

Ecology begins when we allow ourselves to be addressed by the world we inhabit.

This is why ecological thinking inevitably crosses into philosophy, theology, and even spirituality. Once we recognize that existence is relational all the way down, questions arise that science alone cannot settle. What kind of beings are we within this household? What responsibilities follow from belonging? What forms of knowledge emerge not from standing apart, but from participating?

Some traditions have long held that wisdom begins with remembering that the world is not raw material but shared dwelling. Modern ecology, at its best, does not invent this insight so much as rediscover it in empirical form.

Seen this way, ecology is not just about saving the planet. The planet will persist in some form regardless of us. Ecology is about learning how to live truthfully within the web of life that makes our own existence possible.

It is about recovering the sense that we are not spectators of the world, nor its managers, but members of its household.

And that realization, once it sinks in, changes everything… from how we farm and build to how we teach, pray, design cities, raise children, and even how we sit quietly beneath a tree and listen.

Ecology, in the end, is the study of how life belongs.

And perhaps, also, the practice of remembering that we belong here too.

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Practice of Ecological Empathy

There are moments in academic life when a concept stops being merely theoretical and becomes a lived practice. My presentation this past week at Christendom College’s Eternity In Time (Thinking With the Church Through History) conference on Edith Stein and what I’ve been calling ecological empathy has been one of those moments for me. My conference presentation is below if you’d like to read it, and I’ll post the full, longer paper shortly.

What began as a phenomenological question about how we know another’s experience is real has slowly widened into a question about how we inhabit history, land, and the more-than-human world at all.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy is often read within psychology or philosophy of mind. But her insight cuts much deeper. Empathy, for Stein, is not projection and not detached observation (probably my best post about this concept so far). It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience becomes present to me as other. I do not become the other, and I do not reduce them to an object. Instead, I encounter a real center of experience that exceeds me.

This structure has profound implications beyond interpersonal ethics. It suggests that knowing is always relational, always asymmetrical, and always grounded in encounter rather than mastery.

From Historical Method to Empathic Participation

In my talk, I suggested that if we take Stein seriously, history itself becomes an empathic practice.

Modern historical method often imagines itself as neutral reconstruction: gather sources, analyze context, produce explanation. But Stein’s phenomenology invites a different posture. The past is not merely a dataset. It is the trace of lived experience. To study history responsibly is therefore not just to explain events but to encounter the lives, intentions, and worlds that once unfolded within them.

This does not mean sentimental identification. Stein explicitly resists that. Instead, it means acknowledging that historical understanding involves a disciplined openness to experiences that are irreducibly not our own.

History, in this sense, becomes a form of relational knowledge… a practice of attending to the presence of others across time.

The Creaturely Horizon

Where this becomes especially compelling for my own work is when we widen the circle of empathy beyond human history.

If empathy is the recognition of another center of experience that is not reducible to me, then ecological awareness begins to look like an expansion of empathic perception. Landscapes, species, watersheds, and ecosystems are not simply backdrops to human drama. They are fields of lived processes, histories, and agencies that exceed human intention.

This is what I’ve been calling the creaturely horizon. It is the recognition that human life always unfolds within a wider community of beings whose existence is not defined by our narratives, economies, or theologies, even though those systems constantly attempt to do just that.

Here in the Carolina Piedmont, this is not abstract. The Pacolet (and Tyger) watershed near our home carries layers of agricultural history, Indigenous displacement, industrial transformation, and ongoing ecological stress. To walk along its edges is to encounter not just scenery but a dense historical and ecological presence. The river is not an object of study alone. It is a participant in a shared world.

Ecological empathy begins precisely at this point: when perception shifts from viewing land as resource to encountering it as a living historical partner.

Empathy, Ecology, and the Limits of Control

One of Stein’s most important contributions is her insistence that empathy preserves difference. The other never becomes fully transparent to me. There is always excess, always depth, always opacity.

Ecologically, this insight is crucial.

Many environmental crises emerge from the illusion that the world can be fully known, predicted, and controlled. Industrial agriculture, extractive economies, and technocratic planning all rely on the assumption that complexity can be reduced to manageable variables.

Stein’s phenomenology undermines this posture at its root. If genuine knowing involves encountering another reality that exceeds my grasp, then ecological knowledge must also involve humility. The more we understand ecosystems, the more we encounter their irreducible complexity.

Ecological empathy therefore does not produce domination. It produces attentiveness, patience, and restraint.

It shifts the question from “How do we manage this system?” to “How do we live responsibly within a world that is not ours alone?”

Toward an Ecological Practice of History

This perspective also reframes the study of Church history, theology, and religious tradition, which has been central to my recent work.

Too often, religious history is narrated as a story of doctrines, institutions, or human conflicts. But if we read it empathically and ecologically, we begin to see something else: traditions emerge within landscapes, climates, agricultural systems, and material constraints. Monastic rhythms follow seasonal cycles. Liturgical calendars mirror ecological time. Theologies of creation reflect lived encounters with land and weather as much as abstract metaphysics.

To study religious history responsibly is therefore to attend not only to texts and ideas but to the ecological worlds in which they were lived.

History, then, becomes not just human memory but a layered field of creaturely relations.

Ecological Empathy as Spiritual Practice

For me, this is not only an academic argument. It is also a spiritual practice.

Ecological empathy begins in small acts of attention. Watching how light changes across the backyard in late afternoon. Noticing the seasonal shifts in the black walnut tree I’ve been tracking. Listening to the sounds of insects returning in early spring. These are not sentimental exercises. They are ways of training perception to recognize the presence of other lives unfolding alongside ours.

Stein helps clarify that empathy is not something we manufacture emotionally. It is something we cultivate perceptually. It begins with learning to encounter others as real.

In a time of ecological crisis, this shift may be more urgent than any policy proposal. Laws and technologies matter. But without transformed perception, they remain fragile.

Ecological empathy invites us to inhabit the world differently… not as managers standing outside it, but as participants within a shared, creaturely history.

Conference Presentation Text

History as Empathic Ecology: Edith Stein and the Creaturely Horizon of Catholic Memory

Sam Harrelson
Christendom College, Feb 2026

Conference Presentation Script

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to be part of this conversation.

Pope Francis recently called for a renewed study of Church history, warning against what he described as an “overly angelic conception of the Church,” one that forgets her spots, wrinkles, and historical embeddedness. His concern is not simply methodological. It is pastoral and ethical. If the Church forgets her historical entanglement with the world, she risks forgetting her responsibility within it.

Today I want to suggest that Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy offers a surprisingly powerful way to rethink what it means to study Church history at all. My claim is simple:
If we take Stein seriously, history becomes not only an intellectual discipline but also an empathetic practice… and potentially an ecological one.

Stein’s early work On the Problem of Empathy asks a deceptively basic question: how do we know another’s experience is real?

Her answer resists both projection and detachment. Empathy, for Stein, is neither imagining the other as myself nor observing them as an object. It is a distinctive act in which another’s experience is given to me as genuinely theirs… irreducibly other, yet meaningfully accessible.

Empathy therefore has structure. It involves:

First, the recognition of another as a subject.
Second, an entry into the meaning of their experience.
And third, a return to oneself, now transformed by that encounter.

This is not merely psychology. It is a phenomenology of relational knowing. We come to truth not by standing outside relationships, but by entering them responsibly.

What happens if we bring this insight into the study of Church history?

Too often, historical study oscillates between two poles.

On one side, there is triumphalist narration: the Church as a seamless unfolding of divine purpose.
On the other, there is purely critical detachment: the Church as a sociological object to be explained from the outside.

Both approaches, in different ways, fail Stein’s test. One collapses alterity into ideology. The other refuses encounter altogether.

A Steinian approach to Church history would instead treat the past as something we must empathically encounter.

To study a council, a missionary movement, a devotional practice, or a theological dispute is not only to catalog events. It is to ask:
What worlds of meaning were lived here?
What fears, hopes, and constraints shaped these actions?
What forms of life were made possible… and what forms were foreclosed?

History, in this sense, becomes an act of disciplined attentiveness to lived experience across time.

But Stein’s framework pushes us further than this.

Because once empathy is understood as an openness to real otherness, we face a deeper question:

Who counts as the “other” in historical understanding?

Stein herself focuses primarily on human persons. Yet the structure she identifies does not logically stop there. The Church’s history has always unfolded not only among human actors but within landscapes, climates, material resources, animals, and built environments.

The monasteries of medieval Europe were shaped by forests, rivers, and agricultural cycles.

Missionary expansion often followed trade routes, mineral extraction, and imperial ecologies.

Liturgical art depends on pigments, wood, stone, and labor drawn from specific places.

These are not background conditions. They are part of the creaturely field in which Christian history becomes possible.

If Stein teaches us that knowledge requires acknowledging the real presence of the other, then historical study must also attend to these more-than-human participants in the Church’s story.

This is what I call empathic ecology… or, in my broader work, ecological intentionality.

Here the tradition itself offers companions for Stein.

Hildegard of Bingen’s notion of viriditas, the greening vitality of creation, portrays divine life as manifest in the flourishing of the natural world. For Hildegard, spiritual history and ecological vitality are inseparable.

In contemporary theology, Leonardo Boff’s integral ecology similarly insists that Christian ethics cannot be disentangled from the well-being of Earth’s systems and communities.

Stein provides the phenomenological grammar that helps explain why these insights matter methodologically. If understanding requires empathic openness to real others, then historical truth demands attention not only to human intentions but to the material and ecological conditions that co-shaped them.

Let me offer one brief example.

In the nineteenth century, European engagement with the ancient Near East brought Assyrian reliefs and artifacts into Western museums and theological discourse. These objects were treated as confirmations of biblical history and symbols of civilizational continuity.

Yet their removal also depended on imperial infrastructures, environmental extraction, and the displacement of local cultural ecologies. The Church’s encounter with these artifacts cannot be understood fully without recognizing the ecological and political networks that enabled their movement.

A purely doctrinal history might note the apologetic value of these discoveries.
A purely political history might critique imperial appropriation.

A Steinian, empathic-ecological history asks something more layered:
What worlds of meaning were opened and closed here… for scholars, for local communities, and for the landscapes themselves?

Such questions do not dilute historical rigor. They deepen it.

What does this mean for Catholic higher education today?

If Church history is taught merely as a sequence of events or doctrines, students may inherit either nostalgia or cynicism.

But if history is taught as an empathic encounter with the lived, creaturely reality of the Church across time, it can cultivate something else entirely: humility, responsibility, and solidarity.

Students begin to see that the Church’s past is not an untouchable monument. It is a field of relationships still shaping our present obligations.

In this way, historical study becomes formative rather than merely informative. It trains perception. It forms conscience. It prepares a mode of witness that is less triumphalist and more cruciform… grounded in attention to vulnerability, interdependence, and the real costs of historical action.

Let me close with this thought.

Edith Stein teaches that empathy is not sentimental identification. It is a disciplined openness to the reality of another. It changes how we know, and therefore how we act.

If we bring that insight into the study of Church history, we may discover that the task is not simply to remember what the Church has done.

The deeper task is to learn how to perceive the Church’s past truthfully… within the full web of human and creaturely relations that made it possible.

Such perception does not weaken faith. It grounds it.

And perhaps this is precisely what Pope Francis is asking of us:
not a history that idealizes the Church,
but one that helps the Church inhabit time… and the living world… with deeper honesty, responsibility, and hope.

Thank you.

Project Spero Data Center Advances in Spartanburg: Power, Water, and the Real Resource Question

When I wrote recently about Project Spero here in Spartanburg and the unfolding “resource question,” the story still felt open, and we didn’t have many details beyond platitudes, so my thoughts were suspended between promise and caution.

This week, it moved. Spartanburg County Council approved the next step for the proposed artificial-intelligence data center after a packed, tense public meeting, advancing the roughly $3 billion project despite vocal opposition from residents concerned about its environmental and infrastructural impacts. The meeting stretched for hours, with hundreds of people filling the chamber and hallway to voice concerns about the scale of the facility planned for the Tyger River Industrial Park. In other words, the decision process is no longer theoretical. It is unfolding in real time (and hopefully with more transparency), and that matters for the path ahead.

Large data center announcements are consistently appearing in public discourse (at least here in the Carolinas), wrapped in abstraction and NDAs, surrounded by investment totals, job counts, and innovation narratives that feel distant from everyday life. But once approvals begin, the conversation shifts from what might happen to what must now be managed. Water withdrawals stop being projections, and power demand stops being modeled. Land use stops being conceptual while all of this becomes material. The movement of Project Spero into the next phase signals that Spartanburg is entering precisely that transition, moving from imagining a future to negotiating its physical cost.

One of the most striking claims emerging from the latest reporting is the developer’s insistence that the proposed AI data center will be “self-sufficient,” operating without straining local infrastructure or putting upward pressure on energy bills. On the surface, that language sounds reassuring, suggesting a facility that exists almost in isolation, drawing only on its own internal systems while leaving the surrounding community untouched.

However, this is precisely where the deeper resource questions I raised earlier become more important, not less. Infrastructure rarely, if ever, functions as an island. Power generation, transmission agreements, water sourcing, fuel supply, and long-term maintenance all unfold within shared regional systems, even when parts of the process occur on-site.

The broader context makes that reassurance harder to take at face value. Large data centers elsewhere have been documented consuming millions of gallons of water per day, and electricity costs have risen sharply in regions where such facilities cluster, with those increases often eventually distributed across customers rather than absorbed privately. That does not mean Spartanburg will necessarily follow the same pattern, but it does mean the conversation cannot end with a press release promise. If anything, the national trajectory suggests the need for clearer disclosure, not simpler assurances.

Local concerns voiced at the council meeting point to exactly this tension. Questions about transmission agreements, cost structures, and regulatory oversight are not abstract procedural details. They are the mechanisms through which “self-sufficiency” is tested in practice. The reported rejection of a large transmission proposal by federal regulators because of potential cost-shifting onto ratepayers highlights how easily infrastructure investments intended for a single industrial project can ripple outward into the broader grid. What appears contained at the planning stage can become shared responsibility over time, particularly when long-term demand growth, maintenance needs, or energy market shifts enter the picture.

The developer’s plan to generate some power on-site using natural gas, along with a closed-loop cooling system designed to limit water use, is significant and worth taking seriously. Those design choices suggest an awareness of public concern and an attempt to mitigate resource draw. But even here, the key question is not simply how much water or power is used inside the facility’s literal boundary fence. The real issue is how those systems connect to fuel supply chains, regional water tables, transmission reliability, and emergency contingencies. A closed loop still depends on an initial fill and ongoing operational stability. On-site generation still relies on pipelines, markets, and regulatory frameworks beyond the site itself. “Self-sufficient” in engineering terms doesn’t mean independent in ecological or civic terms.

This is exactly why the earlier framing of Project Spero as a resource question still holds. The challenge is not whether the developer intends to minimize impact. Most large projects today do for a variety of reasons, from economics to public goodwill to tax incentives. The challenge is that digital infrastructure, such as data centers, operates at scales where even minimized impacts can be structurally significant for smaller regions. Spartanburg is not just deciding whether to host a facility, but is deciding how much of its long-term water, energy capacity, and landscape stability should be oriented toward supporting global computational systems whose primary benefits may be distributed far beyond the county line.

The Council meeting itself was contentious, emotional, and at times interrupted by public reaction. It would be easy to read that as dysfunction, but I read it differently. That level of turnout suggests something deeper than simple opposition or support. Instead, local turnout for this sort of decision signals that residents recognize it touches fundamental questions about the region’s future and what counts as development in a place defined as much by rivers, forests, and communities as by industrial parks. Public tension often marks the moment when a community realizes that a project is not just economic but ecological and cultural.

Data centers, in this sense, are simply the visible tip of a broader shift. Across the Southeast (and especially here in South Carolina), AI-scale computing is accelerating demand for electricity, land, and cooling water at unprecedented levels, asking local governments to balance economic incentives against long-term utility strain, short-term construction jobs against enduring resource commitments, and technological prestige against environmental resilience. Project Spero brings that global tension directly into Spartanburg County. The deeper question is not whether this one facility should exist, but whether communities like ours have the ecological, civic, and ethical frameworks needed to evaluate infrastructure built primarily for planetary digital systems rather than local human (and more-than-human) needs.

Approval of another procedural step does not mean the story is finished. It means the story has entered its consequential phase. This is where transparency, ecological assessment, and long-range planning matter most, not least. Decisions made quietly at this stage often shape regional water use, grid load, and land development patterns for decades. If the earlier phase asked whether we should consider this, now the question is more likely to be how we will live with what we choose (or our elected officials “choose” for us).

What encourages me most is not the vote itself but the turnout. Packed rooms mean people care about the future of this place. They care about rivers, roads, power lines, neighborhoods, taxes, and the invisible infrastructures that shape daily life. That is not obstruction, but is civic life functioning. Project Spero may ultimately prove beneficial, burdensome, or something in between, but the real measure of success will be whether Spartanburg approaches it with clear eyes about both its opportunities and its ecological realities.

The true cost of a data center is never only measured in dollars. It is measured in attention, in energy, and in the long memory of the land that hosts it.