Category: Ecology

Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene

The paper is called “Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene,” and it starts close to home… literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina’s state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew. A third site remains in the works.

The argument I’m making is that the crisis these proposals represent isn’t only an energy and water problem (though it is that). It’s a crisis of ecological perception, and the way the promotional apparatus around data center development is specifically designed to make planetary costs invisible while foregrounding jobs, tax revenue, and American competitiveness. The Tyger River watershed, the regional grid’s carbon intensity, the cumulative water withdrawals from the Broad River basin… none of that appears in a Governor’s press release.

Drawing on Yves Citton’s account of attention as a distributed, politically structured field, alongside Francis’s Laudate Deum, Donna Haraway’s contact zone concept, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, I try to make the case that what happened in those County Council chambers, a community briefly and collectively organizing its attention against a machinery designed to prevent exactly that noticing, points toward something worth taking seriously. Not as a substitute for structural and regulatory transformation, but as its necessary condition.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. The paper tries to think through what it would take to keep these systems visible before decisions are made rather than after.

Attention as Ecological Practice- AI Data Centers and the Limits of the AnthropoceneDownload

Ecology (Without) Fields: Toward a Different Ontology of the Cosmos

I taught AP Physics and Physics and Physical Science (along with Environmental Science, Life Science, and Earth & Space Science) for almost twenty years. I’d introduce the field concept early in the course, and everything that notion seems to clarify. The gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, the wave collapse, and wave functions, etc., all work better as long as you have a playing field. Much like our sports today. There’s a value assigned to every point in space, smoothly varying, mathematically tractable, and extraordinarily powerful as a predictive tool. Students felt the elegance of it, and so did I. You could describe the behavior of matter across any scale with the same formalism. The cosmos, it seemed, was fundamentally a manifold of field values, and once you understood that, you understood something deep about reality itself.

I am no longer sure that’s true. Not because the physics is wrong (it isn’t, at least in our human understanding of the Cosmos with our current framing), but because I have come to suspect that the field picture, however useful, is describing something derived rather than something fundamental. And I think the place I’m standing right now, on the bank of Lawson’s Fork in the South Carolina Piedmont, is better evidence of what the cosmos actually is than any field equation.

That’s a large claim. Let me try to earn it or unpack this at least.

In 1980, the philosopher Hartry Field published a book called Science Without Numbers that caused something of a stir in the philosophy of mathematics. His argument was deceptively simple, I think. Basically, the fact that mathematics is indispensable for doing physics doesn’t mean that mathematical entities (numbers, functions, sets) actually exist. Mathematics might be extraordinarily useful without being true, much like some would claim about religion. Field called this position fictionalism, and he went on to demonstrate, technically, that you could reformulate Newtonian gravitational theory without any reference to numbers at all, replacing numerical values with purely relational predicates borrowed from geometry.(1) The numbers, he showed, were conservative over the underlying physical facts… they generated no new physical information beyond what the relational structure already implied. They were a powerful fiction, not a fundamental reality.

Field’s project was aimed at numbers. But the argument licenses something further. If indispensability for prediction is no guarantee of ontological fundamentality, then the same skepticism can be turned on the field descriptions that physics has inherited and extended since Maxwell (my favorite) and Einstein. The electromagnetic, gravitational, and quantum fields are extraordinarily useful for prediction. They are not, on that account alone, fundamental features of reality. They might be conservative over something more primordial… something that field theory represents without quite reaching. The question is what that something might be.

Henri Bergson spent much of his philosophical career pressing exactly this question against the physics of his own time, and his answer still appeals to many of us. For Bergson, the deepest problem with mathematical physics is not its precision but its treatment of time. A field value is assigned to a point in spacetime, a frozen coordinate, mathematically exact and stripped of duration. The continuous field is the smooth assembly of such frozen moments across an abstract manifold. This, Bergson argued, is the intellectualist distortion of real time, lived time, the time of actual processes, being not a coordinate. It is duration, qualitative, irreversible, thick with the past, that has accumulated in it. (2) A field value at a spacetime point doesn’t capture duration necessarily but does eliminate it.

In physics, this means the field of formalism is, in a specific and precise sense, conservative with respect to durational facts. It extracts from the living reality of process exactly what is measurable (such as position, magnitude, rate of change) while leaving the ontological substrate of durée untouched and undescribed. Bergson is not saying physics is wrong. He is saying it is a useful abstraction from something more realistic or deeper, and that mistaking the abstraction for the fundamental thing is a category error with consequences.

At Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg, duration is not an abstraction. The creek carries its own past in its channel morphology, its sediment load, its riparian forest, and the chemical memory of every storm and drought since the last ice age. What I encounter when I sit at the shoal is not a field value. It is the thickness, with the accumulated duration of a place that has been doing this longer than the Piedmont has been the Piedmont. You can assign temperature, velocity, and dissolved oxygen values to the water at this point. You cannot assign a field value to what it means for this water to be here, now, still.

Gilles Deleuze sharpens this. In Difference and Repetition, he argues that extensive quantities (like the kinds of quantities field theory assigns to points in space ) are actualizations of something more primordial, such as intensive difference. (3) A temperature gradient is intensive. It has direction, it drives the process, and it is the condition of heat flow before it becomes measurable as a rate. A temperature field value is the extensive representation of that intensity, which you get when you cancel the gradient into a number. The number is real and useful. But the gradient came first, ontologically. The difference is more fundamental than the magnitude.

For ecology, this is almost self-evident. What ecosystems run on is intensity from thermal gradients, hydrological pressure differentials, chemical potential differences across membranes and soil horizons, and trophic gradients from light-saturated surface to benthic dark. These intensive differences are what ecological work is about. They drive nutrient cycling, species distribution, evolutionary pressure, and succession. The field descriptions represent these intensities by extending them into magnitudes, thereby systematically concealing what is ontologically prior. Ecology, properly understood, is a science of intensive differences and similarities. Field theory is the science of extensive magnitude. Obviously, they are not describing the same level of reality.

Alfred North Whitehead made this argument in a different way, and Michael Epperson’s more recent work connecting Whitehead’s process metaphysics to quantum mechanics has recently given it new precision. Whitehead’s central claim in Process and Reality is that the extensive continuum, or the spacetime manifold that underlies field theory, is not primitive but derivative. (4) It is constituted by the mutual implication of what Whitehead calls actual occasions as irreducibly local events of experience in a broad sense, each taking account of its environment, each contributing its achieved definiteness to the world that follows. The field is the abstract pattern that emerges from the creative advance of actual occasions. It is real, but it is not where reality begins.

Epperson’s contribution is to show that this Whiteheadian picture is not merely a philosophical preference, but it resolves genuine problems in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. The wave function, in Epperson’s reading, is not a field in physical space at all. It is a description of potentiality, the structured possibility space of an actual occasion prior to its determination. The so-called collapse of the wave function is the creative advance from potentiality to actuality and the event in which an occasion achieves its definiteness in relation to its environment. (5) The field formalism is conservative over this event structure as it generates the right predictions without describing what is actually occurring at the level of individual occasions.

What Whitehead and Epperson together suggest is that the cosmos is made of events, not fields. Events that are irreducibly local, durational, relational, and in some broad sense experiential, events that take account of their context rather than merely occupying coordinates in it. This is ontologically closer to an ecosystem than to a manifold.

Here is where plasma physics enters, and the argument takes on a different weight.

Plasma is the dominant state of matter in the observable universe, accounting for something in the range of ninety-nine percent by volume. Stars, the interstellar medium, the vast filamentary structures of the cosmic web… all plasma. And plasma physics is, irreducibly, the physics of collective relationships. A plasma cannot be well described by treating particles as discrete entities moving through a background field. Its behavior is dominated by collective phenomena such as Alfvén waves, magnetic reconnection events, Debye sheaths, current sheets, and filamentary structures that arise from the simultaneous mutual interaction of charged particles at every scale. The plasma doesn’t have properties so much as it enacts them through a collective process(es).

Hannes Alfvén, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work in magnetohydrodynamics, was himself sharply critical of the tendency to privilege mathematical elegance over the messy relational reality of plasma behavior. He thought cosmological models built on clean field equations were systematically misleading about what cosmic matter actually does. (6) Alfvén was a physicist making a philosopher’s complaint, as well, that the abstraction has been mistaken for the thing.

A plasma is, ontologically, more like a watershed than like a Newtonian gravitational field. It has memory in the sense that it is encoded in its magnetic field topology, the way Lawson’s Fork has memory encoded in its channel morphology. It responds to disturbance through cascading collective reorganization rather than smooth field-theoretic propagation. It is constitutively far from thermodynamic equilibrium, as are living systems, sustained by the continuous throughput of intensive difference. The Alfvén wave is not a perturbation of a background field. It is the medium itself moving, doing something together, the way a flood pulse is the creek itself responding to what has happened upstream.

If ninety-nine percent of the visible cosmos is plasma, then the “clean” physics of particles and fields is actually the physics of the exceptional cases, such as the cold, dense, low-energy corners of reality where matter settles into the forms our terrestrial instruments first encountered as we experience. The cosmos is not, predominantly, a manifold of field values. It is predominantly a tissue of collective, intensive, durational process. Which is to say, it is predominantly something more like ecology.

Let me try to state the thesis clearly, because I want to be precise about what I am and am not claiming.

I am not claiming that field theory is false or that its predictions are unreliable. They are not. I am claiming, following Field’s nominalist license, that the indispensability of field descriptions for prediction is no guarantee of their ontological fundamentality. Field showed this for numbers. The same argument extends to the field descriptions themselves, I think. Fields are conservative about a more fundamental substrate they represent without quite reaching it.

That more fundamental substrate, I am suggesting, has the following features… it is intensive rather than extensive, durational rather than coordinatized, constituted by actual events of mutual encounter rather than persistent substances in a container space, and irreducibly place-specific rather than homogeneously law-governed. These are the features that Bergson recovers when he insists on duration against spatialization, that Deleuze recovers when he insists on intensity against extensive magnitude, that Whitehead recovers when he insists on actual occasions against the continuous manifold, and that Alfvén gestures toward when he insists on the relational complexity of plasma against the elegance of field equations.

They are also the features that ecology investigates. Not ecology as our current applied physics, as the working out of biochemical field gradients in living systems, but ecology as first philosophy and the study of how living systems constitute their places through intensive, durational, relational process.

What I encounter at Lawson’s Fork is not merely complex field theory. It is something ontologically prior to field theory as a tissue of encounters, each with its own duration, each irreducibly local, each constituted by the intensive differences that drive it. The watershed is doing what the cosmos is doing, at a scale I can stand beside and attend to. The cosmos is not, at its most fundamental level, a field. It is more like a watershed, with duration extending all the way down, an intensive difference expressing itself in process, place, and encounter.

That isn’t mysticism (maybe it is?). It is, I think, what physics is actually showing us, once we stop mistaking the conservation of the formalism for a description of what is fundamentally real.

(1) Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defence of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1–30. Field’s central demonstration is that Newtonian gravitational theory can be reformulated using only relational predicates, betweenness and congruence relations among spacetime points, without quantifying over real numbers or other abstract entities.

(2) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 1–45. The critique of spatializaton is developed most fully in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, but Creative Evolution gives the most direct statement of duration as irreducible to coordinate time.

(3) Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222–261. The distinction between intensive and extensive quantity is central to Deleuze’s account of individuation and his critique of representational ontology.

(4) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 61–82. Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum as derivative from actual occasions is developed in Part II.

(5) Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 145–187. Epperson’s most concentrated argument for wave-function collapse as Whiteheadian concrescence is in Chapter 5.

(6) Hannes Alfvén, “Cosmology: Myth or Science?” Journal of Astrophysics and Astronomy 5 (1984): 79–98. Alfvén’s critique of mathematical cosmology in favor of plasma-based observational models runs through much of his later work, including Cosmic Plasma (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).

Einfühlung: Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

What If AI Learned from Forests Instead of Empires?

I linked to a recent piece this week that highlighted the growing popularity of an open-source project called Edict, built on the ancient Chinese “Three Departments and Six Ministries” model. Instead of imagining AI agents as a kind of flat group chat where everyone talks at once and somehow arrives at a solution, these developers have looked to imperial bureaucracy for inspiration. They’ve built systems where agents deliberate through ordered layers, defined roles, and structured channels of authority.

There is something genuinely insightful there. Anyone who has spent time watching current multi-agent systems stumble around knows that simply putting five bots in a room and asking them to collaborate is not much of a theory of intelligence. It is often just noise dressed up as emergence. The appeal of a more ordered model makes sense. Hierarchy can reduce confusion. Structure can improve coordination. Clear roles can produce better outcomes than endless recursive brainstorming.

I find myself wondering whether both of these dominant models… the flat Silicon Valley “everyone brainstorms together” approach and the hierarchical “imperial court” approach… may be trapped inside the same basic mistake.

Both assume that intelligence is mainly a matter of well-organized agents. That assumption seems really too narrow to me.

My own work has led me again and again toward a different starting point. Through my studies in ecology, phenomenology, theology, and process thought, I keep returning to the possibility that intelligence does not begin with isolated entities that then enter into relation. It begins in relation itself. Perception is relational. Attention is relational. Meaning is relational. Even empathy, if we take it seriously, is not simply a private feeling inside one mind about another mind. It is an opening toward another center of experience through a shared world.

That matters for how we imagine and even construct AI.

If our models of machine intelligence begin with discrete agents, each assigned a role and operating as an independent unit, we may already be building on the wrong foundation. We may be importing assumptions from bureaucracy, management theory, and industrial organization into domains where those models can only take us so far. We may be constructing administrative systems and calling them intelligence.

What if a better model is not the boardroom or the court, but the forest?

I do not mean that in the lazy sense of saying “nature is good” or “technology should be more organic.” I mean something more specific. A forest is not simply a collection of individual trees standing near one another. It is a field of relations unfolding across time. Trees, fungi, soil microbes, insects, moisture, roots, decaying matter, shade, slope, heat, and season all participate in a dynamic web of exchange and constraint. Nothing is fully self-contained. Nothing simply commands the rest. At the same time, it is not chaos. It is patterned, but not centrally controlled. It is differentiated, but not rigidly bureaucratic.

That seems much closer to how real intelligence often works.

Recent research on mycorrhizal fungi has only deepened this intuition for me. These microscopic fungal threads move nutrients, carbon, water, and signaling compounds through the soil in ways that are astonishingly complex. A forest is not just what we see above ground. It is also the dense and largely invisible life below our feet. It is memory in the soil. It is exchange without spectacle. It is cooperation and competition held together in a larger field of becoming. If we are looking for models of distributed intelligence, ecosystems seem to have much more to teach us than most corporate org charts do.

This is where my own language of ecological intentionality starts to matter. I have been using that phrase to think about the ways intentional life is never merely private or self-enclosed. Consciousness is not a sealed chamber. Perception is not just data processing inside an isolated subject. We come into being through relation with other beings and with the worlds we inhabit. Attention is shaped by place. Meaning emerges through encounter. Even our ethical lives are formed through these layered fields of contact, dependence, and response.

If something like that is true, then perhaps intelligence should not be modeled primarily as command, planning, and execution. Perhaps it should be modeled as situated responsiveness within living networks of relation.

That possibility opens up some fascinating questions for AI design.

What would it mean to build systems where agents do not simply send messages to one another, but interact through a shared evolving substrate, more like soil than chat? What if some agents moved slowly, preserving long memory and stable patterns, while others reacted quickly to changing local conditions? What if resource limits were not treated as inconveniences to be engineered away, but as essential features that shape meaningful behavior? What if forgetting, decay, and succession were not failures, but necessary parts of a healthy cognitive ecology?

These are not just technical questions. They are philosophical and theological ones as well. The systems we build reflect the worldviews we carry. If we assume intelligence is best expressed through extraction, optimization, and control, then our tools will almost certainly reproduce those habits. If, on the other hand, we begin from interdependence, vulnerability, partial knowledge, and relational emergence, then different kinds of systems become imaginable.

I suspect this is one reason ecology has become so important to me as more than a scientific discipline. Ecology is not only about organisms and environments. It is also a way of seeing. It teaches us to pay attention to entanglement, to limits, to reciprocity, and to the unseen structures that make visible life possible. In that sense, ecological thought has something to say not only about forests and watersheds and soils, but also about computation, cognition, and the kinds of futures we are building.

I do not think we should romanticize ecosystems. Forests are not sentimental places. They are full of competition, waste, death, asymmetry, and contingency. But neither are they simple machines. They endure because they are adaptive, layered, and relational. They hold difference together without collapsing it into uniformity. They create the conditions for life through constant negotiation rather than total command.

That may be a better image for intelligence than either the group chat or the throne room.

I keep thinking here of the black walnut in my backyard in Spartanburg. Over the course of a year, I have spent a lot of time watching that tree, writing about it, tracking its changes, learning again how much of life unfolds at speeds we rarely honor. The tree itself is only part of the story. The real story includes the red clay, the fungal threads, the decaying leaves, the insects, the moisture, the other plants nearby, and the long memory of a place becoming what it is over time. Nothing there makes sense in isolation.

Perhaps intelligence is like that, too. Perhaps what we need next in AI is not flatter systems or stricter hierarchies, but deeper ecologies.

That would require more than a new engineering pattern. It would require a different imagination. We would have to stop thinking of intelligence as something that sits inside a unit and starts thinking of it as something that happens in the field between beings, across timescales, under conditions of mutual dependence and constraint.

That seems to me not only more faithful to the living world, but maybe more faithful to us as well.

If artificial intelligence is going to have a future worth inhabiting, I suspect it will not be because we taught machines to behave like emperors. It may be because we finally learned to build with a little more humility, from the patterns of soil, roots, trees, and the fragile worlds they make together.

“Completely off the scale for March”

We need to change our perception with ecological intentionality…

Western U.S. heat wave is historic. Here’s what scientists say:

In the modern era of routine weather balloon measurements, which stretches back to the 1940s, no March heat wave comes close to what unfolded across the Southwest this week, Schumacher said. Earlier March heat waves did occur, including significant events in 1907 and 1910, but neither appears to match this one in strength or duration.

The closest comparison, in terms of how far temperatures departed from normal, is the June 2021 heat dome that shattered all-time records across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Weather historian Christopher Burt called that event “probably one of the greatest anomalous weather events in world history, not just U.S. history.”

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…”

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.

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.

AI Data Centers, NDAs, and Rural Communities

I’ve been writing pretty extensively on the role that AI data centers are having in rural communities here in the Southeast of the United States, but this one literally hits home… I grew up in Marion County, SC (population of around 28,000 total now) and this sort of intentional action is infuriating and anti-democratic to say the least…

Data Centers Are Expanding Quietly Into Black Rural America – Capital B News:

As a rare winter storm bore down on South Carolina, bringing conditions that historically paralyze the state for days, local officials in a rural county quietly pushed through a massive $2.4 billion data center without most residents knowing it was even on the table.

“There was a public meeting, which most were unaware of,” Jessie Chandler, a resident of rural Marion County, told Capital B, referring to a Jan. 22 council meeting. “I know legally they had to announce the public meeting within a certain time frame for all of us to attend, but most of the county [was] preparing for this winter storm, which we know firsthand will affect us all because it has before.”

Marion County officials confirmed that the council signed a nondisclosure agreement, which barred their ability to make the data center public. On the agenda prior to the council meeting, the line item for the vote was called “Project Liberty,” but it did not list details of the project.

The pattern residents of this majority-Black rural county are experiencing is not isolated.