October 2025 Networker: Fracking, AI, and the Moral Maturity to Resist |
Volume 30 (10), October 2025 |
Whether it’s climate tipping points or the destruction in Gaza that’s occupying my mind at any given moment, I know I’m likely exuding this heaviness in every personal interaction. So I’m glad to have in my back pocket a shareable tiny-but-inspiring discovery: Helianthus angustifolius L., or, the swamp- or narrowleaf sunflower. As the latest-blooming sunflower (August through November, depending on where you are; for me, blooming began in September and is only now winding down), it’s a very helpful, bright burst around now, as the darkening days we expect of the season cycle seem to take on a potent metaphorical quality too. Intrigued, I’d grabbed a still-bloomless one at a nursery in the mid-summer and will now add it to my application to join my region’s Pollinator Pathway (the linked page is searchable for such projects all around the United States). Listed as a threatened native plant in my state, New York, I’m now a self-appointed ambassador spreading the joy of this plant that is noted to be “a valuable late season nectar and pollen source for pollinator species,” and to “have special value to native bees.”
And of course these things actually do meet up. I’ve been slowly reading through a report by the Center for Applied Environmental Diplomacy (CAED) at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, with Damour for Community Development, that offers a blueprint for Palestinian-led and governed “nature-based and decentralized solutions for Gaza’s recovery.” The writing is alternately utterly devastating (in laying out the present reality) and inspiring (in its vision), as well as idealistic in the best sense. A long list of solutions in what the plan calls the “transformative stage” includes green corridors with “networks of vegetated areas connecting larger green spaces to support wildlife, pollinators and protect migratory routes of birds while providing urban cooling.” Native seed varieties that were developed over generations would be part of an “equitable food future for Gaza.” I deeply hope for this kind of future.
We continue our collective work defending public health and environment. Complementing Carolyn Raffensperger’s “13 Questions to Ask Your Public Officials About the Water Footprint of a Locally Proposed Data Center or Carbon Capture and Storage Project” last month, this month SEHN Fellow Peter Montague contributes, “When a Data Center Proposal Comes to Your Town.” This is both a primer—what is a data center and what is artificial intelligence (AI)?—and a guide covering the range of potential impacts of a data center on a hosting community. Peter also describes how these industrial facilities could actually be planned and constructed in far more environmentally- and economically-sound ways than we are typically seeing in the current mad rush to build them, and the community input and monitoring activities that these developments will require of us. Stepping out further for a big picture view, Carolyn revisits a 2009 essay of her own exploring the idea of a “morally mature culture.” She recalls first hearing the term “moral maturity” in a stirring piece by environmental writer Reverend Benjamin Webb (unfortunately not available online to share here). In her new essay, Carolyn asks what is required right now of the dominant U.S. culture, in order to change course and veer toward collective wellbeing. She writes, “If we are to develop moral maturity as a culture we will have to evolve beyond our technophilia and develop principles for covenants with the natural world and with each other,” and lays out several resolute steps for how to do so. The idea of prophetic voices, past and present, animate Carolyn’s essay. This month Carolyn also pays tribute to her friend and friend of SEHN, Joanna Macy, who died over the summer. Macy was described as a “powerful prophetic voice in global movements for peace, justice, and ecology,” in her obituary. Our senior scientist and writer in residence Sandra Steingraber was recently invited to speak at a Congressional forum on fracking in Mexico, with long-time colleagues of ours at the Alianza Mexicana Contra el Fracking. Her column this month is Part 2 of “The Intended Consequences of the Permian Basin.” It explains the links between U.S. fracking, Mexican sovereignty, how fracking in Mexico became—through a certain lens—an anti-Trump policy, and the voices resisting this perilous path. Today, October 23, 2025, marks ten years since the discovery of the largest methane gas release in U.S. history, the Aliso Canyon blowout near Los Angeles. A coalition of groups is hosting a town hall this Sunday to hear updates on the UCLA-led study on health impacts of the blowout, fenceline monitoring of airborne chemicals, and other topics relevant to this disaster’s aftermath. Despite ongoing pressure from the heavily impacted nearby community, late last year the California Public Utilities Commission voted to continue to keep the Aliso Canyon underground gas storage facility in operation. Next month we’ll be releasing our update to the section of our fracking science Compendium addressing gas-fired residential appliances: the “fracking tailpipes” in homes that, in spite of a now extensive body of literature on their harms, help keep methane gas demand high. We’re eager to add our report to the toolbox for community and policy work to rapidly change this. Warmly, with solidarity,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH |
When a Data Center Proposal Comes to Your Town |
By Peter Montague, SEHN fellow |
A new data center has been proposed for your town. What do you think? What do your neighbors think? A lot of communities doubt the benefits of data centers, and many are opposing them outright. This paper outlines some of the concerns. What is a data center? Data centers are huge windowless warehouses stuffed with electronic equipment. They are essentially giant computing facilities shared by millions of people. They run the internet. That’s where you and I get our email and our news (Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, New York Post, etc.). It’s where Facebook lives, along with WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth Social, Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and so on. Your computer and your hand-held device depend on data centers, as do many or most businesses. But there are already more than 5,000 data centers in the United States, 10 times as many as in China or Germany. So, the internet will not shut down if new ones aren’t built right away. Most of the new data center boom is for “hyperscale” (i.e., humongous) data centers to support generative artificial intelligence (genAI, described below). So, the first thing to consider is genAI itself, the main product and purpose of most new data centers. Without going into detail here, there are important questions about the future of unregulated AI and the global demise of democracy, as detailed recently in a year-long project by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Bulletin asserts that “the people and organizations developing artificial intelligence applications are gaining control of the world's governance, information ecosystems, energy resources, military-industrial complex, and more.” Grass-roots pressure to regulate AI is growing. Continue Reading |
By Carolyn Raffensperger, SEHN executive director |
In 2009, I wrote an essay about a morally mature culture. I am revisiting the concept (and the essay) because of the looming environmental disasters that dominate our nightly news—when the fall of democracy isn’t occupying the airwaves. Disasters like the worsening water quality in Iowa, or the Canadian wildfires that make the northern tier of the United States so smokey the air isn’t safe to breathe, or the floods that are decimating entire communities in the Southeast—all pointing to a culture on the wrong path, neglecting our collective wellbeing. Are we making policy and law that will prevent the destruction of the Earth? No. We are not. I’ve been aghast at the laws that Iowa makes in the face of our water quality crisis and the executive orders of the Trump administration that promote more fossil fuel extraction when we having amped up hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Do we take immediate emergency measures to stop nitrates from flowing into the waterways or to address increasing CO2 in the atmosphere? No. We do not. We pass laws banning cell phones in schools but turn a blind eye to the accelerating development of energy and water-guzzling technologies like carbon capture and storage and data centers. I first heard the words “moral maturity” in an essay about the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel by environmental writer Ben Webb. In that essay, Webb described the spiritual state presumed by the Christian church calendar in the fall and early winter as “morally mature.” During the fall and early winter, the church is focused on the writings of the prophets of the Bible, many of whom called for repentance, for entire nations to turn the other way. To fully understand the prophetic voice calls for moral maturity, which is an ability to understand right and wrong and act on that knowledge. What, I wondered in response, does the Earth require of a culture at this time in the evolution of humanity? Morally mature sounds about right. This leads to the question, “what does a morally mature culture look like?” What might our environmental prophetic voices of today be telling us?
Continue Reading |
“Grace Happens When We Act with Others on Behalf of our World”: A Tribute to Joanna Macy |
By Carolyn Raffensperger, SEHN executive director |
There is a special category of friendship that shapes the history of the environmental movement: that of intergenerational mentorship. I’ve done my share of helping younger people identify their unique skills and the problem in the world they want to address with those skills. I treat those relationships with reverence because they can actually change the world. My husband, Fred Kirschenmann, discovered the enormous difference organic farming made in the quality of the soil from a graduate student of his, David Vetter. Fred, who recently passed away, was called the father of organic agriculture because of how he took the knowledge he got from David and applied it to his own 3,500 acre farm and then translated it into policy. My work on the precautionary principle was initiated when a graduate student, Joel Tickner, asked me to do a collaborative dissertation on the principle, something I had not heard of before Joel’s introduction. Joel and I went on to hold the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998. That conference had a global impact, with ripples still flowing from it. But it is Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar, ecosystems thinker, writer, and friend to thousands, including me, who taught me the most about intergenerational mentorship. Joanna passed away July 19, 2025. I want to mark this passage by describing her extraordinary contribution to the work that we do at SEHN.
Continue Reading |
Repercussion Section: The Intended Consequences of the Permian Basin (Part 2) |
by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist and writer in residence |
In September 2025, I traveled to West Texas to join Sharon Wilson and Miguel Escoto of Oilfield Witness on a three-day fact-finding tour of the nation’s leading oil-extracting region, the Permian Basin, which has allowed the United States to become the world’s number one oil producer. Fully half of all U.S. crude oil is extracted from the Permian. Intensely fracked, the Permian Basin is also the one of the world’s top sources of greenhouse gases, particularly methane. The Permian Basin is a planetary carbon bomb whose emissions are visible from space via satellite imaging, and also via Optical Gas Imaging cameras, which Oilfield Witness uses on the ground to reveal the fossil fuel industry’s false narratives about this place. On the final day, we were joined by a delegation of legislators from Mexico’s General Congress—specifically from the Chamber of Deputies—activists with the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking (Alianza Mexicana contra el Fracking), and a videography team. The legislators were deeply moved by what they saw. And on October 15, we all met again at a forum on fracking that took place within the Mexican Congress at which time the four senators introduced a legislative initiative to ban fracking in Mexico. This is the second part of a two-part series. Last month, we looked closely at the very intentional consequences for West Texas of Texan oil magnate George Mitchell’s 15-year attempt to avoid financial ruin by extracting more gas and oil out of his fast-depleting wells. In 1997, he succeeded wildly by combining two experimental techniques—fracking and horizontal drilling—and by swapping out expensive fracking gels for plain old water, which shouldn’t be cheap and freely available to Texas drillers but was. And still is. Horizontal drilling allows boreholes to penetrate shale layers miles below the surface of the earth and then extend sideways through those layers where bubbles or oil and gas are trapped. Fracking uses explosives plus pressurized fresh water to blast apart those shale layers and shoot into them grains of sand to prop open the cracks so that the gas and oil can flow out and up to the surface. Mitchell didn’t invent fracking or horizontal drilling, but he did yoke them together, commercialize the technique, and scale it up, enabling him, fifteen years later, to die a very rich man. Horizontal, high-volume hydraulic fracturing went on to transform a whole swath of Texas and New Mexico—300 miles long and 250 miles wide—into a fossil fuel sacrifice zone and also went on to rename this region the Permian Basin after a subterranean landscape that no one has ever seen and that was formed during the Paleozoic Era. More specifically, the Permian Basin represents a vast underground coral reef that formed in a shallow ocean that once covered this part of the world. When it fossilized into shale, the corpses of the abundant marine organisms that inhabited this reef became trapped inside and turned into a cache of hydrocarbon molecules we call crude oil and natural gas. Continue Reading |
“Microplastics in the Plasticene: Creating Our Own Diseases,” by SEHN science director Ted Schettler appears in the October 2025 issue of the Bulletin, the Official Magazine of the Santa Clara County Medical Association. Flip through at the link to page 20. SEHN Board member Madeleine Scammell is quoted extensively in a Bay State Banner article, commenting on a Boston City Council ordinance requiring heat protection for the city’s workers and contractors. “People think they can handle the heat; they think, often, they’re not at risk of experiencing illness because of heat. The truth is, nobody is immune to the harmful effects of heat.” “A fracking compendium co-published by Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York [CHPNY], now in its 9th edition, contains thousands of peer reviewed studies, governmental reports, and media investigations that collectively make the case that natural gas is anything but a sustainable energy solution.” The flagship report of our program, CHPNY, is referenced in a Letter to the Editor on PennLive questioning Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s statement on powering data centers with natural gas. |
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