Editor's Note for August 2025 Networker
No matter how often I turn over in my mind the phrase, “water is life,” words can’t seem to capture the gravity and the urgency of this truth. Access to sufficient and safe water is recognized by the United Nations as a human right (along with the related need of sanitation). I’m moved to tears when I think about the many profound violations of this right, worldwide, in our time.
In our staff meetings, each frequent mention of “water” is about our renewed commitment to playing a leadership role in addressing worsening water-related crises. SEHN has always maintained some focus on water: for example, note the nearly 70 pages on water in the fracking science Compendium, or the many resources on water impacts within our coalition carbon capture and storage website. But especially over the past year, water is much of what we talk about.
We’re addressing several rapidly emerging issues—including one that is new nationwide in recent years, and one that has risen from the dead, where I am in New York State.
The first is the proliferation of data centers and the prodigious amounts of water they require. In this edition of the newsletter, we are very pleased to share a hot-off-the-press new SEHN information resource, “Data Centers and the Water Crisis.” In it you will find an impressive set of facts and dot-connecting on what we currently know in an atmosphere of, as we describe, “non-disclosure agreements, proprietary secrecies, and limited regulatory oversight.” All over the country, data centers are threatening water quantity and quality. This unfolding crisis demands our attention.
A second current focus is within our New York coalition work, as we work to educate the public and our representatives about the sudden return of plans for two fracked gas pipelines, the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project (NESE) and the Constitution. Both were previously denied permits by the state several years ago, using its authority under section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act. No matter, apparently… these schemes are back. NESE would run approximately 24 miles under water in the harbor between New Jersey and New York. As we describe in our new information sheet, construction would resuspend long-buried toxic chemicals—including PCBs, dioxin, lead, and arsenic—threatening water quality, the marine ecosystem and its food chains, as well as human health. The 120+ mile route of the Constitution Pipeline would threaten more than 250 waterways and wetlands throughout upstate New York. Additional states are implicated in both pipeline projects, and residents are voicing their opposition, for example in New Hampshire.
Related to our data center work, for this newsletter we reached out to a colleague to update us on a threat to an extraordinary lake that is particularly dear to me and SEHN senior scientist and writer-in-residence, Sandra Steingraber. Residents and small businesses populating the shores of New York State’s Seneca Lake, the largest of the chain of glacial Finger Lakes in central New York, have long been active in protecting this unique body of water. Sandra was a leader in the We Are Seneca Lake campaign which helped block a plan to turn the area into a fracked gas transportation and storage hub for the entire Northeast. The company aimed to store fossil fuels in depleted salt caverns under the lake. (What could go wrong?) Another leader in that effort, Yvonne Taylor of Seneca Lake Guardian, then organizing as Gas Free Seneca, today focuses on protecting the lake from several other threats, including the currently unpermitted (but still operating) “mining” of Bitcoin in a gas-fired power plant on Seneca’s eastern shore. This longtime colleague and frontline leader shares information on the impacts of that operation, as well as related national work, with her contributed article.
In her monthly column, Sandra describes two processes that surprisingly turn out to have much in common: the humidity-augmenting impact of vast monocultural corn fields, and the impact of the large-scale evaporative cooling technologies required by many data centers, or… clouds that make clouds.
We learned much putting this issue together and we hope you learn a lot reading it. We hope that it helps you look out for the water, wherever you are. In short, and always to be taken seriously, water is life.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH