OPINION
Conservationist, hunter and MeatEater-founder Steve Rinella offered up one of the best analogies I’ve heard for conservation.
When he first met his future wife, he said, “I’m going to marry that girl.”
His friend immediately bet him $20 that he wouldn’t, and now he has the bill framed in his house, a reminder of the earliest stages in their marriage, as well as the confidence he had in it.
I’ll paraphrase, but he used that $20 as an analogy for a proposed mine that would inevitably destroy one of the most pristine, wild areas in North America.
If his children were starving and his family was backed into a corner, would he break the glass and head to the grocery store? Sure, in a second, but his needs didn’t warrant it—and hopefully, they never would.
That’s why I was encouraged to read Pilot Point council member Mike Wilson’s quote on whether or not the city should allow data centers: “I’m a hard no, whether it’s a cloud data center or an AI data center. … Our citizens are more important, our water source is more important, our electric grid is more important, than a few dollars we might get out of this.”
I wish everyone across the country (and the world) took this stance but, unfortunately, there are as many as 5,500 data centers across the country.
I’m generally not one to take a hard stance on any issue outside of which Star Wars movie is best (it’s “The Empire Strikes Back”), but I’ll go ahead and take a hard stance on these monstrosities.
Tear them down.
All of them. If these structures were saving human lives or at least improving human lives, maybe we could live with using approximately 110 million gallons of water a day, which is what a medium-sized data center uses.
If they helped us reduce electricity costs and keep low-income families off the street, then maybe I’d waver.
Instead, they use up to 100,000 homes’ worth of electricity every day.
Shoot, if they looked like Notre Dame, maybe we could keep one or two.
Nope, they look like a Walmart distribution center designed by, well, artificial intelligence.
So, what do they do? Well, they provide massive amounts of online storage for God knows what, and they are the life support for our (occasionally) helpful AI companions.
Great.
Meanwhile, Texas is losing at least 572,000 acre-feetper- year of water every single year. Artificial intelligence may be able to do a lot, but ChatGPT will do nothing but shrug its digital shoulders when our water supply runs dry. Who cares about tax dollars and being “business friendly” when that happens?
We can’t glue the glass back on the frame when that $20 is spent.
And sure, as City Manager Britt Lusk pointed out, Texas does have a lot of land.
It’s the same land that’s being ripped up by its roots so developers can make a few billion dollars without worrying if our roads, electrical grid and water supply can take it.
The landscape formerly known as beautiful, rolling plains has enough on its plate.
If you think I sound like a cranky old man, you may be right.
I just think it’s time that people started saying, “Enough is enough.”
It seems like every decade we’re introducing some new, needless “improvement” on our landscape that exists solely for a nameless board of trustees to fund their third vacation home and keep the yacht gassed up.
I assure you that our teachers, ranchers, farmers, small-business owners and countless others will have nothing more than a new eyesore to look at as they watch their water bills skyrocket and aquifers run dry.
So, kudos to those in Pilot Point who take a “hard no” stance on data centers.
I hope every other council in the area takes a stand, because it’s got to start somewhere.
We could be looking at one of two monuments in our future: a soulless building that stands as a testament to corporate greed, or another that says “Welcome to Pilot Point: Where Data Centers Come to Die.”
Now that’s a city banner I’d be proud to wave.
Will we be rich? Will we be big? The verdict’s out. But here’s one thing I do know: We’ll sure as hell have water to drink.
Steve Schwartz is a writer and photographer based in Aubrey. His work has been featured by MeatEater, Field & Stream, Popular Science, Game & Fish, The Fly Fish Journal, American Angler and many more. You can reach him at steve@schwartzcreative. co.
