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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
May Day Strong: to not work, nor go to school, nor buy anything
“The latest effort to protest against Trump administration policies is May Day Strong. The single-day protest on 1 May is asking Americans not to shop, work, or go to school. The goal is a nationwide day of economic disruption. Rallies, marches and teach-ins will also take place across the country.
“The pro-democracy movement can’t ask working people to defend abstract principles while they can’t afford housing, paying bills or accessing healthcare. We need a national movement that does both.
“Organizers are expecting more than 3,500 actions across the country — from street protests to walkouts — under the banner of workers over billionaires, taxing the rich, demanding ICE out, money for people not wars, and expanding democracy. The National Education Association (NEA) has posted a handy May Day 2026 Planning Guide on its website.” [click The Guardian UK link for the full article]
Tonganoxie data center and 9 others – blame “liberal” Gov. Laura Kelly
“During a nearly six-hour work session at the March 18 Leavenworth County Commissioner meeting, commissioners heard from Kansas state employees and developer Cloverleaf about a proposed hyperscale data center. The project would be located on nearly 1,000 acres of land on Tailgate Ranch, just south of Tonganoxie.
“While no official filings have been made with the county regarding data center development, Leavenworth County Commissioner Mike Stieben said the proposal is ‘well beyond its preliminary phases’. Stieben called for a moratorium on further development of the proposal until they can deeply study the associated issues including impact on electrical rates, water resources both locally and regionally, and the rural character of our community.
“Hyperscale data centers use upwards of 75 megawatts of electricity a day, the equivalent of powering a small city. The massive tech campuses use millions of gallons of water daily to cool the thousands of computers and hardware servers inside the buildings.
“Officials say a new Kansas law is drawing data centers to the state as details emerge about a possible new hyperscale campus in Leavenworth County. Project Bluestem would mark the Kansas City area’s 10th hyperscale data center proposal.
“A new state law passed last year offers 20-year sales tax breaks on data center construction. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly officially signed into law a sales tax exemption for qualifying data center projects in the state.” [click the links for the full articles]
AI data center concerns over electricity rates misses the point
“When I open my phone I find an endless stream of headlines and threads and clips and charts and hot takes and counter hot takes, with confident explanations of what is happening today, why, and the implications. And yet increasingly the feeling I have after swimming in some of this is actually a loss in orientation instead of the clarity or the dawning of insight.
“What’s changing now, and in my opinion, about to change massively because of AI and algorithms, is the sheer speed and scale of information available to us. For the wide majority of regular people, the sheer increase in content — the noise — is gonna far outpace the increase in actual signal.
“The human mind can imagine millions of times more sentences and word combinations than can exist in the real world. And now AI is going to undo that on steroids. It’s going to produce fast and confident summaries and honed arguments and explanations and answers at a scale that we’ve never seen before. All with a tone of competence and authority.
“So this is very early days for the pipeline of AI enabled content, but it’s about to explode. These systems can write mesmerizing and witty paragraphs in two seconds. But this is a potentially very separate thing from writing that is thoughtful, helpful, or even accurate for navigating the world around us.
“The sea change ahead is that the scarce resource is no longer going to be content or information. The scarce resource is gonna be authenticity, judgment, and the ability to discern what is grounded in truth.” [click the links for the full article]
Stimulated consumer demand induced by contrived dissatisfaction
“Sixty-nine of the world’s hundred largest economies are not nations. They are shareholder-owned corporations. Let that number sink in. When we think about where power resides in the modern world, we tend to think of governments, elections, treaties, international institutions.
“But the entities that most directly shape the conditions of human life — what gets produced, what gets destroyed, who gets paid and how much — are largely beyond any semblance of democratic accountability. They answer to their shareholders, and to virtually no one else.
“This reality has been quietly ratified even by institutions that were once imagined as counterweights to corporate power. UN agencies now invite the World Economic Forum and other corporate-sponsored bodies to partner in setting global policy on health, education, and climate.
“The shareholder-owned corporation is legally and culturally organized around a single imperative: maximize financial returns for investors, above all other considerations.
“The result is an entity that, judged by its behavior, fits the clinical profile of a psychopath. It feels no genuine empathy. It calculates whether to break the law based on a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. It will discard any employee, community, or ecosystem whenever doing so improves the bottom line.
“Since the early twentieth century, corporate strategy has moved beyond satisfying human needs toward engineering permanent dissatisfaction. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed.
“The deliberate exploitation of instinctual human drives — from the fear of social exclusion to the neurochemistry of sugar and salt — has produced a global consumer culture. The smartphone in your pocket is perhaps the most sophisticated addiction machine ever built. The power of AI is now learning to enhance it exponentially.” [click the link for the full article]
Endangered Species Act not threatened for now at least
“Speaker Mike Johnson pulled from floor consideration the Endangered Species Act Amendments Act of 2025, also known as the ‘Extinction Act’, following outcry from both Republicans and Democrats, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Said Stephanie Kurose, at the Center, ‘This should be a wake-up call to Rep. Westerman that not even his own colleagues support his extreme attacks on wildlife’.
“‘Congress is finally listening to the majority of Americans who support the Endangered Species Act’, said Mary Beth, legislative director of Defenders of Wildlife.
“‘Given the more than 58,000 emails sent to elected officials, it is clear that the American people support the Endangered Species Act, understand its value, and want its protections for threatened and endangered wildlife to remain in place’, said Jewel Tomasula for the Endangered Species Coalition.” [click the link for the full article]
Overlooked in fossil energy transition is energy demand reduction
“Delegates from more than 50 countries are gathering in Santa Marta, Colombia, from April 24 to 29 at the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. The conference’s stated aim is to implement a progressive transition away from fossil fuels creating sustainable societies and economies.
“Emissions from fossil fuels are at the heart of the climate crisis. Yet, the words ‘fossil fuels’ do not appear in the text of the 2015 Paris Agreement — the global pact meant to steer the world to a cleaner and safer future.
“The first mention of fossil fuels in an official UNFCCC output did not arise until the 2023 COP28 conference — the call to transition ‘away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner’. However, there was backsliding at the 2024 COP29 in Azerbaijan, marked by controversies over the host’s promotion of fossil fuels.
“The main output from Santa Marta will be a report from the co-hosts, based on discussions structured around three pillars — overcoming economic dependence on fossil fuels, transforming supply and demand particularly fossil fuel subsidies, and international co-operation and climate diplomacy. On the demand side, discussions [unfortunately] revolve around scaling up renewable energy.” [click the link for the full article]
Grants to help minority farmers canceled because of anti-DEI policy
“The Agriculture Department is cutting roughly $300 million dollars in funding from a program aimed at helping farmers buy and retain land. Nonprofits, tribal governments and other organizations applied for the funding to address underserved farmers, especially targeted to address land access issues facing Black farmers, immigrant farmers, Indigenous farmers, and veterans.
“Wrote Farm Service Agency Associate Administrator, Steven Peterson, ‘USDA will prioritize unity, equality, meritocracy, and color-blindness in furtherance of the Department’s mission. Peterson said in the letter that the grants are discriminatory.
“The funding cancellations come as the challenges facing farmers — especially young and beginning farmers — remain steep. The vast majority of farmland is owned by nonfarming landlords. One of the organizations affected was Cultivate KC, which was in the middle of implementing projects it had already planned. The USDA said the award did not align with the Trump administration’s views on diversity, and that the program was not effectively using funds.” [click the links for the full articles]
Beef and biofuel reduction would provide for more direct food calories
“How we manage the world’s limited arable land is critical for increasing food security and protecting nature. Agriculture is the largest land use on Earth, the largest consumer of water, a major source of water pollution, and the primary driver of deforestation and species extinction.
“To improve food security and decrease agriculture’s environmental impact, the food system will need to be more efficient. Our research quantifies the impact of cropland use for food, livestock feed, biofuels, and other non-food uses from 2010 to 2020. We calculate the number of calories available in the food system based on feed-to-food conversion ratios for meat, dairy, and eggs.
“Two key factors contribute to a decline in efficiency of available food. First, the fraction of crop calories consumed directly as food decreased from 49% to 45%, and the fraction of calories utilized for non-food commodities increased from 14% to 15%.
“How we use croplands to produce food for people has become less efficient from 2010 to 2020. A few commodities, particularly beef and biofuels, account for most of the current inefficiencies. Further, these inefficiencies are concentrated in a small set of countries.
“Shifting to healthier diets in the United States and Brazil, and reducing biofuel production in the United States, Brazil, European Union, and Indonesia are leverage points for increasing the number of available calories from croplands.” [click the link for the full article]
Modernity vs. ecological health — can we navigate collapse?
“This is from an interview of two founders of the Planetary Limits Academic Network (PLAN) — Dave Murphy, focused on the energy transition movement, and Tom Murphy, focused on fundamental principles of the Earth system. Neither of them can be labeled as either a ‘doomer’ or a ‘techno-utopian’, although they each lean more toward one side than the other.
“Dave: First, I would frame the issue as there are indeed planetary limits. The outlook I choose to take for the future is based on nothing scientific at all. These two things are not mutually exclusive; one can understand planetary limits and be optimistic.
“Second, why am I optimistic? There is a tremendous amount that can be accomplished in the middle between techno-utopian and doomer. Despair and doomerism are ineffective change-agents. But the real reason I am optimistic is probably pretty simple: I have kids and I can’t tell them the world is over before they even grow up.
“Tom: I make a distinction here between humanity’s future and modernity’s future. Modernity is incompatible with planetary limits, and will necessarily terminate one way or another. Access to a large amount of exosomatic energy is exactly what has enabled modernity to carry out its atrocities against the more-than-human world. Technological innovations, such as renewable energy, tend to enhance continuance of our destructive practices — irrespective of CO2.
“So, where is the optimism in all that? It’s simply that humans do not have to operate this way. In any case, I am ‘doomerish’ on modernity as a misguided enterprise, and think we will need to face letting go of it. My optimism lies in knowing that humans are capable of forming meaningful, respectful, and sustainable relationships within the community of life.
“Dave: What is modernity? I think we need to define further what we are discussing. Is insulin production part of modernity? Cancer medication? Vaccinations? If we are saying that all the advances of modern medicine and society that require, for example, plastic or energy must be abandoned, then I am not sure what to say. I feel as though it goes against human nature to knowingly reject the basic medicines and technology that are required for the survival of so many people.
“What is considered part of the ‘modernity’ that must be rejected, and what is part of ‘modernity’ that we will keep? Insulin production is a great example. If we want to maintain insulin production in the future, then we must maintain supply systems for the production of that insulin which will also entail the requisite material extraction from Earth and energy consumption.
“Tom: Modernity is the rapid and unsustainable expenditure of a one-time [energy] inheritance that puts humans so completely out of context as to render meaningless any artificial attempts to draw lines regarding what may or may not be part of the future. We have far less agency than the recent windfall has led us to believe. The menu is not for us to decide.
“Pursuing this further, we don’t arbitrate what is or is not sustainable, any more than we decide how strong gravity ought to be today. Can we justify prioritizing insulin over ecological health, if one nation has a long history of expansion, overrunning and displacing technologically inferior and peaceful nations? So, I think it is not within our capacity to decide how much of modernity’s perks we can keep. Ecological context comes first.” [click the link for the full article]
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