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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Who is Ripple Labs, and what is XRP cryptocurrency?
“Ripple Labs, Inc. is a blockchain-based digital payment company that uses the cryptocurrency XRP as a payment settlement, asset exchange, and remittance system for international money and security transfers dealing across currencies. Ripple is unique in this industry as it created the first financial services platform for enterprises, and uses cryptocurrency as a bridge currency to speed up international transactions and reduce costs.
“XRP launched in 2012 with a full supply of 100 billion tokens created at launch. There is no mining or staking mechanism. So, distribution depends on allocation, escrow releases, and market transfers rather than ongoing issuance. Unlike many blockchains, the XRP Ledger offers full transparency into wallet balances. This makes it possible to find out how tokens are distributed among Ripple Labs, exchanges, institutions, founders, and anonymous whales.
“The company has made substantial political donations to Donald Trump, donated millions to Trump’s inaugural and Trump’s White House State Ballroom project, and entered into partnerships with Trump’s businesses.
“The University of Kansas Athletics department recently made waves by announcing a multi-year partnership with Ripple, valued at approximately $30 million. The revenue generated from the $30 million deal is expected to support various athletic department needs, including facility upgrades and student-athlete support services.
“The most visible component of the Ripple-Kansas partnership is the introduction of corporate branding to feature an XRP patch on every sports uniform across all programs. The XRP patch serves as a ‘premier platform’ to introduce digital assets to millions of sports fans globally.” [click the links for the full articles]
Electricity use by data centers and crypto-mining
“Between 2022 and 2025, global data center power demand grew by 59%, and demand in the U.S. could nearly triple by 2030, according to Standard & Poor Global. S&P Global forecasts that in 2026, US data center demand will rise to 75.8 GW for IT equipment, cooling, lighting and other uses. Demand will further expand to 108 GW in 2028, and 134.4 GW in 2030.
“According to a report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. data center annual energy use in 2023 (not accounting for cryptocurrency) was approximately 176 terawatt-hours (176 trillion TWh), approximately 4.4% of U.S. annual electricity consumption that year.
“The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity use for cryptocurrency mining represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption. The EIA identified 137 mining facilities to date, with maximum electricity use at 101 of those facilities estimated at 10,275 MW, representing a share of 2.3% of the average annual U.S. power demand of about 450,000 MW.
“CoinLaw, a cryptocurrency monitoring service, reports that in 2025, global cryptocurrency mining drew approximately 138 TWh [138 trillion Watt-hours] of electricity, representing approximately 0.54% of global electricity consumption.
“Data centers will increasingly require on-site electricity generation, as their power demands outpace the capacity of the grid. Natural gas accounted for 38.2% of the crypto-mining energy mix, the single largest source.” [click the links for the full articles]
Water use by data centers
“Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility.
“Data centers use large amounts of water — in some cases over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers.
“The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons (64 billion liters) of water directly through cooling, and projects that by 2028, those figures could double — or even quadruple. The same report estimated that in 2023, U.S. data centers consumed an additional 211 billion gallons (800 billion liters) of water indirectly through the electricity that powers them.
“According to the EPA, in 2023, U.S. data centers directly consumed 17.4 billion gallons of water, a figure projected to rise to between 38 and 73 billion gallons by 2028.
“The rapid expansion of data centers can place disproportionate pressure on local water resources, particularly in water-stressed and drought-prone regions such as the U.S. Southwest.
“In Texas alone, a study by the Houston Advanced Research Center estimated data centers would use 49 billion gallons in 2025 and as much as 399 billion gallons by 2030 — or the equivalent of drawing down Lake Mead by more than 16 feet in a single year. Corpus Christi is preparing to declare a water emergency with 25% usage cuts, and communities are fighting over what remains.” [click the links for the full articles]
Lake Powell water level critically low
“Lake Powell, the US’s second-largest reservoir, threatens to plunge to unprecedentedly low levels this year after a historically bleak snowpack failed to raise its water level. Lake Powell stands at just 37ft above the level at which electricity-generating turbines start to fail. The 185-mile Colorado River reservoir currently stands at about 22% of its capacity.
“After a winter of historically low snowpack in the mountains and a heatwave that broke records across the south-west in March, water levels at Lake Powell barely rose this spring at all. ‘What’s unique this year is that there was no recovery at all’, said Jack Schmidt, the director of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies.
“Now, experts say, the system is careening toward a long-feared breaking point as the US west’s climate warms and dries. ‘In the 21st century, the ultimate cause of the problem is declining runoff’, said Schmidt. ‘There’s less water in the system. It’s caused by a warming climate, period’.” [click the link for the full article]
Right to repair victory over John Deere
“The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from several states secured a right-to-repair settlement with agriculture equipment giant John Deere that requires the company to let farmers and independent shops fix their own equipment.
“The FTC and attorneys general from Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin brought the antitrust lawsuit in January 2025. The Illinois-based manufacturer has faced complaints for years for withholding the software needed for repairs and forcing customers to use authorized dealers instead of independent ones.
“Deere will now be required to make diagnostic and repair tools available to equipment owners and independent repair shops. It also prevents Deere dealers from retaliating against equipment owners or repair shops who choose to fix their own equipment.” [click the link for the full article]
Local food systems free of petrochemicals
“The Fertile Crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers is considered the birthplace of agriculture. Today, 500 miles from where the two rivers empty into the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz is under a blockade, impacting farming in the United States.
“Posturing, threats, and deadly actions continue between the United States, Israel, and Iran. In the US, the industrialized soil of America’s big-ag heartland is threatened because of the blockade.
“According to The American Prospect, Nebraska farmers are being gouged by the cost of anhydrous ammonia, a synthetic chemical fertilizer made from natural gas sourced from Iran. Prices have spiked by 39%. So the conversations at diners in Nebraska and state capitals are about fossil fuels – how synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia might be made from American gas.
“Corporate food production depends on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, massive tractors and harvesters, and more. The fossil fuel-driven system of corporatized agriculture has, in turn, forced farmers to depend on corporations, reducing them to the level of indebted sharecroppers.
“Today, the only thing that keeps these tired soils producing is the endless inputs of fossil-fuel chemicals. It’s all about making connections, and it shouldn’t take one long to see the connection between recent actions of the US — it’s all about fossil fuels.
“There is an opportunity amid the polycrisis. What if we treated the earth we walk on with the respect it deserves? There is an opportunity to value soil, grow food and support human communities in a way that gives more than it takes.” [click the link for the full article]
Nature guided, self guided education
“Earth-centered ecological education is an approach to learning that recognizes children not as passive recipients of knowledge, but as active participants in living systems. Rather than separating subjects into discrete disciplines, it emphasizes the interconnectedness of all things.
“Learning emerges through experience — through play, observation, skill-building, and conversation — rather than being delivered through predetermined instruction. At its core, this approach is guided by a few key principles:
- Children are participants in the ecosystem, not observers.
- Learning is relational, shaped by interactions between humans and the more-than-human world.
- Free play and choice are essential, allowing curiosity to guide engagement.
- Process matters more than outcome, with growth unfolding over time rather than being measured in fixed benchmarks.
“Relationships are at the center of everything. Living and nonliving elements exist not in isolation, but through connection—spatial, material, and energetic. These relationships often tend toward regeneration. Even those that involve competition or consumption are part of broader systems that, over time, sustain life.
“Within this environment, children develop ecological literacy — an understanding of how systems function, how cycles operate, and how relationships sustain life. Communication and collaboration emerge naturally as children negotiate shared activities, make group decisions, and navigate conflict. Over time, children build resilience and adaptability.” [click the link for the full article]
All my relations
“A single structure and a single process underlie the last six thousand years traced in this series. The structure is civilization. The process is the eradication of relational being wherever it exists and whenever it reemerges.
“The evidence strongly suggests that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were well integrated with their world through animism and presence in the field of relationality. Their way of life produced a healthy and intact psyche and endured roughly fifty times longer than our brief stage of civilization.
“The emergence of intensive urbanization in Mesopotamia marked a decisive break in the way people had lived for roughly 294,000 years. New customs, values, and behaviors quickly began to weaken relational being. Early in the Sumerian civilization, blocking access to critical resources — stored grain, water, land — initiated the process of relational being erosion.
“Tragically, this occurred naturalistically. There was no decision point to initiate or accept the change. The new conditions exerted a particularly adverse influence on men, intensifying dominance, aggression, and competition within their emerging gender roles. These shifts led to patriarchal consolidation of power within early city societies by about 3500 BCE.
“Relational being is closely linked to meaning. As societies grew larger and more complex, meaning became more abstract and ambiguous. Beginning around 1500 CE, however, this tendency intensified dramatically. It profoundly shaped the modern world and our lives today.
“Two major processes drive this shift. First, abstractification, detaching meaning from embodied participation and transferring it into symbols, systems, metrics, and models. Mentalization is the interior counterpart in the mind. Direct relation to the physical world is increasingly displaced. Together these two processes — A/M — erode relational being to an extent never previously achieved.” [click the link for the full article]
We can do better
“When people look at the cascading pathologies of our civilization, it’s easy for despair to set in: if this is what humans do, perhaps it’s just what humans are. Maybe neoliberalism is simply the system we deserve.
“But a vast array of scientific findings — in fields such as evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and anthropology — offers a fundamentally different analysis. The behaviors that drive our current crisis are the product of a specific historical trajectory, one that began only a few thousand years ago.
“Our ancestors spent roughly ninety-five percent of our species’ history in nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, where accumulation of wealth was unthinkable and communities kept in check the power of domineering individuals.
“Beginning sporadically around ten thousand years ago, certain bands started settling in place. Agriculture emerged. With it came private property, and with private property came hierarchies. Virtually every major civilization in history constitutes some version of a wealth pump, with patriarchal cultures, rigid hierarchies, cruel exploitation by elites, and unsustainable resource extraction.
“Cast your gaze back to the long stretch of human experience. Indigenous and traditional communities share a convergent cluster of values and practices — deep reciprocity and gift economies; accumulated surplus is redistributed rather than hoarded; decisions made collectively, with strong norms against domination by any single individual; an identity constituted through relationship.
“Life itself, as manifested in healthy and resilient ecosystems, offers an essential model for how such flourishing might be organized. Three core design principles emerge from the logic of living systems. The first is mutually beneficial symbiosis. The second is fractal flourishing. Look around the natural world and you will see fractal branching patterns at every scale. The third is integration, which can be understood as unity with differentiation.” [click the link for the full article]
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