Sangre de Christo Mountains-Winter sunset.
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Vivaverdi) Details Source DMCA
Last Fall, I took an online course with the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe to explore creativity and reverence while we collapse. He called the course We Will Dance with Mountains, and I loved it. I loved the warm welcome and libations given by elders at each meeting's start. I loved discussing juicy questions with people from different continents in the breakout rooms. I loved the phenomenal music, the celebration of differently-abled thinking, the idea of Blackness as a creative way of being. When people shared tears about the events that began on October 7th, I felt humanly connected.
By engaging about 500 mountain dancers from a half dozen continents, the ten-session course displayed technology's wonders.
I could not delete my awareness that online conferencing starts with a global super-factory that ravages the Earth. It extracts petroleum coke from places like the Tar Sands to smelt quartz gravel for every computer's silicon transistors. It uses fossil fuels to power smelters and refineries. It takes water from farmers to make transistors electrically conductive. Its copper and nickel mining generates toxic tailings. Its ships (that transport computers' raw materials to assembly plants and final products to consumers) guzzle ocean-polluting bunker fuel.
Doing anything online requires access networks that consume energy during manufacturing and operation. Wireless ones transmit electro-magnetic radiation 24/7.
More than a decade before AI put data demands on steroids, Greenpeace calculated that if data storage centers were a country, they'd rank fifth in use of energy.
Then, dumpsites (in Africa, in India) fill with dead-and-hazardous computers and batteries. To buy schooling, children scour them for copper wires.
Bayo says, "in order to find your way, you must lose it."
Call me lost. I want to reduce my digital footprint.
A local dancer volunteered to organize an in-person meeting for New Mexicans. She invited us to consider the question, "What does the land want from me?"
Such a worthwhile question.
It stymied me.
I've lived in New Mexico 33 years. When new technologies like wireless Internet access in schools, 5G cell sites on public rights-of-way, smart meters or an 800-acre solar facility with 39 flammable batteries (each 40 feet long), I've advocated for professional engineering due diligence to ensure fire safety, traffic safety and reduced impacts to wildlife and public health. I've attended more judicial hearings, city council meetings and state public regulatory cases and written more letters to the editor than I can count.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
