Tootfinder

The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount
as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers
and enormous amounts of water for cooling.
A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people,
while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined
— countries with a total population of 650 million.
“Most people underst…

“New Form of Imperialism”: Renowned U.N. Scientist on AI Boom’s Huge Water, Carbon & Land Footprint
The environmental toll of the artificial intelligence boom continues to mount as tech companies use ever more power to run their data centers and enormous amounts of water for cooling. A new investigation by U.N. scientists warns that AI’s water use in 2030 will match the needs of 1.3 billion people, while its power use will be triple that of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria combined — countries with a total population of 650 million. “Most people understand AI as a digital technology, as…

Listening to the sheep and beef chair of Federated Farmers talking to Susie on RNZ just now... He talks about how NZ stopped subsidies for agriculture/farming in the 80s... but of course he's mistaken - the lack of responsibility for the waste generated (including greenhouse gas emissions) - especially dairy - is an effective subsidy to NZ farmers by the rest of society and future generations who have to bear the cost of spoiled land & water, loss of biodiversity, and rising temps/se…

I'm not big on the whole Christian "natural/artificial" binary, or the settler-colonialist concept of "wilderness" which erases indigenous stewardship in a bid to claim mid territory (see, e.g., tribes forced out of what are now national parks in the US). But I do enjoy getting out of urban/suburban environments and into places where the human impact on the land is minimal and/or synergistic with non-human flourishing.
I was thinking about why I enjoy this so much today while out on a stroller hike with my younger child, and came to the conclusion that it may be less about being in a "natural" space and more about being in a space whose flourishing is not tied to the capitalist necropolitical "growth" spiral.
Like, there's the baseline intrinsic beauty of flowers, trees, flowing water, etc. Then there's the pleasure of considering how these things fit together into an ecosystem and mutually support each other (and also compete/predate, etc.). But on top of all that, there's the sense that these things are part of a self-sustaining pattern that's capable of continuing without outside inputs and without creating external waste over vast, geologic timescales. The things I see when I look around in a city aren't like that. 100 or 1000 or 10000 years from now they'll be ruins, not necessarily because of human extinction or anything like that, but because the resource flows that create them are inseparable from a fundamentally unsustainable economy built around a paradoxical assumption of infinite exponential growth.
There *are* of course some human-built or -stewarded things in the world that are sustainably maintained, and ruins can have their own kind of beauty. But to me part of the joy of being on a hiking trail is to look around and see beautiful systems that will persist regardless of (most) human political outcomes that I spend a lot of energy worrying about.
Even in the extreme cases of climate change these things will eventually come back, albeit in an altered form. I don't want to ignore the incredibly destructive impact of humans on the environment, of course, but still, it's comforting to me to think about how the problems and brokenness of currently-dominant human cultures might change and scar but will not actually destroy the many systems on this planet that just don't depend on humans for their propagation.