El Paso County is in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains in a region known as the “Front Range,” the mountains first encountered by settlers traveling westward from the Great Plains. The Front Range includes such wonders as Mount Blue Sky and Pikes Peak. But it also refers to a chain of cities and the urban spatial expansion between them that has propagated within and along the foothills.
Is it just our filter bubbles? Or is an understanding of the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) slowly making its way into the mainstream? Recently, a spate of news stories have highlighted the hefty environmental footprint of AI. Take for instance this recent article by the Washington Post on the hidden water footprint of using AI chatbots. Or this article by The Guardian on how the greenhouse gas emissions of data centers may be almost eight times higher than large technology companies like Google or Microsoft will acknowledge.
What is your reaction when you hear the tagline “city with the highest GDP per capita in the United States”? Perhaps you would like to live in that city. Perhaps you think it sets a positive example for other cities. If so, you are not alone. Corporate and political leaders have been prioritizing economic growth for decades, and this mindset has trickled down until it has saturated the public.
The problem is that there is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection.
“Harris wiped the floor with Trump.” At least that’s how today’s Washington Post kicked off a discussion among in-house columnists. But for voters who prioritize Planet Earth for present and future generations, the 2024 presidential election is a classic example of seeking the lesser of two evils. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump is a student—much less a champion—of sustainability. They probably think “limits to growth” pertains to poll results or crowd size.
As the setting for Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Sauk County, Wisconsin, holds a special place within the pantheon of environmental literature. Leopold’s writings on ecology and forestry brought an understanding of land repair and remediation to academic and general audiences. It is difficult to imagine the fields of wildlife biology, soil conservation, or restoration ecology without Leopold’s contribution.
Likewise, the moral basis for the environmental movement in later decades owes its origins in part to Leopold’s land ethic.
Steady State Herald readers are familiar with the theory that money originates from an agricultural surplus that frees hands for the division of labor—and thenceforth the exchanging of money. This trophic theory of money (TTOM) helps us understand not only the historical origins of money, such as in Mesopotamia (the “Cradle of Cash”), but also the annual origins of “warranted money” in the grain belts of the world.
Every four years, the Summer Olympics present a rare opportunity for friendly competition and collaboration among nations. The public has an opportunity to witness a myriad of sports that otherwise never make the headlines. Talented athletes get a rare chance to display their skills before an international audience.
The Olympics offer a venue for peaceful, international solidarity. Yet they also present a seemingly insurmountable ecological challenge. To begin with,
In 2007, the Marcellus Shale Play was opened for production in Pennsylvania. The fracking of the shale unlocked massive fossil fuel reserves previously considered inaccessible. But it also unleashed an especially expensive and wasteful extraction process that involved flushing hundreds of millions of tons of highly toxic chemicals a mile deep into the ground and into the water table. And it brought up natural gas contaminated with unprecedented levels of radioactivity.
Like the economy of nature, the human economy has a “trophic” structure. In nature, nutrition and energy flow from plants to herbivores to carnivores, with each of these comprising a trophic level of the ecosystem. In the human economy, materials and energy flow from agriculture and other extractive activities to heavy manufacturing to light manufacturing. Both economies include service providers, such as pollinators in nature and the transportation sector in the human economy.
Okeechobee County is located in Florida’s Heartland Region, within the 3000-square mile Kissimmee River Basin. The Heartland stretches from Orlando in the north to the intertidal coast of mangrove forests to the south, forming an area commonly referred to as the “River of Grass.” Water flowed hundreds of miles through this enormous network of marshlands, helping to shape an ecosystem of unrivalled subtropical biodiversity.
Today,