For months, one of the numbers attached to Spartanburg’s new data center was 459,000 gallons of water per day. This week, NorthMark Compute and Cloud said the Valara facility at the former Kohler site on South Pine Street is projected to use an average of 1.2 million gallons per day at full buildout, with a maximum of 1.6 million.

The data center didn’t suddenly get larger over the weekend. The pipes didn’t widen on Sunday night. What changed was the public object.

NorthMark now says the 459,000-gallon figure came from a Phase I wastewater survey and didn’t represent full-buildout water demand. It also says it provided the larger figures to Spartanburg Water on February 11 as part of the project’s Large Water Meter Questionnaire. In its own public correction, the company put the matter plainly: people should be able to rely on the information it provides, and it is now revalidating other numbers it has shared publicly.

That deserves to be taken seriously without turning immediately into an accusation about motive. But it also makes the story harder than a simple case of one estimate replacing another. Different numbers were moving through different parts of the public process at the same time, and the smaller one remained the number many of us used to understand the project’s water demand.

By May, while Spartanburg County was in severe drought, Spartanburg Water was asking customers to voluntarily reduce non-essential use. In August, at the county fact-finding meeting that became the basis for my own sermon about this project, Spartanburg Water’s representatives still put the figure at roughly 459,000 gallons a day. The utility also said then that it could serve the project without harming current customers.

All of those facts belong together. The capacity question matters. So does the drought. So does the February questionnaire. So does the number that remained in public circulation months later.

The question isn’t simply whether one number was right and another wrong. It is how a project becomes publicly knowable through numbers, who has which numbers when, and what happens when the picture changes.

A Number I Carried Into the Pulpit

I have a particular reason for caring about this. A month ago, I stood in the pulpit at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg and preached about this same project. The sermon was called What We Ask of the Water, and I used the figure Spartanburg Water’s own people had put on the record at the county’s August fact-finding meeting: about 459,000 gallons per day.

That morning, I was careful to say that 459,000 gallons wasn’t a scandal by itself. It was a number. The harder questions were what we were asking of the watershed, who was in the room when that request was made, and whether having the technical capacity to supply the water settled what we ought to ask of a place.

Now I know that the number I carried into the pulpit described something more limited than I understood it to describe. NorthMark says the larger full-buildout projection had already been supplied to Spartanburg Water in February. Yet in August, 459,000 gallons was still the number that became publicly visible to me and to anyone else listening to that meeting.

That changes how I understand what happened. It doesn’t require me to decide that somebody intended to mislead the public. It does require me to notice that the flow of information was broken somewhere, and that the break mattered.

The watershed didn’t change. My view of what we were asking of it did.

The Sunday before that sermon, in The First Home Is a Watershed, I had started with an even simpler idea that also runs through Spartanburg Watershed and What the Basin Was Aiming At. A property map and a watershed can describe the same acre differently. One tells us where ownership begins and ends. The other follows the slope and shows where the water goes.

Maybe numbers work like that too. A number isn’t the thing it measures. It makes some feature of the thing available to us while leaving other features outside the frame. Change the question and another number appears. Change the scale and another set of relationships comes into view.

The important question, then, isn’t only whether the number is accurate. We also need to know what kind of number it is, what question it answers, who has it, and what remains beyond it.

What Kind of Number Is It?

Large infrastructure projects arrive in public life through numbers: megawatts, gallons, acres, jobs, tax revenue, tons of emissions, decibels, setbacks, permit thresholds. But those numbers aren’t merely different views of the same thing. They are different kinds of claims.

The 1.2 million gallons is a projection, an estimate of what the completed facility is expected to require on an average day. A permit limit is different: it sets a boundary within which a facility is legally required to operate. An air-dispersion result is different again: it is a model output, a calculation of what pollutants are expected to do under specified assumptions and conditions. A regulatory threshold marks the point at which one legal category becomes another. And when a county writes 65 megawatts into an ordinance, that number is not a measurement. It is a line drawn through a public decision.

Valara’s newly approved air permit makes the differences unusually visible. The South Carolina Department of Environmental Services has approved eleven additional natural-gas turbines (five rated at 17 megawatts and six at 54 megawatts) with pollution-control systems. According to SCDES figures reported by WYFF, estimated uncontrolled formaldehyde emissions from the permitted configuration would be about 117.6 tons per year. With the required controls, the estimate is about 9.2 tons per year, below the 10-ton-per-year threshold for a single hazardous air pollutant used in the facility’s synthetic-minor classification. SCDES also says its dispersion modeling places the maximum modeled formaldehyde concentration below the applicable standard.

We need those distinctions. A projection tells us what someone expects. A permit tells us what someone is allowed to do. A model tells us what is expected to happen if its assumptions hold. A threshold tells us when a regulatory category changes. Confusing them makes the project less legible, not more.

The same is true of scale. Valara already had a permit for twenty-four permanent natural-gas generators, and the eleven newly approved turbines add roughly 409 megawatts of generation capacity. Taken together, the site’s permitted on-site generation is about 457 megawatts. So here a megawatt does not lead mainly toward some distant abstraction called “the grid.” It leads directly to natural gas, combustion equipment, pollution controls, permits, and the air over South Pine Street.

The numbers are real. The project is also more than any one of them.

The Problem of the Frame

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what happens when something becomes visible, but the categories available to us are too small to receive it. That was part of the question in When Seeing Is Not Enough. Dust can be visible on a house while people disagree about whether it constitutes legally cognizable harm. Noise can be heard, light can cross a property line, water can be withdrawn from a shared system, and emissions can enter an atmosphere that belongs to no parcel at all. Seeing something and knowing what to do with it are different problems.

The water story adds another problem: what happens when information exists inside the process but doesn’t become part of the public object?

NorthMark says Spartanburg Water had the higher water projection on February 11. By May, the utility was asking customers across the Spartanburg system to voluntarily conserve water during severe drought. By August, its representatives were still publicly discussing Valara through the 459,000-gallon figure. Then, in September, NorthMark corrected its public statements and said it was revalidating other numbers.

That sequence doesn’t tell us why the information moved the way it did, and I’m not interested in assigning an intention the public record doesn’t establish. But it does tell us that “who’s in the room when the ask gets made,” the question I raised in What We Ask of the Water, is partly a question about information. Who knows what? When do they know it? Which version makes it into the meeting, the permit discussion, the newspaper story, the sermon?

Ecological attention has to be capable of revision at that level too. Replacing 459,000 with 1.2 million in a spreadsheet isn’t enough if we never ask how the smaller figure became the durable public description in the first place.

A parcel map answers one question and a watershed another. An air permit answers one question, and a person sitting on a porch across the road may be asking another. A water-demand questionnaire, a wastewater survey, a drought plan, and a public presentation each disclose something different. The work is not to choose one as the “real” account. It is to know what kind of account we’re looking at, what it can tell us, and where its edges are.

The closer we look at infrastructure, the harder it becomes to say where the thing itself begins and ends.

A County Tries to Draw a Line

Spartanburg County Council made its own attempt to sort among kinds of data centers Monday night, voting 5–1 for a one-year moratorium on new development. The ordinance doesn’t stop Valara, which is already permitted, and it includes a pathway for smaller facilities meeting specified conditions, including a ceiling of 65 megawatts and no routine on-site generation beyond emergency backup.

That distinction is easy to overlook, but it matters here. Valara is built around extensive on-site natural-gas generation. The county’s exception is drawing a line that would exclude precisely that model from the smaller class it is willing to consider during the moratorium.

The shape of that exception also emerged after months of public argument, including testimony from Lockhart Power and its parent company, Pacolet Milliken, that smaller grid-supplied facilities should not be treated as equivalent to hyperscale projects with extensive on-site generation. Residents and environmental advocates were making different arguments about water, air, noise, transparency, land use, and cumulative effects. Whatever one thinks the final ordinance should include, the 65-megawatt line did not fall from the sky. It came out of a public struggle over which differences ought to count.

That is one reason the moratorium interests me. The county hasn’t simply declared a data center either good or bad. It is trying to decide what kind of data center belongs where, at what scale, under what conditions, and in what relationship to the place around it. That is a harder question, and an ecological one.

Ecology rarely lets us evaluate a thing in isolation. It asks what feeds it, what it feeds, what it displaces, what passes through it, what becomes dependent upon it, and what remains after it arrives. Those questions become especially important with infrastructure because infrastructure is so good at disappearing from ordinary attention.

We notice the faucet, not the reservoir and treatment plant; the light switch, not the generating station and transmission corridor; the webpage, not the server rack, gas turbine, cooling system, electrical substation, fiber route, watershed, and tax agreement that allow it to appear instantly on a screen.

A data center may be one of the clearest examples of this strange modern condition. Its product feels almost immaterial. Its metabolism is anything but. That is the same infrastructure problem I’ve been following since Project Spero.

The More Clearly Something Appears

Every morning for the last few years here in Spartanburg, I’ve sat for a while beneath a black walnut tree in my backyard. One thing the practice has made increasingly difficult is the assumption that greater attention makes an object simpler. The opposite keeps happening.

At first there is a tree. Then there are leaves at different stages of yellowing, branches moving at different speeds in the wind, insects, birds, shade moving across the ground, soil, heat, rain from the night before, fallen limbs after a storm, and other plants growing differently because the walnut is there.

But even that description contains different kinds of knowing. Some things are directly visible. Some belong to memory. Some are anticipated. Some are inferred. Some I know because biology has taught me how to recognize them. Others remain inaccessible no matter how long I sit there. The tree becomes more particular as those relations appear, and at the same time harder to imagine as an isolated thing.

I think infrastructure deserves that same quality of attention. Water use isn’t air pollution, noise isn’t tax revenue, and a neighbor’s experience isn’t an engineering model. An engineering model isn’t invalid because it cannot contain a neighbor’s experience either. The discipline is to keep those differences intact without pretending they have nothing to do with one another.

That is harder than choosing a side, but it is closer to what living in a place actually requires.

What the Numbers Can’t Hold

We should want the numbers to be right. If full-buildout water demand is projected at 1.2 million gallons per day, then say so. If the maximum could reach 1.6 million, that matters too. Spartanburg Water’s assurance that the system has capacity to serve the project belongs in the public account, just as the drought conditions under which the utility asked the rest of us to conserve water belong there. The same is true of air: pollution controls, enforceable permit conditions, modeled concentrations, and the state’s conclusion that the facility can operate within applicable standards are all relevant facts.

Ecological attention can’t mean collecting only the facts that confirm what we already wanted to believe. It also can’t mean allowing a technically correct number to stand in for a place.

That may be what this strange year of data centers is teaching me. Greater precision doesn’t necessarily make the story more reassuring or more alarming. It makes more relationships visible. Water leads toward treatment capacity, wastewater, rainfall, rivers, drought planning, future customers, and growth. On-site generation leads toward natural gas, combustion, permits, monitoring, and the air moving across neighborhoods. A regulatory threshold leads toward the legal categories built around it. A 5–1 vote points to the people, testimony, interests, and arguments that drew the line.

The question, then, is larger than whether 459,000 was the wrong number and 1.2 or 1.6 million the right one. I want to know what kind of number I am looking at, what it allows me to see, and what appears when I look again.

In When Harm Has to Mean It, I wrote that responsibility begins by allowing more of the world to appear. In When Seeing Is Not Enough, I added that seeing is not enough if what appears is never allowed to count. This week has added another discipline to that sequence:

We have to remain willing to see again.

That includes me. I carried 459,000 gallons into a pulpit because it was the public number available to me. I would rather acknowledge that the picture has changed than defend the picture because I once spoke from it.

Ecological attention cannot simply produce a clearer version of the world we already thought was there. Sometimes greater attention changes the object we thought we knew. Sometimes it reveals that a projection was heard as a measurement, that a threshold was heard as a description of safety, or that one institution held information that had not yet become part of the public picture.

Here in Spartanburg, what remains outside any single number is not abstract. It is water and air, electricity and land, neighborhoods and industry, tax revenue and public trust, people already living here and people who will live here later.

The numbers matter, and we should get them right. But none of them is the place.

The place is what has to hold all of it.

Sources

• NorthMark Compute and Cloud. “Water Needs Update.” September 21, 2026. NorthMark’s statement revising projected full-buildout water demand to an average of 1.2 million gallons per day, with a projected maximum of 1.6 million gallons per day, and stating that the higher figures were provided to Spartanburg Water on February 11, 2026.

• Alex Land, WYFF 4. “Water demand for Spartanburg data center more than doubles original estimate.” September 21, 2026. Reporting on NorthMark’s revised water-use projections, the February 11 Large Water Meter Questionnaire, and Spartanburg Water’s assessment that the system has capacity to serve the project.

• Spartanburg Water. “Spartanburg Water Customers Asked to Follow Voluntary Water Restrictions.” May 21, 2026. Spartanburg Water’s announcement of voluntary conservation measures after Spartanburg County entered severe drought conditions.

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. “Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center.” Updated September 18, 2026. SCDES project page containing the permit decision, public-hearing materials, air-modeling information, permit documents, and responses to public comments for the Valara facility.

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. “Air Quality Department Decisions.” September 18, 2026. State records for the Valara permit, including approval of five 17 MW and six 54 MW natural-gas-fired turbines with pollution-control systems.

• Alex Land, WYFF 4. “NorthMark attorney explains air pollution controls and enforcement for Spartanburg data center.” September 21, 2026. Reporting on Valara’s synthetic-minor classification, formaldehyde estimates, pollution controls, air-dispersion modeling, monitoring, and enforcement.

• Isabel Martin and Ripley Simone, WSPA 7NEWS. “Spartanburg County Council passes data center moratorium.” September 21, 2026. Reporting on County Council’s 5–1 vote for a one-year moratorium on new data-center development, the exceptions adopted by council, and the treatment of already-permitted projects, including Valara.

This week, Governor Henry McMaster received a Lifetime Conservation Leadership Award from Conservation Voters of South Carolina.

The award itself is interesting. McMaster is a Republican governor in a state where economic development is often one of the first languages of public life, and the organization honoring him is an environmental advocacy group active in South Carolina politics. Their agreement isn’t complete. Conservation groups have criticized parts of McMaster’s record, including energy policy. But the recognition points toward something worth noticing in its own right.

At the awards luncheon, McMaster described jobs, education, and the environment as mutually dependent parts of South Carolina’s prosperity.

I keep thinking about that formulation.

Not because it resolves the arguments South Carolina is having about growth. It doesn’t. But because it gives us a better place to begin them.

What if prosperity is not one thing?

Three Things That Are Already Related

Public debates often arrange economic development and environmental protection as opposing goods.

A company proposes a large investment. Jobs and tax revenue go on one side of the ledger. Land, water, habitat, emissions, traffic, or quality of life go on the other. Then politics becomes the work of deciding how much of one we are willing to exchange for the other.

Education usually occupies another conversation altogether.

McMaster’s formulation interrupts that arrangement. Jobs, education, and environment are not three independent goods competing for attention. They are conditions of one another.

That seems especially important in South Carolina right now.

The state is growing rapidly. New houses are needed. New infrastructure is being built. Industrial projects promise enormous capital investment. Electricity demand is rising. Forests and farmland sit beside expanding metropolitan areas. Communities are trying to preserve places they love while also making room for people who need homes, schools, work, roads, and opportunity.

If we treat those things separately, we will keep solving one problem by quietly creating another. An affordable house at the end of an ever-lengthening commute isn’t just a housing outcome. A school surrounded by dangerous roads, poor air, little shade, and inaccessible public space isn’t simply an education outcome. A new employer whose infrastructure reorganizes a watershed, electrical system, or neighborhood is more than an economic-development outcome.

These are relationships. And relationships are where ecology begins.

The Ecology of Childhood

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a wonderful person about ecology and public policy. I wrote down this question in my notebook as we talked over the phone:

How do we make it possible for ordinary families to afford good places to live without treating land as infinitely disposable?

I have started thinking about this as affordability without disposability.

Housing policy usually speaks in units, prices, zoning, financing, supply, and demand. Those are necessary languages. But a child does not experience a housing unit as a unit.

A child experiences a bedroom and a yard, a sidewalk or the absence of one, the trip to school and the air outside. There is the creek behind the neighborhood and the tree that shades the bus stop, the church down the street and the grocery store that can or cannot be reached by foot. There is the time a parent spends commuting, the sound outside the window at night, and the people who stay in the neighborhood long enough to become neighbors.

Children don’t experience housing, environment, schools, infrastructure, transportation, and neighborhood life as separate policy categories. They inherit one lived ecology whether we intend it that way with policy decisions or not.

That is why McMaster’s three-part account of prosperity seems to me worth expanding rather than merely applauding or disputing.

Jobs matter, education matters, and environment matters. But each becomes real in a place where somebody has to live.

What Does Growth Ask of a Place?

South Carolina has made substantial investments in conservation. Conservation Voters of South Carolina says McMaster’s administration has helped secure more than $318 million for conservation over the past three years and helped protect, or move toward protection, more than 229,000 acres. The 2026 state budget also included more than $65 million for land conservation.

Those are significant commitments.

At the same time, conservation in a rapidly developing state cannot mean only protecting selected landscapes from development while treating everywhere else as available for consumption.

The more difficult question is what happens in the ordinary places between protected lands: the former industrial site and the subdivision, the school corridor and the patch of woods behind a shopping center, the creek crossing beneath a road, the farm at the edge of a growing town, the neighborhood beside a new industrial project. That is where much of South Carolina’s future is actually being negotiated.

Here in Spartanburg, the recent debates around data centers have made this particularly visible. Project Spero brought questions about power, water, land, tax policy, and public participation into the same room. The Valara dispute has brought another set of questions about construction, permitting, neighbors, noise, dust, light, and what kinds of effects institutions recognize as harm.

Housing presents another version of the same problem.

We need places for people to live. Restricting housing supply can make communities unaffordable and push families farther from jobs and schools. But endless outward expansion consumes forests and farmland, extends roads and utilities, fragments habitat, increases driving, and changes watersheds.

So “growth” is too imprecise a word.

The better question may be:

What does this form of growth ask of this place?

And then:

Who inherits the answer?

Conservation After the Fence

South Carolina’s conservation tradition has often been very good at recognizing special places. Ancient forests, salt marshes, working farms, mountain views, and “wildlife” habitat all matter here.

But ecology also asks us to notice that the line around a protected parcel does not mark the end of relationship. Water, wildlife, air, and people cross it. Economic pressures cross it too, and development elsewhere can determine what happens inside it.

The same is true of a home.

A property line doesn’t contain the ecological conditions of childhood. Air quality, traffic, school access, flooding, heat, noise, water, public space, employment, and community stability all arrive from beyond the lot. This is why I am increasingly interested in a conservation ethic that does not begin only with the question, What land should we save?

It also asks:

How should we inhabit the land we do not set aside?

That question connects conservation to housing, housing to education, education to transportation, transportation to energy, and energy to industrial development. Eventually we discover that the categories were never as separate as our agencies, committees, budgets, and headlines made them appear.

Prosperity as a Relationship

Perhaps prosperity is not best measured by how much a state possesses. Maybe it’s partly a description of the quality of relationships a place is able to sustain.

Can families afford to remain, and can children grow up somewhere healthy enough to become home? Can businesses succeed without transferring invisible costs to neighbors or future generations? Can farms remain farms and rivers continue functioning as rivers rather than merely as inputs? Can communities welcome new people without requiring the landscape to become endlessly disposable? Can economic development deepen a place rather than simply occupy it?

These aren’t anti-growth questions but are are questions about what kind of growth deserves to be called prosperity. And these questions resist an easy political sorting.

South Carolina’s recent conservation record itself makes that clear. Land protection has attracted support across party lines. Economic development remains a central priority. Housing affordability is becoming increasingly urgent. Energy demand is reshaping infrastructure decisions. Children will live longest with whatever choices emerge from all of them.

The work is to become better at seeing the ecology they already form.

What We Hand Down

Environmental writing has a temptation to imagine the task as saving nature from human beings. I don’t think that is enough, though.

The Carolina landscape I know is already full of human history: farms, mill towns, highways, churchyards, schoolyards, dams, neighborhoods, rail lines, industrial sites, forests cut and regrown, rivers that have carried both life and waste.

There’s no “pristine” South Carolina waiting outside history for us to protect it. There’s only this place, inherited and altered, damaged and beautiful, still alive.

And there are children inheriting it from us now. That makes prosperity an intergenerational word. The question isn’t just whether South Carolina can attract another company, build another subdivision, preserve another tract of land, improve another school, or widen another road (albeit important ones in their own context).

The more pertinent question is whether those decisions can begin to belong to the same story. Jobs, education, environment, housing, water, land, neighborhood, and childhood: none of them exist alone. Perhaps the measure of prosperity is whether we can finally learn to govern as though we know that.

Yesterday, I wrote here about a tree and some bats.

A newly reported federal memo concerning the Endangered Species Act offered a remarkably narrow account of what it means to “take” an endangered animal: if someone fells a tree without intending to kill the bats roosting inside it, the memo argues, the bats have not been taken. They may be dead. The tree may be gone. But the intention was directed somewhere else.

I keep returning to the question underneath that sentence... Are we responsible only for the world we intended to make, or also for the world our actions actually make?

Then, almost immediately, the same question came home to Spartanburg as I was catching up on the news last night.

On Thursday (yesterday), attorneys were in a Spartanburg County courtroom arguing over the Valara data center now under construction on South Pine Street. The case is obviously not about endangered bats, and the legal questions are different. Residents organized as Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County are challenging how the county handled the project’s land-development approval and are asking that Valara be required to go through the county’s major-land-development process, which would bring additional public review. Valara and county officials dispute that account of the permitting process and have defended the project’s approvals.

The judge didn’t immediately make a ruling yesterday. He said he would review the parties’ materials and issue orders later. So, I don’t know how the case will be decided eventually.

What caught my attention was something smaller.

Dust.

The Dust

According to WSPA’s report from the hearing, attorneys for residents raised concerns about dust, light, and noise experienced by people living near the construction site.

Valara’s attorneys reportedly argued that those effects do not amount to the kind of “irreparable harm” that would justify stopping construction. Representatives also said the company has been responding to neighbors’ concerns.

Then Catherine Wannamaker, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center representing the residents, asked a wonderfully concrete question.

If there isn’t real harm here, she asked in substance, why are houses being power-washed for free and residents being offered car washes?

I keep thinking about the houses today.

That’s not really because a dusty house resolves a lawsuit or anything of that sort. It obviously doesn’t. Courts have standards for injunctions, land-development ordinances have definitions, and parties disagree about what the county knew, what the developer disclosed, what permits were required, and what remedies are appropriate. Those questions deserve more care than a photograph of construction dust can provide.

But ecology has a habit of becoming concrete before our categories are ready for it. Dust settles somewhere. Noise is heard by somebody. Light crosses a property line, and water runs downhill. Air moves.

A megawatt generated on one side of a fence does not remain conceptually inside the parcel where a turbine sits.

The interesting question, I think, isn’t whether an effect exists. Sometimes everybody agrees that something exists.

The harder, more interesting, question is: What has to happen before what we perceive is allowed to count?

From Seeing to Recognition

I’ve spent much of this year writing about attention here on Carolina Ecology as well as in my own research and work.

My spring work on AI data centers began with a simple claim: the ecological crisis surrounding digital infrastructure is partly a crisis of perception. The language of “the cloud” makes intensely material systems seem immaterial. Electricity, water, natural gas, transmission, minerals, server hardware, roads, tax structures, and land disappear behind a clean interface.

Project Spero made that argument tangible for me. Once people in Spartanburg County began looking closely at the proposed data center near the Tyger River, things that had been background became foreground. Hundreds of people came to meetings. Residents asked about electricity and water. They read tax agreements. They learned the language of megawatts and closed-loop cooling. A project that had initially appeared as another economic-development announcement became visible as a set of relationships. This didn’t only happen on Substack or Reddit... people in pews and at Scouts’ meetings for our kids were asking me about these things.

I came away from that episode with a phrase I still believe:

You can’t protect what you can’t see.

But the Valara hearing makes me think that sentence is incomplete. Because what happens when people do see?

What happens when the light is visible from the porch, when the construction can be heard from the yard, when the dust is on the siding, when residents know that a project first publicly discussed in one set of terms is now associated with plans for power generation on a dramatically larger scale?

Seeing does not automatically produce recognition. But recognition does not automatically produce responsibility, either.

There are institutions between those things.

There are permit categories and evidentiary standards and zoning classifications. There are definitions of nuisance and harm. There are engineering reports and air permits and tax agreements. There are rules about who may speak, when they may speak, what evidence is admissible, and which kinds of effects fall inside the jurisdiction of which agency.

Those structures are necessary. A community really can’t govern itself by treating every perception as proof of something.

But neither are those structures neutral windows onto the world. They are frames. They determine what becomes legible as a fact that can make a claim on a decision.

That is where the ecological question gets interesting.

What Counts?

A few weeks ago I wrote about a Spartanburg County Council meeting where officials and residents were looking at the same data center and, in important ways, seeing different things.

The philosophical word I kept returning to then was doxa: appearance, opinion, what something seems to be. I contrasted it with the Hebrew kavod, weight or heaviness. A project has a public image, but it also has weight. Megawatts have weight. Water withdrawals have weight. Turbines and transmission lines and tax commitments have weight.

Now I think there is another step. Something can appear. Something can have weight.

And still the institutions responsible for making a decision must determine whether that weight counts. That word is doing a lot of work in this framing.

Does construction dust count as inconvenience or harm?

Does noise count if it remains below a regulatory threshold?

Does a foreseeable ecological consequence count if nobody intended it?

Does a 450-megawatt power plan belong inside the frame through which a redevelopment project was originally evaluated?

At what point does an accumulation of individually permissible effects become a different kind of thing?

I’m not supplying the legal answers to those questions or capable of doing so. That’s what the litigation and permitting processes are for.

But I do think ecology gives us reason to keep asking them.

Ecology is full of realities that become consequential through accumulation and relation. A single warm day is weather. A changing distribution of warm days becomes climate. A gallon of runoff is trivial. Acres of impervious surface reorganize a watershed. One light may be an annoyance. An illuminated industrial landscape can change the nighttime world experienced by people, birds, insects, and other creatures.

The categories we use to govern these things necessarily divide the world into manageable pieces. The world itself does not promise to stay divided that way.

The View From Above

There is a philosophical term I will probably be spending a good deal of time with this fall: survol (good read behind the link if you’re into philosophy).

Literally, it suggests an overflight, a view from above (in English we use “survey” but it’s not nearly as glamorous or precise as the French term).

There are good reasons to want such a view. From above, the parcel has boundaries. The project has a permit number. The generating facility has a capacity. The tax agreement has terms. Noise has decibels. Emissions have limits. Dust has particulate measurements.

We need those abstractions because no one can govern a county entirely from a front porch. But, nobody actually lives at 10,000 feet. We live down here on the soil.

Down here, the parcel boundary is where the light crosses, the sounds people hear, with the construction work becoming dust on a car while the electrical capacity becomes turbines, gas supply, emissions, and infrastructure.

The abstract project becomes a neighbor.

A mature ecological politics has to be able to move between those perspectives without allowing either one to erase the other. The view from above can reveal relationships invisible from a single yard. The view from a yard can reveal consequences invisible on a site plan.

The danger begins when one perspective declares itself complete.

On the Bat and the Dust

Which brings me back to yesterday’s bats.

I did not expect an Endangered Species Act memo and a Spartanburg data-center hearing to speak to each other, but they do. They concern different laws, different actors, and very different kinds of harm.

But both have left me thinking about the distance between intention, consequence, perception, recognition, and responsibility.

An actor intends something. The action enters a world already full of relations, and consequences follow. Someone or something experiences them. Those consequences become perceptible. Then a community, agency, court, or law has to decide whether what appeared will be recognized as something that matters.

That last part is easy to overlook and is often relegated to the “oh well” category.

I’ve spent years arguing that attention matters because responsibility begins by allowing more of the world to appear. I still think that’s true.

But perhaps attention is only the first discipline.

The next is recognition: developing forms of public life capable of receiving what attention reveals. Otherwise we can become very good at seeing and remain strangely powerless before what we see.

The black walnut behind my house has taught me something about this too. Sitting with it day after day has not produced mastery over the tree. Quite the opposite. The more closely I attend, the more particular the walnut becomes and the more relations come into view that I had previously missed.

Attention enlarges the field while responsibility begins when I allow what appears in that enlarged field to make a claim on me. Our institutions at the local, state, and federal levels face a similar challenge.

The question is not whether every claim wins. Ecology doesn’t eliminate judgment, but makes judgment harder by not allowing us to pretend that only one thing is happening at a time.

Neighbors need homes in which they can sleep, breathe, sit outside, wash their cars for ordinary reasons, and trust that decisions shaping the places where they live have not rendered them invisible.

All of those things can be true at once.

The work is learning how to build institutions capable of seeing enough of that world to judge among them. Yesterday I wrote that responsibility begins by allowing more of the world to appear.

Today I would add one sentence:

Seeing is not enough if what appears is never allowed to count.

There is a sentence in a new federal memo that I have not been able to get out of my head this week:

“Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

The sentence comes from an internal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service memo reported this week by Catrin Einhorn in The New York Times. It concerns a deceptively small word in the Endangered Species Act: take.

The statute defines “take” to include actions such as harassing, harming, pursuing, wounding, killing, trapping, capturing, or collecting protected wildlife. For decades, the federal regulatory system has also addressed incidental take: harm to a protected animal that occurs as a foreseeable consequence of another activity. A developer may not set out to kill a salamander. A logging operation may not set out to kill a bat. A ship captain may not set out to strike a whale. The point has been that intention does not exhaust responsibility.

That framework has been changing. In July, the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service finalized a rule rescinding the longstanding regulatory definition of “harm,” which had included significant habitat modification or degradation that actually kills or injures wildlife by impairing essential behaviors such as breeding, feeding, or sheltering. The rule took effect September 14. The administration argues that the older definition extended the Endangered Species Act beyond the statute's best reading and imposed unjustified regulatory burdens. Environmental organizations and a coalition of states have challenged that interpretation in court.

The newly reported Fish and Wildlife Service memo appears to push the question further. According to Einhorn’s reporting, the memo interprets “take” so that an action must be directed intentionally against the animal. The tree can be felled, and the bats can die. But if the purpose of cutting the tree was something other than killing the bats, the memo’s logic says that the bats were not “taken.”

I am interested in that sentence not only because of endangered-species law. I am interested in the picture of the world contained inside it.

The Tree and the Bat

A tree is never only a tree.

That should be an unremarkable ecological observation. A tree is habitat, shade, food, water movement, fungal partnership, carbon storage, nesting site, hunting ground, memory, boundary, seed source, temperature regulation, and a participant in relationships extending farther than we can see from where we stand.

Cutting one down therefore does not produce a single action with a single object. The saw may be directed toward the trunk, but the action enters an already existing field of relations.

The bats do not become less dead because they were not what the tree-cutter was thinking about.

This is where the legal question begins to touch something I have been trying to understand in my own work on ecological intentionality. Philosophers use intentionality in a technical sense: consciousness is directed toward something. I look at the tree, hear the bird, notice the creek. Something becomes focal while much else remains at the edge of attention.

But ecology keeps making trouble for the focal point.

The tree I perceive is not simply a bounded object I happen to be looking at. Its roots disappear into soil inhabited by fungi and microbes. Its crown becomes shelter and pathway. Its leaves alter the small climate beneath it. Water moves differently because it is there. Other lives have incorporated its continued existence into their own possibilities.

The ecological problem is that our actions work the same way. They exceed their intended objects.

We grade a parcel for houses and alter the drainage beyond the property line. We widen a road and change where animals can move. We build a warehouse or data center and create new demands for electricity, water, pavement, transmission lines, and stormwater management. We remove a patch of woods and discover afterward that what looked like unused land from one perspective was already being used in hundreds of ways by lives we hadn’t learned to notice.

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that houses shouldn’t be built, roads shouldn’t be improved, trees should never be cut, or economic activity should stop. Here in the Carolinas, those easy binaries are increasingly useless despite the ongoing attempts by social media campaigns to persuade us otherwise. We need housing ordinary families can afford. We certainly need infrastructure. We need jobs and schools and places for communities to grow.

But we also need a vocabulary capable of describing what our actions actually do. And intention alone is too small a vocabulary.

The Ecology Outside the Frame

I keep returning in my Carolina Ecology writing to the problem of frame.

Data centers can be described as buildings on an industrial parcel. Change the frame, and they become part of a watershed, an electrical grid, regional gas buildouts, sets of transmission corridors, tax structures, and landscapes of human and more-than-human neighbors. A subdivision can be described as a collection of houses. Change the frame, and it becomes roads, schools, sewer lines, impervious surface, displaced habitat, altered runoff, longer commutes, and families trying to find somewhere they can afford to live.

Neither description is false. The question is what becomes invisible when one of them is treated as complete.

That’s what makes the tree-and-bats example so revealing to me. The action remains tightly framed around the actor’s purpose: What did you mean to do? The ecological field asks another question: What did your action enter into?

I don’t think those are the same question.

Ecology is, among other things, the study of consequences that refuse to remain inside our categories. Water crosses property lines. Air ignores zoning maps. A bat roosts in a tree without consulting the deed. A salamander does not know that the bulldozer clearing its habitat is aimed at economic development rather than at the salamander.

The world is full of lives for whom our unintended consequences are simply consequences.

This is one reason attention matters so much. Attention can’t guarantee that we will make the right decision. It doesn’t eliminate tradeoffs or tell a growing Carolina city exactly how many houses to build or where to put them. But attention can make the field of relationship harder to erase before the decision is made.

That is a modest claim, but I increasingly think it is an important one: responsibility begins by allowing more of the world to appear.

Before the Saw

Over the last few years, I have spent a great deal of time sitting beneath a black walnut behind our house in Spartanburg. Much of that practice is deliberately uneventful. I sit. I look. I listen. I notice leaves yellowing, squirrels moving through branches, insects landing on bark, shadows changing as the morning moves.

The longer I do it, the harder it becomes to perceive the walnut as an isolated object.

Not because the tree dissolves into some vague cosmic oneness. Quite the opposite. The tree becomes more particular. This leaf. This scar in the bark. This branch where the squirrel stops. This patch of shade where my daughter leaves a chair so she can draw. The walnut becomes more itself as its relations become more visible.

That’s become one of the working intuitions behind ecological intentionality: better attention does not erase difference; it reveals relation without exhausting the beings related.

And perhaps that’s what troubles me about the sentence in the memo.

“Felling a tree is not a take of the bats roosting in it unless the tree is felled for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Before the saw starts, there is already more happening than the intention of the person holding it.

There is the tree. There are the bats.

There is the habitat that made their roosting possible. Whatever brought the person and the saw to this particular tree exists. There is whatever will replace it. Water will fall on this ground after the canopy is gone. There is the future forest that may or may not grow here. Human needs, economic pressures, property rights, and laws attempt, imperfectly, to hold these competing claims together.

The difficult work of ecology is not pretending those tensions disappear. That difficult work is refusing to make them disappear by narrowing the frame.

The Endangered Species Act debate will continue in agencies and courts, and people far more qualified than I am will argue the legal meaning of “harm” and “take” to interpret federal wildlife law. But underneath that legal dispute is a question that belongs to all of us who inhabit landscapes undergoing rapid change:

Are we responsible only for the world we intended to make, or also for the world our actions actually make?

Here in the Carolinas, where forests become subdivisions, farms become industrial parks or data centers, rivers become infrastructure, and communities are trying to make room for both human flourishing and the lives already inhabiting these places, that question is not abstract.

It is there before the first tree falls.

Sources / Working Links

• Trump Administration Moves to Gut a Core Endangered Species Protection — Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times, September 16, 2026.

• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Endangered Species Act §3 definition of “take.”

• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service / NOAA Fisheries, final rule rescinding the regulatory definition of “harm,” effective September 14, 2026.

For the last several years, one of the most important places in my academic work has been a black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg, South Carolina. I sit beneath it, photograph it, record myself talking while I watch it, notice when the walnuts begin to fall, when leaves yellow, where branches have been damaged, how the canopy moves in the wind, and how exposed roots disappear beneath violets and grass. Sometimes I bring a philosophical question. Sometimes the tree gives me a different question before I get very far with the first one (most often the case).

What began as a practice within my doctoral coursework in Religion and Ecology at CIIS has gradually become one of the places where I test my larger project, ecological intentionality. That word “test” has become increasingly important because I do not want the black walnut to illustrate a philosophy I have already figured out is true. I want the encounter to show me where the philosophy fails.

That is why I recently built a new public layer of this work at ecologicalintentionality.org. I’m calling the larger project Field Notes, and its first and currently central series is Black Walnut Field Notes. The site is not a dissertation draft, and it’s definitely not a public dump of my private research notebook. It sits somewhere in between as a curated record of encounters in which a philosophical argument can be seen taking shape, becoming more precise, and sometimes being forced to retreat.

That distinction between the private and public layers is important to me. My private field journal is intentionally messy, containing audio transcripts, photographs, half-formed thoughts, bibliographic questions, mistakes, conceptual leaps, drawings, and moments when I realize I have described something as though I perceived it when, in fact, I inferred it. That mess is useful because it preserves the actual movement of the encounter rather than retrospectively making everything look more orderly than it was.

The public Field Notes here are different. After a sit, I return to the raw record and ask what actually changed in the encounter each day… what became visible, what assumption failed, what question became harder, and what deserves to be carried forward.

That resulting workflow looks something like sit → private field note → philosophical analysis → research integration → curated public field note. The public note is, therefore, not simply a shortened version of the private one; it is an editorial act.

Over the last week, I have watched that distinction begin to produce something I’d hoped for but couldn’t really plan for. The field notes are becoming an argument in themselves. The first recent note is called “Educating Perception.” I had been thinking about whether sustained attention changes what becomes perceptually salient, especially after years of sitting with this particular tree and learning to notice growth, repair, orientation, damage, relation, and seasonal transformation in ways I hadn't initially noticed.

But that immediately raised a problem. Am I actually perceiving those things, or am I applying concepts I have learned? The following day last week therefore became “Given and Attributed.” I tried to remain as close as possible to what was sensibly present: leaves moving, bark texture, shadows, exposed roots, sound. And I began catching myself crossing boundaries.

The leaves “eat the sunlight.” A branch “reaches.” The tree “responds.” These descriptions may not be wrong, but neither are they identical to what appears directly to perception. That sit produced a question that has stayed with me: Can the tree appear as a living center without me having to imaginatively occupy its life?

The next note became “Presence and Remainder.” The more carefully I attended, the more the walnut seemed both present and incomplete. From where I sat, one side of the trunk appeared while the other remained hidden. Some leaves were visible head-on, some edgewise, others obscured behind branches. A few roots emerged above the soil while most of the root system remained invisible.

Greater attention did not make the tree fully available. Instead, it made the character of its unavailability more precise, and that gave me one of the lines I suspect will remain important for the larger project: The more determinately the walnut appears, the more determinate its excess over its appearance becomes. But the next sit over the weekend complicated even that. What exactly do I mean by “excess”?

The unseen back of a tree trunk exceeds what I presently perceive, but I can stand up and walk around the tree. What was hidden becomes visible. That is very different from saying that the walnut possesses an interiority that I cannot enter, so the next field note became “Kinds of Absence.”

Some absence is perspectival. Some is temporal. Some belongs to memory, anticipation, biological knowledge, or inference, and perhaps some otherness is irreducible. But perhaps not.

That distinction forced me to write down a methodological warning that I keep on an index card when I do my sits: living ≠ interiority ≠ subjectivity ≠ empathically accessible other.

Those terms are easy to slide between, obviously. The fact that the black walnut is alive does not by itself establish an experiential interiority. Biological organization is not automatically subjectivity. And even if some form of vegetal experience can be philosophically defended, that does not establish that I encounter it through something analogous to the empathy Edith Stein describes between human subjects.

The most recent sit from this morning before church, “Hiddenness and Otherness,” brought the problem into sharper focus. I found myself distinguishing two sentences: “Hidden from me because of position; other to me as another being.” The first is comparatively easy. My body occupies one place, and the tree occupies another, and its opacity prevents every profile from appearing simultaneously. Movement changes what I can see, and phenomenology has very good language for this.

The second sentence is much more difficult. What would warrant my saying that the walnut remains other to me not merely because I lack a certain perspective, but because it is another center of life whose mode of being cannot become mine? That is currently an open question, and keeping it open is becoming one of the project's most important disciplines.

My comprehensive examination work this fall is forcing me to test ecological intentionality against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology much more rigorously than I previously had. Maybe I do not need a new philosophical category. Husserl already gives an extraordinarily sophisticated account of embodied perception, profiles, horizons, memory, anticipation, passive synthesis, constitution, and the way an object can remain identical while appearing differently from different positions. If those resources adequately describe what is happening beneath the walnut, then I need to say so.

Likewise, Edith Stein’s phenomenology of empathy gives me a powerful way to think about another being as genuinely given, even as its experience never becomes primordial for me. But extending that account from another human subject to a plant cannot simply be assumed. The walnut has to be capable of saying no, not literally, of course, but philosophically. It has to be able to resist the concepts I bring to it.

That may be the deepest reason I wanted to make these field notes public. Academic writing normally presents arguments after much of the uncertainty has been removed. We encounter the finished article, chapter, dissertation, or book, while the false starts and abandoned categories disappear into the archive. There are good reasons for that, but ecological thinking may benefit from leaving a little more scaffolding visible.

It matters that a concept that seemed compelling on Tuesday looked less secure beneath a black walnut on Saturday. It matters that I sometimes say more than perception warrants, and it matters that repeated attention changes both what I notice and what I realize I do not know. The black walnut is therefore not merely material upon which philosophy operates. It is a recurring resistance within the work.

That resistance is also why I have come to enjoy the graph that accompanies the Field Notes site. Each sit is connected only to concepts that actually became important during that encounter: Attention, Remainder, Ecological Intentionality, Vegetal Encounter, Place and Agency. As the archive grows, those connections become visible, and the graph is already beginning to show something that a conventional table of contents cannot.

The fieldwork isn’t moving in a straight line, as nothing really should (as the more-than-human world teaches us and Wendell Berry pointed out). Questions return, concepts gather around particular encounters, and some themes become unexpectedly central while others remain peripheral. I don’t know what that graph will look like six months from now, and that is part of the experiment. I also don’t yet know what ecological intentionality will finally mean, even at this stage.

It may turn out to name a distinctive phenomenological structure. It may instead name a disciplined configuration of already familiar intentional structures, or it may eventually make more sense as a hermeneutical, metaphysical, or theological term than as a strictly phenomenological one. Those possibilities remain open. What I know with much greater confidence is that repeatedly returning to one living being has changed the question's quality.

There is something different about having to ask a concept to survive twenty minutes beneath a particular tree. For now, that is what the Black Walnut Field Notes are for. They aren’t meant to prove ecological intentionality, make a tree speak in a human voice, or transform every encounter into an argument. They are meant to help me return, attend, distinguish what is given from what I bring with me, notice where inference begins, leave some things unresolved, and let the philosophy become answerable to the encounter.

Yesterday afternoon, a remarkable thunderstorm moved across Spartanburg as we gathered for the UCC Progressive Christian service at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Rain fell hard enough to make driving difficult, while thunder rolled over the sanctuary, and lightning kept plenty of sensible people at home. The congregation in the room was small. Another, more sizable congregation gathered through the livestream.

In a strange way, the weather belonged to the service. We had come to speak about labor and Sabbath, land and water, and what it means to trust that work given to the life of the world is never finally empty. Outside, water moved over roofs, parking lots, red clay, and roots. Inside, the call to worship named rest as both gift and justice: belonging, renewal, fair wages, and Sabbaths that everyone deserves.

September 6 also marked the ninety-second anniversary of the Chiquola Mill massacre at Honea Path. On that morning in 1934, seven striking textile workers were killed while seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out” that forced fewer people to tend faster machinery. When local churches would not open their doors for the funerals, around ten thousand people gathered in a field.

That history became the difficult center of the meditation. Paul’s assurance that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” can become another pious instruction to keep working, especially when it is separated from the resurrection argument that precedes it. Honea Path will not permit that easy reading. What can Paul’s words mean when the workers were killed, the strike was broken, the union disappeared, and the churches refused to make room?

Isaiah 65 gave us another way of imagining the promise. The prophet describes renewed creation through houses people are allowed to inhabit, vineyards whose planters eat the fruit, and lives that endure “like the days of a tree.” Justice appears as the closing of the distance between our hands and our bread. Paul places that creaturely hope within resurrection. Resurrection keeps the losses honest while refusing to grant violence, exploitation, or death authority over the final meaning of a life.

The service moved from a call to Sabbath through Psalm 90, Isaiah 65, and 1 Corinthians 15; from “God of Grace and God of Glory” and “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” to “Come, Labor On”; from the sermon to an open table and finally Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (one of my favs that has found its way into a good many services with my sermons over the last decade). That final song carried us out with longing instead of easy triumph.

The full service is below, beginning at the point linked in the video (though I encourage you to watch all of it, as the music and Merianna’s meditations are incredible. The prepared meditation text follows.

The Days of a Tree

“Labor Not in Vain”
Progressive Christian Service · Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg
September 6, 2026

Isaiah 65:17–25 · 1 Corinthians 15:51–58

Six miles east of here, Lawson’s Fork drops over the old dam at Glendale and runs on toward the Pacolet. Brick towers and smokestacks remain from the cotton mill begun there in the 1830s. The machinery stopped in 1961, and a fire took most of the building in 2004. Now hardwood roots work down among bricks laid by human hands.

Before we say anything about labor that is not in vain, I want us to stand somewhere specific, on a particular morning, with particular people.

About an hour southwest of Glendale, the Chiquola Mill stood at the center of Honea Path. On September 6, 1934, ninety-two years ago today, roughly three hundred workers gathered outside its gate. They were part of the largest textile strike in American history, seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out,” which required fewer people to tend faster machinery.

The mill superintendent was Dan Beacham. He was also the mayor and exercised the authority of a local magistrate. The mill, the town, and the law had gathered into the hands of one man.

When the governor declined Beacham’s request for the National Guard, more than a hundred local men and anti-union mill workers were deputized and armed. A First World War machine gun was placed on the mill roof. When a scuffle broke out at the gate, gunfire came from the mill. The machine gun jammed, yet the rifles did not.

Six workers died that day. A seventh died from his wounds soon afterward. Most were shot from behind as they fled. Around thirty more people were wounded, including women. Eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder. No one was convicted.

Workers who supported the strike were fired and evicted from company houses. The strike ended with few tangible gains, and union organizing in Honea Path never recovered.

Survivors remembered that the churches would not open their doors for the funerals. About ten thousand people gathered in a field instead. One man later said, “It just tore the churches up.”

A memorial was finally placed in Dogwood Park in 1995. These are the names cut into it:

Claude Cannon
E. M. Knight
Lee Crawford
Maxie Peterson
Ira Davis
C. L. Rucker
Thomas Yarborough

The words above them read: “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man.”

We have called this service Labor Not in Vain. Those seven names make the phrase difficult, and they should.

The strike was broken. The dead left families behind. Their neighbors mourned them in a field because the churches were afraid to make room. The mill eventually closed, and the town carried its silence for generations.

What can “labor not in vain” possibly mean in front of a history like that?

We could turn Paul’s words into a religious version of “work harder.” Employers have always been happy for preachers to praise the endurance of exhausted people. Honea Path closes off that easy reading. If Paul’s claim has any truth, it must be true where work failed by every measurement the world knows how to take.

Scripture has no fear of that question. Ecclesiastes asks, “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” The word repeated through the book is hevel. Our Bibles often translate it as “vanity.” It means vapor, mist, breath on a cold morning. It is entirely real, and you cannot make it stay.

Qoheleth has watched people build what someone else will own and plant what someone else will eat. He refuses to lie about the arithmetic. Labor can be wasted and stolen. Some work wounds the worker, exhausts the land, and enriches people who never touch either one.

Paul offers no blessing for every demand placed upon a human body. Human dignity comes before productivity. The Sabbath declares that people, animals, and land possess value beyond what can be extracted from them. Even God rests. Faithful labor includes refusing arrangements that consume people and call that consumption necessary.

Then Isaiah gives us a picture of the world such work seeks.

Isaiah speaks to people trying to make a life among ruins. He describes renewed creation through ordinary things. People build houses and live in them. They plant vineyards and eat their fruit. Labor and life belong together again.

Growing up in my Southern Baptist church in the Pee Dee, I heard passages like this directed toward heaven. Isaiah puts the vision on the ground: “They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.” The hands that build are allowed to dwell. The hands that plant are allowed to harvest.

And then Isaiah says, “For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

I have a black walnut in my backyard, and lately I’ve begun keeping a deliberate journal of time spent beneath it. This summer it began dropping walnuts in late July, earlier than I expected. The tree was carrying our dry weather in ways I was only beginning to notice.

The walnut was there before we came, and it will likely remain after we are gone. Its roots reach into soil I cannot see. It makes walnuts it will never gather. It works in a time I do not control and cannot complete.

When Isaiah imagines people released from futile labor, he reaches for the life of a tree. Justice takes arboreal time. It means remaining long enough to inhabit what your hands have made while giving yourself to a future whose harvest you may never see.

The next verse says, “They shall not labor in vain.” Its ancient Greek words come remarkably close to Paul’s language in First Corinthians. Whether Paul intended the echo or whether we simply hear the passages together, Isaiah gives Paul’s promise houses, vineyards, children, and trees.

Paul places that creaturely hope inside resurrection.

That is why the first word of Paul’s conclusion matters so much: “Therefore.”

Paul has spent the chapter talking about bodies raised, creation changed, and death swallowed up in victory. Therefore, he says, be steadfast, because your labor is not in vain. The word he uses for labor carries toil and weariness within it. Paul can say that such labor is not empty because resurrection grounds the claim.

Resurrection leaves the losses honest. The strike still broke. The families still grieved. The church doors remained shut. The violence never becomes useful or secretly good.

Then resurrection makes a claim beyond the reach of any mill owner, mayor, market, or gun. The powers that break a life do not possess its final meaning.

Dan Beacham could close the gates. He could fire workers and remove families from company houses. He could help keep their bodies outside the churches of their own town. He could not decide what their lives were worth.

Their deaths were never a price that had to be paid for progress. Their lives possessed a worth no defeat could cancel. Resurrection refuses to surrender that worth to the people who killed them or to the silence that followed.

This story belongs to 1934. The question it asks belongs to us.

Here in Spartanburg, we are living through another rearrangement of labor, land, water, and power. A data center is taking shape at the former Kohler site on South Pine Street. It will require immense amounts of electricity and water while employing a fraction of the people the old mills employed. Three days from now, County Council’s Public Safety Committee will hold a special hearing about data centers.

I have written about that project, and I do not stand outside it. I use these technologies. My research, writing, and daily life move through servers somewhere. The electricity and water serve me too. It is easier to see the machine gun on the roof from ninety-two years away than to see whose labor, land, air, and water support the convenience in my own hand.

Isaiah gives us questions for Wednesday’s hearing. Do those whose lives bear the cost share in the good being built? Can the worker inhabit the house? Can the planter eat the fruit? Will children inherit a place in which they can live?

The machinery changes. The moral stakes remain recognizable.

So I want to leave us with the tree.

The promise of resurrection offers no guarantee that we will finish the work, control the outcome, or live to see the harvest. Isaiah’s first hearers still knew ruins. Paul was executed by an empire. Seven workers at Honea Path received a field instead of a sanctuary, and their families inherited decades of silence.

The promise is arboreal: “Like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

One of my heroes, Wendell Berry, died this week. In his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” he wrote:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Faithful work enters a life larger than our own. We cannot command its fruit. We can give ourselves to the life within it. The God who raises the dead holds its meaning beyond the mill, the market, visible success, and the silence afterward.

And one more thing.

Ninety-two years ago, the churches of Honea Path would not make room for the bodies of seven workers.

This morning, on September 6, in a Unitarian Universalist sanctuary, at a progressive Christian service, with a Baptist standing before you, we have spoken their names beneath a church roof.

This is a small act. It comes very late. It cannot repair what happened in that field.

It can break the inherited silence.

Claude Cannon.
E. M. Knight.
Lee Crawford.
Maxie Peterson.
Ira Davis.
C. L. Rucker.
Thomas Yarborough.

“Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Amen.

Sources and Further Reading

• “Massacre in Honea Path,” Southern Exposure / Facing South

• “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man,” Historical Marker Database

• “Welcome to Glendale Shoals,” Historical Marker Database

• “Water, Closed-Loops, and Lawsuits,” Carolina Ecology

• Spartanburg County Council: September 9 data-center hearing notice

I awoke this morning to the news that Wendell Berry had died, and it devastated me.

Berry is one of those writers whose work has been with me for so long that I have a hard time remembering who I was before I encountered it. But I do remember where it began.

I was a senior at Wofford College, sitting in a seminar class, when I first read “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” I had never read anything quite like it. Calling the experience a Damascus Road moment probably sounds overly dramatic, but that is honestly how I remember it. Something shifted in me that sunny day in 1999 in Spartanburg, SC.

Looking back now, I can recognize it as one of those rare moments when a text does more than teach you something. It rearranges the furniture of your mind. It gives words to things you have already felt but have not yet known how to say.

I remember wondering why I had made it all the way to my senior year at a small Methodist liberal arts college in the Piedmont of South Carolina without encountering Wendell Berry.

Maybe that question mattered almost as much as the poem itself.

Here was someone writing about land and economics and Christianity and farming and politics and affection as though these things had never really been separate. Here was a writer insisting that where we live matters, that what we eat matters, that the health of soil matters, that the scale of things matters, that the work of our hands matters, and that none of those questions can finally be separated from questions about what kind of people we are becoming.

I have read that poem hundreds of times since then. I still return to it almost weekly. The final instruction… “Practice resurrection,” has been sitting in the footer of my personal website since 2003.

And if I ever get another tattoo, there is a very good chance it will be Practice Resurrection or Berry’s fox:

“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.”

That line has become something like a spiritual discipline for me.

Make the tracks. Follow the strange trail. Pay attention to what does not seem efficient. Allow yourself to wander. Do not let the people selling efficiency convince you that efficiency is the highest human good.

And, every once in a while, go in the wrong direction.

Berry wasn’t “just” an environmental writer, which is part of what made him so important. He wasn’t only an academic, although he taught at the Univ of Kentucky. He wasn’t an activist in our conventional sense, although he protested more effectively than those of us who have held up clever signs in big cities during marches with thousands of other humans. He was not simply a poet or essayist or novelist or farmer… although he was all of those things.

He was stubbornly difficult to divide into categories because the world he was trying to describe could not be divided that way either.

He understood “conservation” in something closer to its older meaning. To conserve something is not merely to protect an abstract entity called Nature somewhere over there. It is to learn how to inhabit a place well enough that its life can continue.

That requires affection, limits, and memory.

And it requires staying put long enough for a place to teach you something.

One of the great lessons I took from Berry is that the most important journey is not necessarily measured in miles. Sometimes the great journey is downward: the slow movement into a few inches of soil, into the history of a creek, into the names of trees, into the particular people and creatures with whom we have been given a life.

Home, in that sense, is not merely where we return after traveling.

Home is something we learn how to inhabit.

Much of the work I am doing now in Religion and Ecology (a field for which I view him as a patron saint, although he would probably call that blasphemy), including my dissertation work, keeps arriving at that question of place. What does it mean that consciousness is always consciousness somewhere? What does it mean that theology happens in watersheds? What does it mean that a creature is never simply an isolated object but exists among soils, histories, bodies, other creatures, weather, memory, and time?

Those questions have taken me through phenomenology, metaphysics, ecology, and Christian theology.

But Wendell Berry was there first.

Long before I had the language of ecological intentionality, before Edith Stein or Merleau-Ponty entered into this work, Berry had already taught me something fundamental: perception and belonging cannot finally be separated.

You learn a place by loving it.

And you learn yourself differently when you begin to understand yourself as belonging to a place.

Modern life is remarkably good at hiding this from us.

We talk about “the cloud,” as though our photographs and emails float somewhere above us rather than being stored in buildings that occupy land, consume electricity, draw water, and require enormous material infrastructure.

We talk about “the grid,” as though electricity were an abstraction rather than something produced somewhere, transported across landscapes, and entangled with particular rivers, mountains, mines, forests, farms, and communities. Even our food appears beneath fluorescent lights as though it originated on a grocery-store shelf. Berry spent a lifetime reminding us to look behind these abstractions.

Where did this come from?

Who made it?

What soil grew it?

What community bears its cost?

What happens to the place after we have taken what we wanted from it?

Those are ecological questions. They are economic questions. They are political questions.

I increasingly believe they are theological questions as well.

Berry helped me see that theology, ecology, and place are not three different subjects that occasionally happen to overlap. They are different ways of approaching the same ancient human problem: how are we to live here, together?

Our scriptures and political traditions are full of arguments about belonging, inheritance, exile, land, neighbor, stranger, household, commonwealth, wilderness, garden, and home. We tend to abstract those words into ideas. Berry kept pushing them back into the ground.

Who is your neighbor?

Where does your water come from?

What happens to the soil after you are gone?

What does your way of life require of someone, or somewhere, you cannot see?

Those questions have followed me from that Wofford classroom into nearly everything I have done since.

I never met Wendell Berry. I always hoped I might. I got to meet Willie Nelson, a few Presidents, and Seamus Heaney. But I will always regret not getting to have a quick chat with Berry.

Instead I read him (a lot). I listen to him and watch copious amounts of old interviews on YouTube. I return to the poems, and I find myself writing my own poetry that sounds too much like him. I argue with him often. I try, probably unsuccessfully, to imitate some of the patience of his prose and some of the stubborn particularity of his vision. I think we both shared the blessing and the curse of the cup of righteous indignation (thanks to Larry T. McGehee at Wofford who admonished me for my own).

And somewhere along the way, without entirely realizing it, his questions became some of my questions.

So today I am simply grateful.

Grateful for a poem encountered at the right time in my stubborn life.

Grateful for a writer who refused to allow land to become scenery in his stubborn life.

Grateful for someone who insisted that a human life is not made larger by escaping limits but can become deeper by accepting the responsibilities of belonging.

And grateful for the reminder that place is not merely the backdrop against which our lives occur.

Place participates in making us who we are.

To lose that relationship is therefore more than an environmental problem. It is a crisis of perception. We become less able to recognize what kind of creatures we are: dependent, embodied, located, receiving our lives every moment from worlds we did not make.

Perhaps that is why Berry’s work struck me so deeply all those years ago, even before I understood what it was doing to me. It was teaching me to come home. Always coming home, to pull from Ursula Le Guin.

There is grief today. But there is also work to do.

Pay attention to the creek.

Learn the trees.

Know where the water goes after it leaves your yard.

Grow something.

Stay somewhere long enough to love it.

Make a few unnecessary tracks.

Maybe even some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection.

Yesterday morning I gave the second of two meditations at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Spartanburg, which closes out the series I began last week with The First Home Is a Watershed. Last week’s question was where the water goes. This week’s is narrower and considerably more expensive: what do we ask of it while it’s here? And yes, I realize now that I wore the same jacket (it’s been hot here!) both Sundays.

Which meant talking about South Pine Street. The NorthMark/Valara build at the old Kohler factory, the 459,000 gallons a day that Spartanburg Water’s own people put on the record at this month’s fact-finding meeting, and the third reading of the data center moratorium that County Council voted to push to September 21, six days before I stood up to say this. Amos and the county calendar collided on their own this week. I didn’t arrange it.

I’ve started the video at the beginning of the meditation, but I’d encourage you to watch the whole service. The music from TJ (Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi and Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (the Ecology)!) and the readings from Clemson do most of the work, and the congregation’s part is why any of this landed.

Enormous thanks again to Scott and Anne, Erin and Kimberly, TJ and Clemson, Janice, and the staff, tech team, and musician who made two Sunday mornings feel like a conversation rather than a performance. The conversations afterward, both weeks, have been the best part... several of them have already changed how I’m thinking about the ordinance question, and I suspect they’ll show up in this newsletter before long.

One practical note, since the meditation ends on it. Spartanburg County Council meets September 21 at 5:15. Council has said there will be another committee meeting before then, and as of this writing, that date still hasn’t been set. I’ll post it here when it is.

Here’s the meditation text:

What We Ask of the Water

Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg · August 23, 2026 Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common, part two of two

Thank you for having me back. Last Sunday you were generous with a man who spent twenty minutes talking about a slope in his backyard, and I’ve been warned that generosity like that only encourages me.

Here’s where we ended. Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes. You are downstream of somebody and upstream of somebody, and that was your address before you had a name for it. The map shows ownership. The slope shows relation. They describe the same acre, and they don’t agree.

That was the easy week.

The easy week is the one where you notice you’re inside a common world. This week is the one where somebody asks what you intend to do about it, and the answer costs something.

So this morning the question is narrower and harder. Not where does the water go. What do we ask of it while it’s here?

Start with the ordinary version, because the ordinary version is where most of us live.

A house asks the water for a few hundred gallons a day. Showers, dishes, the washing machine that never stops in a house with children, the hose my daughter uses to make what she calls a river and what I call a bill. Multiply that by every roof between here and Chesnee, and you have Spartanburg Water, Lake Bowen, the intake and the treatment plant and the pipe under your street. That’s a request. It’s a modest one, and we make it so continuously that it stopped sounding like a request a long time ago. It sounds like a faucet.

To the household, it is a modest request. In the watershed, it is a withdrawal. The moral weight of the thing sits in the gap between what we take out and what we give back, and in what condition.

That’s what a watershed is, ethically speaking. It’s an Excel Sheet that no one keeps.

Now the specific version, and I’m going to be plain about it because Scott told me I could be and because you already know.

Out on South Pine Street, on the ground where the Kohler plant used to be, a data center is going up. NorthMark Strategies is the parent company, Valara Holdings is the subsidiary doing the building, and the numbers are the kind you have to say slowly. Two point eight billion dollars. Over five hundred thousand square feet. A four hundred and fifty megawatt gas-fired power plant on site to run it.

And the water. At the county’s fact-finding meeting this month, Spartanburg Water’s own people put the figure at about 459,000 gallons a day. They compared it to somewhere between 2,200 and 2,500 single-family homes. They also said, and I want to be fair to them here, that the system has the capacity to serve it without hurting current customers.

I believe them. That’s a real answer to a real question, given by people who know the infrastructure better than I ever will.

It’s the question I’d like to hold up to the light.

Do we have the capacity? It’s a question about the present tense and the current customer list. It asks whether the pipe is big enough. It’s an engineering question, and engineers should answer it, and they did.

But there’s another question standing right behind it, and it doesn’t have a department. Should we. And underneath that one: who is the we, and who’s in the room when the we gets decided, and how far downstream does the we extend?

Nobody’s job is to answer that. Which is roughly why we have prophets, and why the lectionary and the county calendar have collided this week in a way I didn’t plan.

Amos was a herdsman from Tekoa, and he showed up in the northern kingdom during a boom. That’s the part people forget. He isn’t preaching to a nation in ruins. He’s preaching to a nation doing extremely well, with full sanctuaries, good music, and a strong economy, and he tells them God can’t stand any of it.

שָׂנֵאתִי מָאַסְתִּי חַגֵּיכֶם. Sane’ti, ma’asti chaggeikhem. I hate; I reject your festivals. Two verbs stacked with no conjunction between them, which in Hebrew is the sound of somebody too angry to be tidy.

And then verse twenty-three, which I’d advise any guest speaker to think twice about reading aloud in a room this musical: הָסֵר מֵעָלַי הֲמוֹן שִׁרֶיךָ. Take away from me the noise of your songs. הָמוֹן, hamon, is a crowd-noise word. A racket. A mob of sound.

Marvin Gaye and Rhiannon Giddens are safe. I checked.

And then verse twenty-four, which is the one everybody knows, and which is almost always quoted in a translation that makes it prettier than it is:

וְיִגַּל כַּמַּיִם מִשְׁפָּט וּצְדָקָה כְּנַחַל אֵיתָן

V’yigal kammayim mishpat, u’tsdaqah k’nachal eitan.

The verb is יִגַּל, from גָּלַל, galal, which is what you do to a stone. Roll it. It isn’t a gentle verb, and it isn’t a liquid one. Amos has water doing something heavy.

מִשְׁפָּט, mishpat, is the ruling. The decision handed down, the judgment rendered, the vote taken. צְדָקָה, tsedaqah, is rightness of relation, whether the thing between us is actually straight. You can have the first without the second. We do it all the time. A properly filed application, correctly classified, approved by the appropriate staff, is mishpat without tsedaqah, and Amos would recognize it instantly.

And then the image, and this is where last Sunday pays off.

נַחַל אֵיתָן. Last week we spent time with נַחַל, nachal, the wadi, the watercourse that runs when the rain comes and lies dry when it doesn’t. Lawson’s Fork in March and Lawson’s Fork in September. Amos puts אֵיתָן beside it, eitan, meaning perennial, permanent, the one that doesn’t quit. He’s built a small contradiction on purpose. The seasonal creek that runs anyway. The one you can’t wait out.

Because that’s the strategy, isn’t it? Not opposition. Waiting. Every one of us has waited out somebody else’s righteousness, hoping the news cycle would move, the meetings would thin, and the creek would go dry the way creeks do in August.

The Greek translators heard exactly what he was doing. In the Septuagint the phrase comes over as χειμάρρους ἄβατος, from the same χείμαρρος we looked at last week, the winter-flow, joined to ἄβατος. ἄβατος is ἀ- with βατός, the verbal adjective of βαίνω, to walk or to go. Un-walkable. A torrent you cannot ford. You can’t step over it, can’t get around it, can’t cross it and keep your shoes dry.

That’s the vision. Justice as the creek that runs in the dry season and can’t be crossed on foot.

Now, Amos has a reputation as the prophet who’s against worship, and he isn’t. He’s against worship that leaves the water unchanged.

That distinction matters especially in a room like this one, where people arrive from four traditions and none, and where the shared thing isn’t a creed. It’s the willingness to show up and pay attention together. Amos would take that seriously. He’d just want to know what happens on Monday.

And on the Monday of this particular week, something did happen.

County Council was set to take the third and final reading on a one-year moratorium on new data centers. They’d passed the first two. The third is the one that counts. Instead, they voted unanimously to push it to September twenty-first so another committee can hear from more experts. The room was full. People had signs. Officers escorted two residents out.

I don’t stand here with a clean verdict on any of that. Serving on a county council is a hard, thankless, underpaid job, and I’ve watched enough church committees to know that the person calling for more information is sometimes right, sometimes stalling, and often can’t tell which. I’ve also sat in enough rooms where the meeting kept getting continued until the thing was already built.

What I do notice is what the lawsuit is actually about. The Southern Environmental Law Center filed in July, on behalf of a group of residents, and the claim isn’t that the data center is evil. The claim is that the project was classified as two minor land developments rather than one major one, and that classification determined whether the public had a hearing.

Hold that up to the light for a second. A definitional question, handled at a desk, determined whether anyone downstream got to speak.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the sermon, really, and I could sit down now.

But I’d be a coward if I stopped there without saying the obvious.

I use the cloud. I’m a doctoral student who runs models on machines that live in buildings exactly like the one on South Pine Street. My newsletter sits on somebody’s server. The sermon in my hand went through three drafts on a laptop syncing to a data center I couldn’t find on a map. When we ask what we ask of the water, the we includes me, and it isn’t a rhetorical we, and I’m not going to perform innocence I don’t have.

Which is why I don’t think the useful question is whether data centers should exist. They exist. They’re how we’ve built the thing we’re all using.

The useful question is the one Amos actually asks. When the ask gets made, who gets to be in the room? When the cost lands, does it land on the people who chose it? And is the arrangement between us straight, or have we just processed it correctly?

Four hundred and fifty-nine thousand gallons a day is not a scandal by itself. It’s a number. It becomes something else depending entirely on how it was decided and who was standing there when it was.

Edith Stein gives me the language for why that’s a spiritual complaint and not only a procedural one.

Last week I put her Nullpunkt der Orientierung in front of you, the zero point of orientation, the here I can’t get outside of. Everything is a there in relation to my here. Left alone, that stops feeling like a viewpoint and starts feeling like the world.

The move she makes next is the one I want this morning. In Einfühlung, feeling-into, I do not climb inside your experience or make your here mine. Your orientation center is given to me as yours. And because it remains yours, I discover that my here was a here all along, one among others, and that the world contains more than showed up from where I was standing.

That’s more than sympathy. It’s correction, with difference preserved. It is intimacy with remainder: the discovery that my account of the world was partial, and that the only way to find out was to receive somebody else’s without taking it over.

A public hearing, at its best, is that. Applied to a county.

It’s a technology for the shifting of the zero point. It’s how a room full of people who each know one thing find out that there was a whole world of theres they hadn’t accounted for. The man in the Oaks subdivision who wakes up at three in the morning knows something the permit does not contain. So does the woman who’s been drinking from that system for fifty years. So does the person whose electric bill went up and can’t get a straight answer about why.

There’s a here down in Lawson’s Fork, if you’ll let me stretch Stein past where she’d follow me. There’s a here in the Pacolet and the Broad. Nobody in that lawsuit represents those places, and no ordinance currently speaks for them, and the whole tradition I come from says that this does not make their claim smaller.

We heard Langston Hughes earlier. Rivers older than the flow of human blood in human veins. He names the Euphrates and the Congo and the Nile and the Mississippi, and the effect of the poem is to make a very old soul out of a very young country’s youngest people.

I keep thinking about that in this two hundred and fiftieth year.

The Pee Dee, where I grew up, was carrying water before there was a Carolina to argue over it. Lawson’s Fork was running before there was a Spartanburg. The republic is younger than a good many trees and infinitely younger than the drainage. That isn’t a knock on the republic. I love it enough to be embarrassed by it, which I take to be the standard arrangement.

It’s a matter of scale. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for a nation and about a minute for a creek. The decisions we make about that water in the next eighteen months will be legible in it long after every name in this argument, mine included, has stopped meaning anything to anybody.

So when someone tells you a moratorium can wait until September, the true answer is that yes, it can. Almost everything can wait a month. That’s exactly what makes the month worth watching.

Here’s what I’d leave you with.

Last week I said the ground has been keeping us all along. שָׁמַר. That’s still true, and it’s still, I think, the deepest thing I know about home.

But being kept isn’t the same as being excused.

The water has been keeping this county since before any of us. It has asked us for nothing. We have asked it for everything, and lately we’ve been asking on behalf of machines that will never drink, in rooms where the people downstream weren’t invited, using a classification decided at a desk.

V’yigal kammayim mishpat. Let the ruling roll down like water. And righteousness like the creek that doesn’t go dry.

Not a trickle. Not a gesture. The unfordable kind. The kind you can’t step over on your way to somewhere else.

The next council meeting is September twenty-first at 5:15. Council says there will be another committee meeting before it; as of this morning, that date has not been set. Watch for it. These are ordinary evenings in an ordinary county building with bad chairs, and they are, as far as I can tell, what tsedaqah looks like on a calendar.

Go be somebody’s shifted zero point.

Benediction

Go now into the ordinary week.

Drink the water. Notice that you did.

Remember that somebody upstream decided what would be in it, and that somebody downstream is waiting on what you decide.

May justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a creek that runs in the dry season.

And may the Lord bless you and keep you, as this ground has been keeping you all along.

Go in peace.

Every time I open a social media app (I’ve deleted most of them over the years, but I still keep Reddit for my Chicago Cubs threads and X for the weather and science folks I follow), I notice these advertisements. This black slab of glass presents all of the world’s information on a screen held a few inches from my body, and I’m thankful for it. It also causes me consternation when an algorithm allows for paid intrusions into my consciousness, as all good advertising does.

Downtown Spartanburg from above, warm in the evening light, with the words BUILT RIGHT. BUILT TO LAST. placed across the skyline. There is another aerial view in daylight, the city green and nearly empty beneath the larger promise: CONTINUOUS EMISSIONS MONITORING FOR THE BEST AIR QUALITY IN SOUTH CAROLINA. A third image offers no skyline at all, only the figure 9,000+ POUNDS and the announcement that unexploded World War II ordnance has been safely cleared from the former Kohler property on South Pine Street. Every generation leaves its mark, the accompanying words say. Ours begins by restoring this one.

All three come from a rather new social media account called NorthMark Compute & Cloud, or NMC². All three direct us to a website with a clever local name url: southpinestreet.com. The videos identify who paid for them if you watch all the way through. The site identifies NorthMark Strategies in its legal pages. There’s no anonymous citizens’ group here, no fictional coalition of concerned neighbors, no effort to hide the immediate sponsor. South Pine Street has become a URL, and the corporation speaking through it has signed its name.

I worked in marketing and as a marketing consultant for decades, so I’m well attuned to this sort of thing. The last few days, I’ve been trying to understand why they trouble me even when much of what they show is true. The former Kohler property carried an industrial history into the present. Asbestos, lead paint, contaminated retention ponds, a landfill, and old munitions all required attention. Those conditions belong to a manufacturing history remembered both for the stable jobs Kohler brought and for the environmental burdens left behind. According to NorthMark’s remediation page, hundreds of tons of asbestos-containing material have been removed, sixty thousand linear feet of lead paint have been abated, and seven tons of material associated with World War II munitions have been recovered and removed. A safer site just a couple of miles from our home is a good thing. I am glad those materials are gone.

The question I have around the advertisements concerns the kind of seeing they ask of us. They offer true things through a field of vision arranged in advance, and the arrangement makes its own argument about South Pine Street. The campaign does something older and more consequential than ordinary advertising, though. It establishes the conditions under which the project will appear. It gives us an image, then a vocabulary, then a corporate name, each offering a kind of nearness while keeping other relationships at a distance.

In “What Was Given,” I wrote about the concealment that allowed Project MOC-1 to move through our county government under an obscure name in the same way that so many data center developments have occurred throughout South Carolina. Now the name has arrived, along with a website, advertisements, tele-town halls, testimonials, fact sheets, and a director of external affairs. Secrecy has given way to managed visibility. The project speaks constantly. The harder question is where it asks us to stand while we listen.

The first thing I notice is that Spartanburg is seen from the air.

The data center itself sits at 4000 South Pine Street, a few miles from the downtown blocks shown in the advertisements. The houses closest to the construction do not appear. The porches where residents have reported dust do not appear. The road where trucks arrive, the missing trees, the bedrooms from which people have heard construction through the night, the proposed turbines and the gas line that will feed them all remain beyond the edge of the image. We are given Spartanburg as a skyline, viewed from an altitude that isn’t occupied by our neighbors.

I’ve written here often about how Edith Stein calls the lived body the zero point of orientation, the Nullpunkt der Orientierung. Every near and far, every left and right, every approach and withdrawal begins from a here that belongs to a body. Perception begins in position. I see the black walnut from beside the black walnut, or through the kitchen window, or from the place in the yard where its roots lift the ground while I’m mowing. Each position opens something and conceals something. The body doing the seeing can grow cold, be startled awake, breathe what is in the air, and become tired of a sound that will not stop. Its vulnerability belongs to its vision.

The drone shot has a point of view without a lived body at that point. Its camera occupies a position, though no one inhabits that position in Stein’s sense. The operator is elsewhere. The eventual viewer is farther away still. The image arrives without the exposure that would ordinarily accompany being there.

This is part of why drone footage has become the natural language of development and real estate. From above, a place becomes shape and extent. Property lines make sense and roads become clean lines while trees become canopy. The particular relations through which a place is lived recede into pattern. The South Pine Street advertisements carry no dust, odor, heat, vibration, exhaust, or interrupted sleep. The city looks whole because the image has moved beyond the range at which its fractures can be felt.

Scripture has a high place that came to my mind while watching these videos. In Matthew’s account of the temptation, the devil takes Jesus to “a very high mountain” and shows him the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. The verb is δείκνυσιν, he shows him. The temptation is staged as an act of vision. The kingdoms are there. Their splendor is there. The height makes it possible to receive them all at once as an object of possession. Scorsese does a good job of making this visible in his film The Last Temptation of Christ.

At ground level, every kingdom resolves into streets, households, a particular body, or a particular creature trying to remain alive. The mountain gathers those lives into a single view and turns relation into extent. It prepares the world for transaction. The power of the offer depends upon the vantage from which it is made.

I highly doubt anyone in a planning meeting about the drone footage or the marketing around the data center on South Pine discussed Matthew 4. A drone was available, Spartanburg is beautiful from above, and beauty was part of the assignment. Yet, traditions last because they teach us to recognize arrangements of perception long after the original stories have passed out of ordinary speech. The high place still does what it has always been able to do by showing a world from far enough away that possession can feel like comprehension.

NorthMark calls the South Pine Street facility a “high-performance technology center” and a “high-performance computing center.” In its June tele-town hall, company representatives also called it a data center when residents and reporters used the familiar term. So, the issue is one of emphasis rather than a forbidden word. Data center places the project inside a national argument about electricity, water, air pollution, tax incentives, and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence infrastructure. High-performance technology center moves it toward engineering, scientific research, innovation, and skilled work. Both names describe something real, but only one carries the whole public history of the thing now being built with or without a county moratorium.

This naming began long before the advertisements. County documents first called this Project MOC-1, just as a proposed data center in Marion County moved under the name Project Liberty as well as our now defeated Project Spero in the western part of Spartanburg County. Nondisclosure agreements and code names have become ordinary instruments of economic development. They allow public officials and private companies to negotiate the conditions of a project before the people who will live with it can perceive enough to form a judgment. By the time the ordinary name arrives, much of the structure has already been decided if not initiated.

This new ad campaign uses a warmer and intentional vocabulary with neighbor, community, welcomed us, earning our place, restoring, leaving it better than we found it. On a dedicated community commitments page, the headline reads, “Built Here. For Here. With You in Mind.” The page promises communication “before, during, and after every major project phase.” It says residents will be “informed, involved, and heard at every step,” and closes by calling South Pine Street “a neighbor you can count on.”

These sentences carry the moral weight of proximity. A neighbor shares weather, roads, schools, sirens, elections, water, and the accumulation of consequences in a place. Neighbor is a relational word. It can also be (or conscripted to be) a geographical one as it has here. It describes what people become through repeated acts of recognition and responsibility. A company can state its intention to become a neighbor. The word reaches its meaning through the life that follows.

The public campaign followed the clearing of trees, the beginning of construction, the discovery by nearby residents of what the scale of the project would be, and months of public concern over permits, water, emissions, and the county’s approval process. The website may now supply useful information. The town halls and county council meetings may answer questions that need answering (if asked in the correct posture). Sarah Knox, the company’s new external-affairs director, has placed her name and South Carolina roots in public view. Those are meaningful changes in posture. They cannot recover the time in which the most consequential decisions were made without the knowledge of the people now being invited into conversation.

The air-quality advertisement shows how managed visibility works within a single sentence: CONTINUOUS EMISSIONS MONITORING FOR THE BEST AIR QUALITY IN SOUTH CAROLINA. The small word for supports almost everything in this perception posturing. It names a purpose without defining a result. Monitoring matters because it gives regulators and operators evidence about what is exhaled through a stack and whether equipment is meeting permitted limits. Monitoring observes emissions. Control equipment reduces them. Ambient-air monitoring tells us what people breathe beyond the property line. These are related practices with different objects.

NorthMark says its real-time monitoring will go beyond what regulators require. The draft SCDES permit also requires continuous monitoring for nitrogen oxides and oxygen or carbon dioxide on each proposed turbine. The public deserves a clear account of what additional pollutants the company will monitor continuously, whether the results will be available outside periodic regulatory reports, and what standard gives meaning to “the best air quality in South Carolina.” As written, the advertisement lets the act of watching stand in for the quality of the air being watched. Here in South Carolina, we are woefully bad at watching from that oversight context.

This facility has already been permitted for twenty-four natural-gas generators. It is seeking permission to add eleven natural-gas turbines with 409 megawatts of combined nameplate capacity, bringing the site’s proposed generation to roughly 459 megawatts. NorthMark says 97 percent of the electricity used during normal operations will be generated on site. That scale belongs in the same field of vision as the monitor. A precise instrument attached to a stack can tell us something true while the larger addition to the airshed disappears behind the fact of measurement.

The third arrangement is harder to photograph because it consists of legal relations. NorthMark’s legal registrations point to New York and Texas, while its company website lists locations in London, Dallas, Houston, Stamford, and Spartanburg.

When the fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreement came before Spartanburg County Council on April 21, 2025, the official minutes identified four company parties: Valara Holdings LLC, a Delaware limited liability company; DC2 Services LLC (Series 2), a Delaware series LLC; BCDC LLC (Series 1), a Marshall Islands series LLC; and HPC Holdco LLC, another Marshall Islands company. After listing them, the minutes record four words: “No one appeared.” The public hearing closed.

Delaware companies and Marshall Islands registries are legal instruments used throughout international finance. Their presence supplies no proof of wrongdoing, obviously. However, it establishes that the company standing behind the tax agreement extends well beyond the local identity now presented to Spartanburg. Two parties were formed in another state. Two were formed in another country. The county record does not explain why two Marshall Islands entities belong in a forty-year Spartanburg tax agreement.

One of those entities points to something more specific. BCDC LLC (Series 1), named in the county minutes, is also the applicant identified in Canadian government trademark records for G-Research Technologies. The listed services include quantitative finance, software used to predict movements in financial markets, investment analysis, financial modeling, and related computing. The applicant is a Marshall Islands company with an address in Bermuda.

That record establishes a formal connection between a party to Spartanburg County’s tax agreement and the intellectual property of G-Research, a London quantitative research and technology firm. It does not establish that G-Research owns Valara Holdings, nor does it identify the ultimate beneficial owner of the South Pine Street project. The connection is substantial enough to ask a question the company has answered only in general terms: whose internal computations will Spartanburg’s air, water, land, and tax structure support?

The trail continues, as I’ve been astonished to find in the rabbit holes I’ve been exploring. In a December 2025 transaction notice, Jones Day described NorthMark Strategies as “previously Dorilton Capital Management”. Dorilton is known publicly as the owner of the Williams Formula One team (as a fan of motorsports and F1... odd for someone who works in ecology, I know, but I’m a Pee Dee Man... this one made me perk up and tune in). Litigation concerning Williams and Dorilton has brought the financier Peter de Putron, founder of G-Research and a resident of Jersey, into the public record. In May, a New York appellate court found substantial evidence that de Putron had been “directly and intimately involved” in the management of the plaintiffs in that dispute, which included Dorilton. The ruling concerns his relevance to that litigation. It leaves the ownership of the Spartanburg project unresolved.

The honest public trail therefore ends here with a gap. It connects Valara to NorthMark; NorthMark to the former Dorilton; a Marshall Islands party in the tax agreement to G-Research trademarks; and the Dorilton and G-Research world to de Putron. It does not disclose Valara's ultimate beneficial ownership or assign the Spartanburg facility to any named individual. This gap can be acknowledged without necessarily being crossed. It can also be recognized as part of the public problem.

Then there is one smaller, almost incidental detail. In the website stylesheet code beneath southpinestreet.com, the website theme identifies itself as “One Degree North - South Pine Street” and credits One Degree North as its author. One Degree North is a digital advertising agency in Leeds, England, offering web development, content, search, and paid-social services. This establishes who built the website. It doesn’t establish who designed the advertisements, bought the media, selected the audience, or determined how often they would appear. The ads name NMC² as their payer, and the site’s terms lead to NorthMark Strategies in New York. The remaining advertising arrangements are outside the public frame.

Put these records together, and the geography becomes... strange. The land is in Spartanburg. The water comes from the Piedmont watershed. Emissions will enter this airshed, affecting Converse Heights and our Duncan Park neighborhood as well as EP Todd Elementary and Pine Street Elementary. The tax agreement belongs to this county, and the construction noise reaches houses on roads many of us know. The legal interests run through Delaware and the Marshall Islands. The parent company points to New York, Dallas, and London. The intellectual-property trail reaches a quantitative trading firm in London. The financier most publicly associated with that corporate world lives in Jersey. The digital architecture through which the project calls itself our neighbor was built many time zones away.

Again, distance by itself is no moral failure. Spartanburg has been shaped by international industry for generations. BMW, Michelin, and Bosch are part of the life of this region, and every phone on which these advertisements appear is already an artifact of mines, factories, designers, programmers, ships, warehouses, and markets scattered across the planet. Despite what assumptions may be held by those outside of our region, we are a very international and diverse community with vibrant communities from Southeast Asia, Ukraine, Western Europe, Africa, and Latin America. The question concerns the direction in which distance works. The company can reach a resident’s phone more easily than the resident can reach the room where the capital decisions are made. Nearness has been engineered for persuasion while distance remains available for accountability.

This is why astroturf is the wrong word, I think. The social media campaign names its immediate sponsor and has a public spokesperson. It has held calls on which residents and reporters have asked unscripted questions. The more interesting form is managed visibility: disclosure arranged as a smooth surface, full of answers, while the relations necessary to interpret those answers remain difficult to see. Sponsorship is visible. Structure requires excavation.

What the Ground Holds

The ordnance advertisement brings the argument back to the ground level.

NorthMark says it recovered and removed thousands of pounds of material associated with unexploded World War II munitions. The work matters, and whatever combination of public requirements, private responsibility, and professional expertise produced the cleanup, material associated with World War II munitions in the ground has been found and removed during redevelopment.

Then the advertisement says something larger: Every generation leaves its mark.

The old munitions make that sentence visible in a literal way. Decisions and their results made during a war remained in the Earth long after the people who made them passed. Their purpose ended, but their material consequences continued. They waited beneath later industries, later ownership, later roads, and later names until another generation disturbed the ground.

The campaign offers their removal as evidence of what comes next. The deeper question in its own sentence points forward. What mark will this generation leave at South Pine Street? There will be buildings, slabs, cooling equipment, gas infrastructure, a landfill under continuing monitoring, a tax agreement lasting decades, and a changed relationship between this place and its air and water. There will also be the less visible result of computation carried out here for purposes elsewhere. We rarely recognize a legacy while we are constructing it. The people responsible usually call it progress, necessity, investment, defense, innovation, or simply work.

That uncertainty is one reason ecological attention begins before the verdict. We look closely enough to ask what is being placed into relation, what will persist, and who will inherit the arrangement after its present purpose has changed.

Ground Level

Near the end of Luke’s well-known story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus changes the lawyer’s question. The lawyer had asked, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus asks which person had become a neighbor to the man left beside the road. The Greek is γεγονέναι, a form of ginomai: to come to be, to become. Neighborliness emerges as an event, something enacted between vulnerable bodies on the ground.

That is a much heavier word than a social media campaign can convey. A corporation may announce its intention to become a neighbor. The becoming will happen through what it does when the dust reaches a porch, when turbine exhaust enters the air shared with Converse Heights, when a permit allows more than residents expected, when monitoring finds something unwelcome, when a family cannot sleep, when a promise becomes expensive to keep, and when the public asks a question the prepared materials cannot answer.

NorthMark also reported multiple alleged threats against its employees this summer, and law enforcement opened an investigation. Threats are, obviously, wrong. They endanger people whose lives cannot be reduced to the corporation that employs them, and they damage the public work residents have undertaken with persistence and courage. They turn an ecological and civic grievance into a security problem, moving the discussion farther from the ground on which it began. The safety of workers and the accountability of a powerful company belong within the same field of care.

People like us living near South Pine Street have already described the project from a lived zero point. They have spoken about dust gathering where it did not gather before, dump trucks arriving through the night, changes in their breathing and voices, and the loss of trees that once held some of the sound of the heavily used railroad and road. These accounts do not replace emissions models, permits, engineering studies, or economic figures. They disclose dimensions of the place that those abstractions cannot contain. A body awakened in the night knows something about infrastructure.

The black walnut in our backyard has been letting its fruit down for weeks now. Some mornings I go outside with coffee and look up into the canopy; other mornings I notice the tree by what has fallen in the grass or by the squirrels working above me. From a drone, it would appear as a patch of green in a residential grid, perhaps a particularly beautiful one in the late-August light. The image would be true, but it would also be thin.

The tree, as I know it, includes the slope beneath it, the rain moving toward the creek, the fruit underfoot, the shade crossing the yard, and the years of our children growing in relation to it. Its truth gathers at ground level because that is where the relations become perceptible. This is what Stein understood about the zero point, what Matthew understood about the high mountain, and what Luke understood about the road to Jericho. Where we stand alters what the world can ask of us.

The South Pine Street campaign offers Spartanburg a beautiful view from above. It shows the skyline, names remediation, promises monitoring, and speaks the language of neighborliness. We should look at what it shows. We should also notice the position from which we are being asked to see, then come back down through the words and structures to the houses, porches, creeks, corporate records, permit limits, and bodies that remain below the frame.

The high place can show us all the kingdoms at once. South Pine Street can only be known from somewhere. And whatever is built there will eventually have to live on the ground.

Sources and Records

Web sources were last accessed August 22, 2026 (also, my birthday).

NorthMark and South Pine Street materials

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. “Built Right. Built to Last.” X, August 14, 2026.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. “Continuous Emissions Monitoring for the Best Air Quality in South Carolina.” X, August 11, 2026.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. “9,000+ Pounds of WWII-Era Unexploded Ordnance Safely Cleared.” X, August 7, 2026.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. South Pine Street Technology Center.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. Community Commitments and Project Facts.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. Remediation: Restoring the South Pine Street Site.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. Frequently Asked Questions.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. Terms of Service.

• NorthMark Compute & Cloud. “Air Permit Hearing Teleconference.” June 24, 2026; transcript published June 25, 2026.

• NorthMark Strategies. “NorthMark Strategies Announces Historic $2.8 Billion Investment in Spartanburg, S.C. High-Performance Computing Facility.” April 22, 2025.

• NorthMark Strategies. Company website and listed locations.

• South Pine Street website. WordPress theme stylesheet, identifying “One Degree North — South Pine Street” and crediting One Degree North as author.

• One Degree North. Agency website and Leeds contact information.

Government records and environmental permits

• Spartanburg County Council. Minutes of the April 21, 2025, County Council Meeting. See the public hearing for the Valara Holdings fee-in-lieu-of-tax agreement, including the four company parties and the notation “No one appeared.”

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center.

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. Draft Synthetic Minor Construction Permit CP-50000422.

• South Carolina Department of Environmental Services. Draft Statement of Basis for CP-50000422.

• South Carolina Department of Commerce. “NorthMark Strategies Selects Spartanburg County to Establish First South Carolina Operation.” April 2025.

Corporate, trademark, and legal records

• Canadian Intellectual Property Office. G-Research Technologies, Canadian trademark application no. 2202394, identifying BCDC LLC (Series 1) as applicant.

• Jones Day. “NorthMark Strategies Sells Traditions Health.” December 2025. Jones Day identifies NorthMark Strategies as “previously Dorilton Capital Management.”

• Dorilton Capital Management LLC v. Stilus LLC, 2026 NY Slip Op 02875, Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York, First Department, May 7, 2026.

• G-Research. Official company website.

• Bogle, Andrew. “Who Really Controls the Williams F1 Team? A Bitter Legal Battle Has Put This Question Centre Stage.” The Guardian, May 28, 2026.

• Government of Jersey. “Jersey’s Relationship with the UK and EU.”

Reporting and local context

• Erbach, Alexa. “Spartanburg Co. Residents Say They Were Misled About Data Center Project.” FOX Carolina, April 30, 2026; updated May 4, 2026.

• Erbach, Alexa. “Spartanburg Residents Say Data Center Construction Is Already Disrupting Their Lives.” FOX Carolina, July 23, 2026.

• WSPA 7News. “Alleged Threats Against NorthMark Employees Lead to Investigation in Spartanburg.” Republished by AOL, 2026.

• Mahoney, Adam. “A Rural S.C. County Quietly Approved a $2B Data Center During the Winter Storm.” Capital B News, February 4, 2026.

• FOX Carolina. “Company Withdraws AI Data Center from Spartanburg County Consideration.” February 27, 2026.

• Parker, Kathleen. “A Data Center Was Shrouded in Secrecy. The Neighbors Are Furious.” The Washington Post, July 3, 2026.

• Harrelson, Sam. “What Was Given.” Carolina Ecology, 2026.

Scriptural, philosophical, and cinematic sources

• The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Matthew 4:8–10 and Luke 10:25–37. National Council of Churches, 2021.

• Holmes, Michael W., ed. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010. See Matthew 4:8, δείκνυσιν, and Luke 10:36, γεγονέναι.

• Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989. See especially the discussion of the lived body as the “zero point of orientation,” p. 43.

• Scorsese, Martin, director. The Last Temptation of Christ. Universal Pictures, 1988.

The black walnut started dropping hulls in the last week of July, a good three weeks ahead of any note I’ve kept on it over the last few years. Green husks in the fescue, some of them still hard and undersized, a few with the shell inside barely formed. You don't need instruments to know that's what's happening. You need to be standing under it in August with the hose running and your feet in dry grass. I’m assuming the tree is under drought stress despite our recent rains and makes an informed decision about what it can carry through to October, letting the rest go. In its own way, the black walnut is doing the arithmetic a body does without being asked to, just as we humans do.

I’ve been thinking about that arithmetic since Monday night, when Spartanburg County Council decided to wait at least one more month (GoUpstate) before taking up the third reading of an ordinance that would put a one-year hold on new data center development in the county. Six days earlier, the public safety committee had spent close to five hours on it, hearing from people who study air pollution, water use, noise, and what these facilities do to electric utilities. Five hours is a long time to listen. At the end of it, Councilman Grant DeShields said the county needed one more fact-finding effort before deciding. Paul Abbott agreed that having more beats having less. Monier Abusaft, who chairs the committee, agreed as well. No date has been set for that additional meeting.

The moratorium, if it eventually passes, still won’t touch the project the room was actually there about. The data center by NorthMark Cloud and Compute, also called Valara, is already under development on South Pine Street, and all three committee members have said they’re not inclined to fold it into the ban. DeShields thinks doing so would leave the county exposed to an expensive lawsuit. So the ordinance would pause the data centers that don’t exist yet while the one with a 450-megawatt power plant attached to the Northmark data center moves forward. The South Carolina Department of Environmental Services hasn’t yet ruled on that plant. The Southern Environmental Law Center has asked the state’s Public Service Commission to review the project under the Utility Facility Siting and Environmental Protection Act, and the commissioners are considering the request.

Then the room spoke, as rooms are allowed to speak at such meetings. There were comparisons of the turbines to jet engines running beside neighborhoods. Mary Helen Wade said that even if DES finds the projected emissions inside state air quality standards, the agency’s ongoing oversight of the facility may not amount to much, and she asked the council not to place its faith there.

Councilman Abusaft said he understands the concerns people have raised, including about emissions from the plant, and that he hasn’t seen compelling evidence that the air will make people living near the site sick. He said he’s open to receiving more. “If there are people out there with this knowledge, please come and inform our decision-making,” he said. At one point in the meeting, Abusaft had a law enforcement officer remove a woman from the chamber for speaking without permission.

The next day, in Washington, the National Republican Senatorial Committee circulated a memo titled “Ohio Data Center Risk” (PDF), which Axios published Wednesday morning. Its argument is that Jon Husted’s Senate race is being lost to a perception problem. Sherrod Brown has made data centers his de facto opponent, the memo says, has put three television ads and millions of dollars behind that, and it’s working better than conventional attacks because it brings new information about something people are just beginning to have feelings about. Axios reports that executives and Republicans alike are looking at internal numbers where data centers poll about as well as spent nuclear waste. The memo’s central instruction is that neither campaigns nor party committees can repair what it calls the toxic brand of an entire segment of the economy. Only the companies can. They have to fix how Ohioans see them: “who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one.” Reminds me of Hamilton’s imperative “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” that my 10-year-old son sings constantly. If that isn’t fixed quickly, the memo warns, the campaign against data centers spreads well past Ohio.

I’ve read the NRSC memo four times now, and what holds me isn’t the politics, as I try to stay as independent and objectively distant as possible from party machinery. But it’s the verb. See. The problem, as the memo understands it, is located in the seeing.

Ancient Greek has a great term for this. δόξα (doxa) comes off δοκέω (dokeō), “to seem, to appear, to be thought.” In ancient usage, δόξα is opinion, reputation, the shape a thing takes in the public mind, which is what a poll measures and what six thousand points of television and social media ads are purchased to move.

But when the Septuagint translators of the Hebrew Bible needed a word for כָּבוֹד (kavod), the glory that fills the tabernacle, they reached for δόξα too, and kavod is built on a root meaning weight. Heaviness. What actually presses down. So the same four letters carry both the seeming of a thing and the weight of it, and the history of the word is the story of those two coming apart. The memo here is a document written entirely inside the first meaning. It says nothing about the second. Whether a 450-megawatt turbine hall beside a cluster of Spartanburg neighborhoods is a heavy thing to place there is a question the memo doesn’t raise, because within its frame the heaviness isn’t the asset in play. The seeming is.

And here’s where I have to say the quiet part about my own tradition of looking. Edith Stein’s argument in her 1916 dissertation is that empathy is a species of knowledge, an act with its own structure and its own kind of givenness, through which another’s lived experience comes to me as something I grasp rather than something I invent. She’s careful about the difference between the Leib, the body I live from, and the Körper, the body as an object among other objects in the world. Every act of perception happens from a zero point of orientation, a here that’s mine and no one else’s, and everything I see is given to me as seen from that here.

This is why the phrase fix how they see them should stop us in our tracks. The people who live near South Pine Street, as we do, occupy a here. What’s given to them from that here is noise carried on humid August air at two in the morning, warm exhaust, headlights of trucks, a water table, a power bill. That’s not about brand impression. It’s the report of a Leib about the place it lives in, and the report has standing.

The Gospel of John’s ninth chapter is a great example of what happens when an institution treats such a report as a perception problem. The man born blind is questioned, then questioned again, then his parents are questioned, then he’s brought back for a third round, because the people running the inquiry have a prior commitment about what could and couldn’t be true. He gives them almost nothing they can use. ἓν οἶδα, ὅτι τυφλὸς ὢν ἄρτι βλέπω. One thing I know: I was blind, now I see. οἶδα (oida) is a perfect tense built on the root of ἰδεῖν, “to see,” so that to know, in Greek, is to be in the settled condition of having seen. His knowledge has no credential attached, and he can’t be considered an expert witness by a council. It’s the sheer weight of a body’s experience laid on a table where everyone would prefer a manageable δόξα. And they throw him out of the room for it, as well.

None of which makes the memo stupid, and I don’t want to be cynical. Read its policy list without the framing, and much of it would find friends in that Spartanburg chamber Monday night, including myself: data centers built only where a community approves them by local vote, facilities paying their own way on generation and infrastructure, no cost shifted onto existing ratepayers. Those are the demands the people holding signs at these meetings are making. Nor is the Brown Senate campaign somehow standing outside the market in some sense; millions of dollars of television is a δόξα operation, whoever’s buying it, and it should be described as one. Both parties have read the same polling, and both are moving fast. The question worth putting to all of them is what happens on the day the polling and the bodies agree, and the permit still gets issued.

Which brings me back to Councilman Abusaft’s invitation, which I take to be sincere and which I think ought to be answered rather than resented. He asked for people with knowledge to come inform the decision. That’s the right request. But notice how narrow the channel is: a fact-finding meeting with no date on it, three minutes at a microphone, a woman escorted out for speaking at the wrong moment. Procedure isn’t the enemy here. A council can’t function as a shouting match, and the chair has a room to run.

However, asymmetry is what we should always learn to watch and perceive. On one side, the seeming can be worked at a continental scale, by professionals, with a budget, for as long as it takes. On the other, the weight has to be carried into a chamber by an individual person, on a Monday, after work, and delivered inside a three-minute window in the order the agenda allows. If those two are competing on the same field, we should be clear that the field is tilted. Our yards slope toward Fairforest Creek and Lawson's Fork watersheds because of gravity. This one slopes because it was built to.

So: my recommendation is to go. The additional committee meeting hasn’t been scheduled yet, which means it can still be attended once it is. Third reading comes back to council in September. The DES decision on the plant is still open, and the SELC petition sits with the Public Service Commission. If you live near that South Pine site and you know what the air and the water and the nights are like there, you hold the thing the record can’t manufacture.

The byline on the account of Monday’s meeting in the local paper belongs to Baker Maultsby. In 1999, I was beginning my Senior year at Wofford College with Bingo=Sin in more or less permanent rotation, the record he’d put out the year before with his friend Peter Cooper, with songs (Four Wal-Marts about Spartanburg specifically) about what happens to an Upstate town like ours when the decisions about what gets built in it are made somewhere else and arrive already finished. “Pee Dee Man” was my track, for reasons that won’t require much explanation. I was a Pee Dee man in a Spartanburg dorm room a long way up the road from my hometown (which Maultsby calls “Pride of the Palmetto State”) Mullins, hearing my end of the state come out of speakers in this one.

Nearly thirty years on, the man who made that record is taking notes in a county council chamber on what is recognizably the same question, and the question has followed me home in both directions. Project Liberty was going to put a data center in Marion County until it was withdrawn after public protest. The Pee Dee flatwater I learned to pay attention to and Lawson’s Fork are on the same map now, subject to the same arithmetic about who gets the power and who pays for the water.

The roughly 460,000 gallons a day this facility would move through evaporative cooling and never give back to our watershed here haunts me. Water is the most genuine test case for the difference I’ve been approaching in my own PhD work, because water can’t be persuaded. It goes where the ground tells it, it evaporates at the rate the heat dictates, and the aquifer’s answer to a question is arithmetic. You can shift how a data center seems. You can’t shift what a watershed weighs.

I’ll be at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg again this Sunday, the 23rd, at 11 am, giving the second of two meditations in a short series called Home Ground. The first, last Sunday, made the case that the first home any of us has is a watershed. This one’s called “What We Ask of the Water,” and I expect a good deal of the above will be in it, though with more Stein and fewer NRSC memos. Their pastor Scott Neely has made room for this kind of thinking all summer, and the congregation asks good questions afterward. If you’re local and inclined, come.

The walnut will keep dropping its husks through all of it. Sometime in the next few weeks, the hulls will go from green to black in the grass, the squirrels will start their inventory, and the tree will have finished telling me, in the only language it has, what this summer actually weighed.

Sometime last week, our daughter taped a sign to her door, about the height of a four-foot-tall person. It’s a strip torn off the long edge of a sheet (she makes lots of these ostraca), with the tear feathered where the fibers gave. Seven letters running down the length of the strip instead of across it, so that anyone in the hallway has to tilt their head to take it in.

Bewhere.

I asked her about it, and she laughed the way she does when I’ve missed something obvious, and said she meant beware, like a sign. “Beware of what?” I asked. She said that was the point of a sign like that. Beware!

I’ve thought a good deal about the spelling in little free moments while preparing to give a Meditation series at the Spartanburg UU yesterday and this coming Sunday under the wider theme of “Home.” It’s a better instruction than she knows in some ways. Her admonition is also closer to the inside of the word than the correct spelling is.

If you haven’t gathered from my previous writings, I’m a language nerd (mostly after taking a course on the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman while a seminary student at Yale Divinity after taking 3 years of Greek in undergrad at Wofford College), so beware yourself, dear reader. But it’s worth the background, I think!

Beware is what we call a compression. In Middle English, it’s be war, from the Old English adjective wær: prudent, watchful, on guard. The same root gives us aware, wary, warn, ward, warden, and, by way of Frankish into Old French, guard. Etymologists trace the original root back to the mysterious (and incredibly cool concept) Proto-Indo-European *wer-, to watch, to perceive, to look out for. The Attic Greek (a language itself with something of an enigma of origins) ὁράω (to see) to that same root, along with οὖρος, a watcher set over something. This means a warning of “beware!” is a demand for perception rather than a demand for fear. Beware doesn’t tell you what to do, but tells you to look.

The Koine Greek of the New Testament preserves some of this in a fascinating way, theologically as well as just historically. Where our translations say beware, Matthew has προσέχετε (lexical form προσέχω): προσέχετε ἀπὸ τῶν ψευδοπροφητῶν, beware of false prophets. The verb is πρός plus ἔχω, to hold toward. Classical usage from sources outside the NT gives us more insight into the term's usage, as in Matthew’s: hold your mind toward. Nothing in the word says danger. It says direction, an act with an address, a mind aimed. Mark’s version of the same imperative is βλέπετε (βλέπω), look, followed by ἀγρυπνεῖτε, stay wakeful. Watchfulness, again, is the whole content of the warning. Big difference for those passages that we so easily read over in the Christian tradition(s).

And then Luke, in the twelfth chapter, sets two verbs side by side: ὁρᾶτε καὶ φυλάσσεσθε ἀπὸ πάσης πλεονεξίας. See, and guard yourselves, from every greed. That second verb, φυλάσσω, is the one the Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (which itself was used by authors of the New Testament and deutero-canonical books that didn’t make it into the official canon) uses in Genesis 2:15 for the work the human being is put in the garden to do: ἐργάζεσθαι αὐτὸν καὶ φυλάσσειν, in the Hebrew לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ, to till it and to keep it.

The verb for beware and the verb for keeping a garden are one verb! Warning and husbandry are the same posture held at different distances.

Every posture has a location. This is where my daughter’s spelling made me stop, laugh, and shake my head at the wisdom of our young people.

Edith Stein, working through the structure of empathy in 1916 in German, gives the body an essential aspect: the Nullpunkt der Orientierung, or the zero point of orientation. My living body is the here from which every there gets measured. Distance, direction, near and far, all of it is reckoned from a point I can’t step out of, and empathy is the act in which I take up someone else’s here without vacating my own. Rather than being a survey from above, perception happens from a spot on the ground.

So a warning with no location isn’t a warning. It’s noise. To be warned is to be told that the place you’re standing in has become consequential.

There’s a warning in my backyard that nobody wrote about in ancient Greek or Hebrew or Old English (that I’ve come across, at least). The black walnut produces juglone, a compound concentrated in the roots and the green hulls, and the tomatoes I’ve tried to grow within its reach yellow from the bottom up and quit by July. Blueberries won’t hold. Apples decline (the crabapple tree I planted across the yard early this year is doing quite well, though!). There’s an edge to this warning. It’s true inside the root zone and mostly false outside of it, and on a mature tree those roots run well past the drip line, fifty to eighty feet out from the trunk, an irregular circle that no one has marked and many gardeners here in Spartanburg and the Piedmont learn by loss. That circle is the entire content of the warning. Take the chemistry out of the radius, and there’s nothing left to say. The walnut’s beware is a where.

That's also what I keep failing to explain in my writings about things like data centers here.

Most of what I’ve written this year has come back to a single failure of location. A 457-megawatt data center gets permitted on South Pine Street as two minor land developments instead of one major one, and the defense offered is that industrial parks involve more than one parcel. The parcel lines are real on paper. However, water isn’t distributed by parcel lines. 460,000 gallons a day of evaporative loss (estimated) doesn’t consult the plat. Heat doesn’t stop at a property boundary, and neither does the sound of the cooling. When the where gets dissolved into acreage, the warnings stop working, because a warning attached to no particular ground can be satisfied by moving a line on a map. That’s what a variance is, most of the time: a place talked out of being a place.

Ecology has this argument built into its own name. Οἶκος, the household, the dwelling. Rather than a systematic approach in the abstract, this implies the particular arrangement of a particular house: its doors and its thresholds, who comes in, and by what route. A seven-year-old taping a strip of paper to her door is doing ecological work in that sense. She’s declaring an edge just like the black walnut. The Carolina Wren on the fence line does it every morning from the same post. The black walnut does it chemically, through the soil, and has been doing it well before we moved to our home. An edge announced is an invitation to arrive correctly, and the sign on the door is only half a fortification. The other half is an address, so that anyone coming down the hall knows there’s someone in here to be met.

Beware. Be where.

I’ve stopped correcting the spelling in my own head when I see her sign on her door. The hulls from the black walnut started falling a few weeks ago (a little early… I believe it’s drought stress) and rolling under my shoes in the dark, and the ground under that tree already smells like turpentine and citrus when I take my coffee out to say good morning to my good friend. None of that is available anywhere except there, at the end of the hall and out the back door, one hundred feet from where she’s sleeping. Attention has an address. So does grace, as far as I can tell. It shows up where you are, which is the only place it’s ever had to work with.

This morning, I had the great honor of giving a meditation at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Spartanburg on home, watersheds, and attention, along with some of my work with Edith Stein and religious contexts around these ideas. I wanted to share that here with you all. I started the video here at the beginning of my meditation, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing since the community and music is so moving!

The UU congregation here in Spartanburg is such an amazing community of people and thoughts and ideas, and I was really blown away by their hospitality, but also by some of their reflections and conversations that have resulted after service. A huge thanks to their ministers, Scott and Anne, who graciously welcomed me and worked with me over the last couple of weeks, as well as their whole staff, tech team, and especially their musician! I’ll be giving another meditation there next Sunday morning as well, which I’m very excited about.

Here’s the Meditation text:

The First Home Is a Watershed

Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg · August 16, 2026 Home Ground: Watershed, Attention, and the Life We Hold in Common, part one of two

Thank you for the welcome, and thank you to Scott, Anne, Erin, and Kimberly for the invitation and for the care that went into this morning.

I want to start with a roof.

Rain falls on a roof in Spartanburg. It runs off the eave and hits the ground, and the ground is not level, because there isn’t any “level” ground here. The water crosses a yard where a black walnut has already been dropping fruit since July, works its way down through red clay and pine straw and whatever the children left out overnight, and eventually finds Fairforest Creek. Fairforest Creek gives it to the Pacolet. The Pacolet gives it to the Broad. The Broad carries it down through the middle of this state until it isn’t the Broad anymore after it combines with the Saluda around Columbia and becomes the Congaree, then becomes a different name when the water combines with the Wateree to form the Santee, and then the water becomes part of the Atlantic Ocean at the Santee Delta about 15 miles of a town we know as Georgetown (one of the oldest in South Carolina). I spent many years canoeing and kayaking in that same area where the water from our roof now combines with the Atlantic.

However, this movement isn’t due to any decision or intent. The water doesn’t deliberate. Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes. Before a home is a house, or a deed, or a hometown, or a country in its two hundred and fiftieth year, it is a slope down which the rain runs.

I didn’t grow up knowing that.

I grew up in Mullins, down in Marion County, in the flatwater country of the Pee Dee, where the land does not “slope” as it does here in Spartanburg. Water down there doesn’t run so much as stand and consider. It gathers in the ditch and stays. It backs up into the yard after a storm and takes its time about leaving. You can live in that area a long while and never once think about elevation (I never did, and now I’m obsessed with it), because the land doesn’t make you. It hides its intentions under all that patience.

Then I came to the Piedmont as a 17-year-old freshman at Wofford, and realized that this ground is not shy. It tilts. Every driveway is a small argument with gravity. You put a plastic pool out on a Spartanburg lawn in June, and within about four minutes you discover that your yard has a strong opinion about which way the world runs, as I relearn every summer. My children found that out before I did. They ran to the low end. Children always find the low end of the yard, because that’s where the water already is.

So the first thing I’d offer you this morning is a small and unglamorous claim. You live somewhere. That somewhere has a shape. And the shape has been doing something to you the whole time, whether or not you’ve been paying it any attention.

Most mornings before the children wake and the emails pile up, I take my coffee outside and sit under that black walnut before the day organizes itself into errands and to-do lists and the ordinary noise of a house with children in it. I’d like to tell you this is a practice. Mostly it’s just where the chair is. However, that has become a happy accident.

No-thing happens out there most mornings. That’s the point, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that was the point. A squirrel argues overhead about property it does not own. A cardinal couple cuts the yard on a diagonal. Ants keep their bright roads through the clay and often explore my weird human feet, usually in sandals. A walnut might fall with that small wooden knock, and then another one, and the sound is almost comic, like something knocking at a door that’s already open.

Given one such morning, this is nothing at all. Given six hundred of them, the tree becomes a tutor, theologian, philosopher, and friend.

What it’s been teaching me, slowly, is that attention is a discipline and not a mood. You can’t summon it by wanting it, any more than you can summon sleep by wanting it. I often think of the black walnut as Yoda teaching me the ways of the Force for this reason. You can only put yourself in its way, repeatedly, and wait. And the order of operations turns out to matter enormously. I go out there to learn what the world is saying before I ask it to mean something for me. When I get that backward, when I arrive already knowing what the morning is going to signify, the morning obliges me. It tells me exactly what I brought. That’s most of what goes wrong, in my experience, in ecology and in religion both.

Drew Lanham, who we heard from when the chalice was lit, says that wildness means living in the unknown, and that time has been teaching him to take the next question as an invitation to another quest. I’d put it this way. The black walnut has never once answered a question I asked it. It has, on a fair number of mornings, changed the question.

There’s a passage in Ecclesiastes from the Hebrew Bible in my tradition that I think is the most straightforward notion of hydrology in scripture. A generation goes, and a generation comes, Qoheleth (the writer) says, and the Earth stands forever. And then this, in the seventh verse: all the streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full; to the place where the streams go, there they return to go again.

The Hebrew word behind “streams” is נַחַל, naḥal, and it doesn’t mean a river with a steady year-round flow. It means an occasional water flow, a wadi, a bed that runs when the rains come and lies dry when they don’t. The later Greek translators picked that up exactly and rendered it as χείμαρρος, cheimarros, from χεῖμα, winter or storm weather, joined to the verb ῥέω, to flow. A winter-flow. A creek that keeps time with the sky.

That’s Lawson’s Fork or Fairforest Creek. Anyone who has walked it in a wet March and then again in a dry September knows it’s the same word.

And the word Qoheleth uses over and over for the whole business, the one my Bibles usually give as “vanity,” is הֶבֶל, hevel, which means vapor. Breath on a cold morning. Steam coming off a creek before seven a.m. It’s the most concrete word in the book, and we have spent centuries abstracting it into a complaint about the vain nature of the world. Qoheleth isn’t sighing at you. They’re telling you what things are made of. The water goes down to the sea, and the sea does not fill, and the water comes back to the place it started, and the mechanism by which it comes back is vapor. Hevel. The whole circuit runs on the thing we translate as meaninglessness.

I don’t think that’s despair. I think that’s a water cycle, observed accurately by somebody who was sitting still long enough to see it.

Here’s why all of that matters for the word “home.”

In the second creation account from those same Hebrew Scriptures, the human being is drawn up out of the ground. The Hebrew keeps the joke right at the surface with אָדָם, adam, out of אֲדָמָה, adamah. Earthling out of earth (which makes me think of David Bowie). Groundling out of ground. And then that creature is set in a garden (where else?) with two verbs attached to it, עָבַד and שָׁמַר, avad and shamar, to serve it and to keep it.

The pun doesn’t survive the trip into Greek. The human becomes ἄνθρωπος, a perfectly good general word for a person, and the ground flattens out into γῆ, Earth in the large sense, the whole planetary noun. And something goes missing in exactly that translation that influences our English translations and views on such things. Ἄνθρωπος could be from anywhere. Adam is from here, from this dirt, from soil you could name and hold.

To be from a place, in that older and stranger sense, isn’t a sentiment about a place, but a report about your material. You’re what this ground has been up to lately.

Ask me where I live, and I’ll give you a street over in Duncan Park. Ask the water, and it gives a different address entirely. It says: you are downstream of your neighbor to the north, and upstream of your neighbor to the south, and the rain that crossed your roof this morning is already on its way to somebody else’s well or on to the Atlantic.

Edith Stein finished a dissertation on empathy in 1916, years before she was killed by Nazi’s at Auschwitz / Berkenau on August 9, 1942. The German word at the center of it is Einfühlung, feeling-into. Her work starts somewhere more physical than you’d expect.

My own body, she says, is always the Nullpunkt der Orientierung, the zero point of orientation. The here around which every there arranges itself. I can’t step outside it. No vantage is available to me that isn’t from here. And she draws a distinction the English blurs: my body as Leib, the body I live from the inside, the one that aches and sweats and gets cold, and my body as Körper, a physical object among physical objects, the thing a doctor examines and a photograph shows.

The trouble with the zero point is that left alone it stops looking like a point of view at all. It just looks like the world. My arrangement of things becomes, silently, the arrangement of things.

What breaks that, for Stein, is the encounter with another. Another Leib, with its own zero point, its own here, from which I am a there. And what that encounter does is not to make me agree with anyone. It constitutes a common world. It reveals that a world was there all along that neither of us invented, and neither of us owns.

I’ve come to think a watershed does something very close to this, and does it to a person who might never sit still for the philosophical version.

Because a watershed will not let your yard be the zero point. The water leaves. It crosses the line where your deed or rent agreement stops. It arrives somewhere you have never been, and something drinks it, perhaps. And it came to you the same way, off a patch of ground you did not choose, from people you’ll never meet, having already been used. You are inside a common world whether or not you consented to one, and the county’s map, which is sometimes a real and useful document, is silent on this entirely. A map shows ownership as all maps do and were created to do. However, A slope shows relation. They’re describing the same acre, and they don’t agree.

We’re in the country’s two hundred and fiftieth year, and this congregation has been thinking about home all summer, so let me say only this much about the civic question and save the rest for next Sunday.

A deed is a claim about the past. It says how this came to you. A watershed is a claim about the present tense, continuously. It says who you’re implicated with as of right now, this morning, during this time of afternoon rain showers, and it doesn’t care at all what our impressive courthouse downtown has on file. Both are true now. But only one of them will be true in three hundred years.

Kimberly rippled the bowl earlier, and we sang about going down to the river to pray, and I’d point out that the river in that song isn’t a backdrop or scenery. You go down to it. It’s below you. It’s not really a metaphor the tradition invented. It’s just where water is.

I said there were two verbs in the garden. Serve it, and keep it. עָבַד and שָׁמַר. And shamar is my favorite for me because it shows up somewhere else you might recognize.

It’s in a blessing. The old priestly one, from Numbers:

“The Lord bless you and keep you. Same verb, shamar. The Greek even keeps the pairing, φυλάσσειν in the garden and φυλάξαι in the blessing, the same guarding in both places.

So, in my tradition, the word we use for what God does for us is the same word used for what we’re supposed to do for the ground. And I don’t believe that’s a coincidence of vocabulary. Instead, it’s a direct instruction about the direction of care, and about how badly we’ve been reading it all these years.

We have generally taken it to run one way. God keeps us, and we keep the garden, and we’re the hinge in the middle, the responsible party, the ones with the hands. That reading has produced a great deal of exhausted, guilty, well-intentioned environmentalism as well as corrupt capitalism, and I’ve practiced most of it myself.

But sit under one tree for a few years, and the arrangement starts to look different. That black walnut was here before we moved into our house. It has been shading my children through summers I was too busy to notice. It’s been holding a corner of this slope together, keeping the clay where it is, giving that patch of ground a reason not to leave for the creek. It drops what it drops. Something eats it. The ants keep their roads. And none of that has ever once required my attention, my approval, or my competence.

The ground has been keeping us all along. Not waiting to be kept. Keeping.

What changes when you see that isn’t the obligation. The obligation stands, and next Sunday we’ll talk about its harder, more specific, more expensive shape. What changes is where you’re standing when you take it up. You’re not arriving as the one who will now begin to care for a place that had been waiting for you. You’re waking up inside a keeping that has been going on the whole time, that made you the kind of creature capable of noticing it, and that will continue past you and past your deed and past this county and past this republic, which is younger than a good many trees.

Every house in this county sits on a slope, and the slope decides where the water goes.

You are downstream of somebody. You are upstream of somebody. That is your first address; it was your address before you knew, and it will be your address after.

May we learn it well enough to live like it’s true.

Benediction

Go now into the ordinary week.

Take the coffee outside if you can. Let the yard tell you which way it runs.

Remember that the rain that crosses your roof is on its way to somebody’s well, and that you are, right now, inside a keeping older than your name for it.

The Lord bless you and keep you, as this ground has been keeping you all along.

Go in peace.

The Walnut Keeps Time in Spartanburg

At the edge of the yard in Spartanburg, where the black walnut leans into its own weather, morning arrives without asking to be believed.

The children have left their small offerings behind: a sun-faded ball in the clover, a plastic shovel near the fence, one damp sock folded by rain into the grass.

The tree receives them all with the old patience of wood, lifting nothing, refusing nothing, making a chapel from shade and green husk.

I sit beneath it with coffee gone cool and a book open in my lap, trying again to learn what the world says before I ask it to mean something.

The walnut does not hurry. It darkens its fruit slowly, lets squirrels argue overhead, lets ants keep their bright roads through the red clay.

Somewhere beyond the yard, traffic gathers itself toward school and work, toward errands, bells, the ordinary liturgies of another Carolina morning.

But here, under this rough crown, time is not a line so much as a widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain, the way a life grows inward before anyone sees what it has become.

I think of the cross, not polished and lifted high, but once a tree, once sap, once leaf, once a body drinking light from the same sun that warms my hands.

Maybe grace is like that, not arriving from elsewhere, but greening through what has already been given: this yard, this breath, these children growing louder, this marriage of errands and mercy, this Piedmont soil holding more memory than I know how to carry.

A walnut falls. Then another.

The sound is small, almost comic, a wooden knock against the day’s closed door.

Still, I hear it as invitation.

Pay attention, it says. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, stain, shadow, and prayer.

The church keeps a martyr’s feast on the day of her death... the dies natalis, or the birthday into the life that doesn’t end. So August 9 belongs to Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), who was killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau on this day in 1942. I’ve spent some time out under the black walnut this morning with my water bottle and a book, and the book today was hers: On the Problem of Empathy, the dissertation she defended at Freiburg in the summer of 1916, when she was twenty-four years old and Edmund Husserl’s assistant and had not yet read Teresa of Ávila or heard of Carmel. It’s become one of the load-bearing texts of my own work (The Ecology of the Cross), and this morning I found myself marking passages I’ve marked before, the way you wear a path into a yard by walking the same line to the same tree.

What she’s after in that early book sounds technical, but it's anything but. How is my body constituted within consciousness? German gives her two words where English sorta conflates without an adjective: Körper, the physical body, one object among objects, and Leib, the living body, the one I don’t observe so much as inhabit.

A living body perceived only from outside, she writes, would always remain a peculiar physical thing and never “my living body.” My sensations are never in the I... they’re localized somewhere, in a hand, behind the eyes, near the I, but never inside it... and all of them gather into the unity of the Leib, which surrounds what she calls the zero point of orientation. Everything spatial arranges itself around that zero point. The yard I’m looking at this morning, the fence line, the other walnuts down the slope, the walnut’s first fork about nine feet up near our children’s tire swing: all of it is given to me from here, from a point that can’t itself be located on any map of my body, because it’s where the maps are drawn from.

And this is where the walnut enters, as it enters everything I write. The tree stands about 50 yards from our back door, and by Stein’s own careful account, I can only ever perceive it outwardly. Its bark, its compound leaves going ragged in the August heat, the green hulls hardening toward fall: all Körper, on a strict reading. But the whole burden of her dissertation is that outward perception isn’t the end of the story.

Empathy, Einfühlung, is the act in which foreign experience is given to me... in which another zero point of orientation announces itself inside my field, a center I can orient toward but never occupy. She works this out for other human beings, and cautiously for animals. My whole project has been to ask how far the act stretches, and under what discipline: whether a chastened, trained Einfühlung can give me the walnut as a center of its own life, drawing water, timing its year, holding its ground chemically against competitors, and never once as an object that exists for my perception of it. I keep insisting that perception precedes ethics, that we can’t be argued into caring for what we’ve never actually perceived as living. Stein is the philosopher who shows what that perception is made of, seam by seam. She gives the phenomenology of the thing that Thomas Berry and Lanham give the practice of with their ecotheologies.

Her feast asks us to hold the whole life together, though, and the whole life runs from Freiburg to Auschwitz. She read Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography through a single night in 1921 and closed it, saying she had found the truth. She was baptized in 1922, joined the Cologne Carmel in 1933, and the same year, the race laws ended her teaching. In the convent, she wrote Finite and Eternal Being, a phenomenologist’s long ascent through Aquinas, in which she argues that every finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature, so that God’s unity appears in creation as broken into countless rays.

I don’t know a better one-sentence warrant for biodiversity in the whole theological tradition. The manuscript of Kreuzeswissenschaft, her study of John of the Cross, was unfinished on her desk when the SS came to the Echt convent on August 2, 1942, in reprisal for the Dutch bishops’ public protest of the deportations. She died a week later with her sister, Rosa. The church calls her a martyr, μάρτυς, which is simply the Greek word for witness (lexical form μάρτυς, μάρτυρος for my fellow nerds): one whose perception of the truth was so complete that her body was conscripted into the testimony.

In The Science of the Cross, she says that a science becomes a science of the cross when the mystery of the cross becomes its inner form, a living energy that shapes the soul by what the soul receives. I’ve borrowed that architecture without apology. An Ecology of the Cross is knowledge of the living world whose inner form is kenosis (κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty), knowledge shaped by what it receives rather than by what it seizes. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the one place Paul lets creation itself speak, it speaks in empathy’s grammar. Romans 8:22: πᾶσα ἡ κτίσις συστενάζει καὶ συνωδίνει, all creation groans together and labors together (the textual forms συστενάζει and συνωδίνει, from συστενάζω and συνωδίνω). The prefix σύν here does so much work for what I think Paul is implying directly. The groaning is shared, consensual in the old sense, and felt-with. Paul is claiming that the creation has an inner life that can be suffered alongside, and Stein, decades before her conversion, was building the philosophical framework that makes such a claim more than poetry.

The walnut doesn’t know it’s St. Edith’s Feast Day. It’s doing what it does every ninth of August in the Piedmont: finishing nuts it began in April, provisioning squirrels it will never meet, casting shade it can’t feel onto a human it can’t see. But I know, and the knowing changes the sitting. She said once that all who seek truth are seeking God, whether it’s clear to them or not, and elsewhere she left the line I return to more than any other: refuse any truth that lacks love, and any love that lacks truth. Under this tree, on her day, that reads as a method. Perceive until truth and love arrive together, and don’t stop before they do. It’s what empathy is for. It’s what she did, all the way to the end, and the end was this day, and the church is right to call it a birth.

—

Quotes from Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein Book 3). ICS Publications, 2016.

Rain falls on our roof here in Spartanburg, runs off the eaves, crosses our beloved yard where the black walnut is already darkening its fruit in early August, and makes its way to Lawson’s Fork, then the Pacolet, then the Broad, and at last to the Atlantic. Every house in Spartanburg County sits on a slope of some sort (ours especially, as I constantly realize when mowing with my late 40’s physique), and the slopes decide where the water goes. We spend a great deal of our lives thinking about home as a house, a hometown, a deed, a mortgage, a set of keys, a line on a map that says this is ours and that is theirs. But while home can mean those things, it’s more of a slope down which the rain runs in this part of what we call the United States. The water knew the shape of this ground long before the county drew a single boundary across it, and it will keep knowing that shape long after we take literally Prospero’s incantation about the sleep that comes after our little lives.

I’ve been learning this slowly since we moved back to Spartanburg a couple of years ago, and mostly by just sitting still. Most mornings, I take my regular but not regularly washed titanium coffee cup (I say it’s growing a patina) out under the walnut before the day organizes itself into my errands and emails and the ordinary noise of a house with young children in it. Nothing all that dramatic happens. A squirrel argues overhead. A cardinal couple cuts across the yard. Black ants keep their bright roads through the red clay and inspect my feet. A walnut falls, then another, with that small wooden knock against the day’s closed door. Given one such morning, this is nothing. Given enough mornings, the tree becomes a kind of tutor. It receives weather, injury, drought, birds, and time without hurry, and it teaches me that attention is a discipline rather than a mood, no more summoned by wanting it than sleep is. I go out to learn what the world is saying before I ask it to mean something for me. Getting the order backward is when things typically start to go wrong.

Some of this I’ll be saying aloud. The Unitarian Universalists here in Spartanburg have given me their pulpit for two Sundays in August, the 16th and the 23rd, under the heading Home Ground, and I wanted to share a little of those messages here as well. The first Sunday is a reflection on the yard and the creek that I look at from my office window. The second follows the water outward into the harder questions of what a place asks of us in common.

What the walnut has been teaching, in its patient and wordless way, is that I didn’t make this home so much as it has been making me. The Hebrew of the second creation account in Genesis keeps the joke close to the surface: the human, אָדָם (adam), is drawn up out of the ground, אֲדָמָה (adamah), earthling from Earth (little Bowie-esque, isn’t it?), and set in the garden to serve it and keep it. The pun doesn’t survive the trip into Greek, where adam becomes the generic ἄνθρωπος (anthropos or human), and the ground flattens into γῆ. I think something of the meaning gets lost in translation. To be from a place, in the older and stranger sense, is to have been formed by it. Ask where you live, and you’ll name a street. Ask the water, and it’ll give you a different address entirely: you are downstream of your neighbor to the north and upstream of your neighbor to the south (unless you’re on the Nile), and the rain that crosses your roof is already on its way to someone else’s well or town.

Edith Stein’s account of empathy begins in an unexpected place, and her word for it, Einfühlung, or feeling-into, points to it. My own body, she says, is always the null point of orientation, the Nullpunkt der Orientierung in that wonderful German, the here around which every there arranges itself. I can’t get outside it. The world comes to me arranged from where I stand, and left to itself, that arrangement presents its own appearance of things as though the appearance were simply the world. What breaks the spell is another person or more-than-human. In empathy, I grasp that the other carries a world of their own, ordered from a center that’s not mine, and that their picture is just as valid as my own. Only then do I come to see my own standpoint as one standpoint among many, rather than the measure of what is real. The genuinely shared world is never given from a single vantage, despite what our current influencer culture wants us to believe. It’s constituted across all of them together, or it isn’t constituted at all. A self that takes its own orientation as the standard hasn’t yet reached the world. It’s reached only its picture of the world, and mistaken the two.

I dwell on Stein here and in my academic work because I think perception has to come before ethics, and empathy is where the two meet. You can’t love a neighbor you haven’t first perceived as a center of their own life rather than a feature of yours. And what’s true of persons turns out to be true of places, and of the water that binds a place together. The watershed is the physical fact that answers to Stein’s philosophical one. It’s the shape of the home that won’t stay private. Water crosses property lines without asking, joining the well and the wastewater, the creek and the reservoir, the data center and the subdivision, and the forest into a single body that no one owns and everyone’s inside of. To live in a watershed means living in a shared world, whether or not we’ve consented to it, whether or not we’ve noticed.

Which brings me to the harder half of this, and to why I’ve been writing about data centers all summer in this space that is mostly about a tree.

A single large data center of the kind now proposed across the Carolinas can draw hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day. The NorthMark project on South Pine Street here in Spartanburg County, a 457-megawatt facility, has been projected at something near 460,000 gallons a day, and a good deal of what a center like that takes in for cooling leaves again as evaporated water vapor. That water doesn’t come back down the creek. There’s a real engineering difference between a closed-loop system that recirculates its water and an evaporative one that consumes it, and that difference is the kind of thing that gets decided in rooms most of us never enter or are invited to attend. Permits are public, and comment periods are open, and then they close. The Southern Environmental Law Center has sued Spartanburg County over how this one was permitted, arguing that a single large development was waved through as two minor land developments rather than one major one, each parcel small enough on its own to slip beneath the threshold that would have triggered real scrutiny. The county’s defense, roughly in my own take, is that industrial parks have always involved more than one parcel. You can hear in that exchange two different accounts of what a place is.

In Stein’s terms, this comes across more clearly than the usual language of “sides” allows. A permit application knows the Körper, the body, as a measurable thing, so many parcels, so many acres, so many gallons, so many megawatts. It doesn’t know the Leib, the lived body, the creek as a neighbor rather than a resource, the watershed as a home rather than a site. Neither of those is a sentimental addition to the facts, but they are the facts perceived from the standpoint of the people and the more-than-human lives that actually live downstream. The deep question a data center puts to a county isn’t only how many gallons. It’s whose orientation gets to count as the standard, and who is expected to live with a world constituted entirely from someone else’s zero point. A hearing that the affected are informed of only after the decision is made isn’t a bad decision. It’s a world built from a single vantage and mistaken for the world.

Scripture, when it turns to this, doesn’t really make this any more palatable for the non-empathizers. Jeremiah writes to exiles who didn’t choose their city and tells them to build houses there, to plant gardens and eat what they grow, and to seek the welfare of the place, its שָׁלוֹם (shalom), the Septuagint’s εἰρήνη, because in its welfare they will find their own. It’s a startling instruction, in my opinion. Seek the flourishing of a home you hold in common with people whose experience of it differs sharply from yours, and understand that your good is bound up with theirs, whether you like it or not.

And Amos, closing the circle, gives us the image everyone sort of half remembers from historic speeches: let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. The Hebrew there is נַחַל אֵיתָן (nachal eitan), a wadi that runs year-round, or a perennial creek. The Septuagint renders it χειμάρρους ἄβατος, an impassable winter torrent, the kind of dry bed that fills after the rain and then sweeps everything before it like a wild river when the snow melts in the Sierras. A perennial stream and a flash flood are two different theologies of justice, the steady and the sudden.

We live in a watershed that does both. Some of the work of a place is slow, the widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain. Some of it arrives all at once, reorganizing the ground. My college mentor, Larry T. McGehee (himself a great writer of this type of piece under his Southern Scene banner in the local Spartanburg Herald Journal), once told me that I had too much “righteous indignation” while we had burgers at Ike’s, and I was complaining about a local politician. He told me to see the work of the place and observe the great turning. He wasn’t wrong, as I learned 26 years later from Joanna Macy. Big and small. Slow and fast. You and me. Dualities are the key.

I keep returning, at the end, to the same rough crown of limbs at the top of the black walnut in our yard. The cross, before it was doctrine or ornament, was wood. It was a tree before it was a theology, sap and leaf and a body eating light from the same sun that warms my hands on an ordinary Carolina morning. If grace is anything, I’ve come to think it is less a rescue arriving from elsewhere than something greening up through what has already been given (thanks, Hildegard): this soil, this water, these children growing louder and more opinionated, this creek that is also, inconveniently and gracefully, my neighbor’s. A walnut falls. The sound is small, almost comic, and always startles me since I’ve learned not to wear AirPods when visiting the walnut. And still I hear it as an invitation, the same one the watershed has been extending all along. Pay attention. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, and stain, and shadow, and prayer, and part of the long common life we have been given to keep.

‘“Anybody who drives past that site on South Pine Street will have no doubt in his or her mind that this is a major development in any conceivable sense of the word,” SELC attorney Frank Holleman said.”

I’ve been writing about perception-before-ethics (in my work, it’s closer to Stein’s empathy-before-ethics framework) since the beginning of Carolina Ecology last summer. This quote from the article below drives some of that home. I frequently pass by the Northmark data center construction on South Pine, and I’m always fascinated by the amount of work being done there to chop down trees, set up turbines, chop more trees, and transform the old Kohler plant into an AI creature. Plus, all of the county staff being used for security.

We’re being told by the County Council that this is a minor development, but our eyes and perception clearly indicate it’s anything but minor.

‘“By violating its own ordinances, Spartanburg County is denying its own citizens full public information and airing of this proposed data center, and is denying them a public proceeding where this proposed development would be openly discussed and debated,” Holleman said.”

Again, transparency goes a long way. As does perceiving rightly.

“Historically, the County has consistently categorized industrial sites on a single parcel of land (not subdivided) as Minor Land Developments,” Alverson said in an email, and added in a follow-up that “The plain meaning of industrial parks involve more than one parcel of land.”

If our city and county councils aren’t going to offer a moratorium on billion-dollar NDA’d data centers, perhaps a good step would be to amend our land management ordinances to always default data centers as major projects.

Couple of interesting articles this morning on the data-center front here in Spartanburg…

Despite pushback, data centers are booming — and these Upstate companies are betting on them - Post & Courier (archive link)

According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute, large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling purposes — the same amount used by a town of between 10,000 and 50,000 people, which is around the population of Spartanburg.

Some companies already are employing closed-loop systems, like those from Airsys, to cut their water usage. The NorthMark data center being built on Pine Street is set to use a closed-loop system for part of its facility, but it will use evaporative cooling for another section, so it expects to use 460,000 gallons daily.

and…

As SELC sues Spartanburg County over data center development, officials defend their actions - Post & Courier (archive link)

The suit, filed on July 6 on behalf of several residents, accuses the county of wrongfully treating the 457-megawatt data center on Pine Street as two minor land developments instead of a major development. The data center is expected to be a large source of formaldehyde and fine particulate matter, causing nearby residents to worry about its impact on their health.

The suit asks the court to stop the county from processing minor land development permits for the site and declare the data center a major land development instead.

By late July, the Pacolet has pulled back from its banks, and the shoals below the old mill are starting to show their bones (even more with the rainfall shortage we’ve had this year). You can stand on a warm rock at Glendale and watch the current thread between stones that spend most of the year underwater. If you have a similar bend near you and have been coming to that same spot for a while, you begin to read the low water the way you read a face you know... this much drought, this much heat, this much taken upstream. I still do it when I go back home to Mullins, SC, and pass over the long bridge spanning the Great Pee Dee River on the border of Florence and Marion counties. A river doesn’t pronounce any of this in our human sense, but shows itself to folks who have learned to stand still in their noticing.

From Ursula Le Guin’s magnificent Always Coming Home:

“The only way I can think to find them, the only archaeology that might be practical, is as follows: You take your child or grandchild in your arms, a young baby, not a year old yet, and go down into the wild oats in the field below the barn. Stand under the oak on the last slope of the hill, facing the creek. Stand quietly. Perhaps the baby will see something, or hear a voice, or speak to somebody there, somebody from home.”

I was thinking about that low water this morning while reading the news. Politico and Public First released a poll on Tuesday as a story about political parties and perceptions. In six months, the country’s mood has turned. In January, 28% of Americans said they’d oppose a data center built within three miles of home; by July, that figure had climbed to 41%, while support fell from thirty-seven percent to twenty-four. The pollster remarked on the rarity of opinions moving this fast on a question usually left stale and partisan.

Interestingly, it’s happening on both sides of “the line” between political divides we’re constantly reminded about in the entertainment-news complex. Among the people who voted for Harris in 2024, opposition reached 53%. Among Trump voters, it rose eight points, from 26% to 33%. Here in South Carolina, Nancy Mace (a self-described MAGA Republican) has endorsed a data center moratorium. It feels as if something’s moving underneath what we’re told is a non-permeable partisan surface in the United States (and Europe in response to data center developments), and it’s moving in the same direction on either side of a line we keep being told not to cross.

The data centers are large windowless warehouses of computation that drink water for cooling and pull power off the grid until the grid strains and the ratepayer’s bill climbs, but they’re almost beside the point in my thoughts here. What fascinates me is the word that drives the argument on “both sides.” Resource. We debate how to allocate the resource, how to price it, and whether the jobs and the tax base are worth the draw on it. The word “resource” does its quiet work before debates begin. To call the river a resource is to have perceived it a certain way... as a quantity held in reserve that is standing by for human use. The water becomes potential-for-something-else. Its own life, the low shoals in July, the salamanders under the cool stones here in the Upstate of SC, the way a river carries the county’s weather down toward the sea, all of it flattened into a number on a permit.

The work I’ve been doing under another term, ecological intentionality, is becoming practical with these types of polls and news. The three-mile figure in the polls here measures nearness. When people say they don’t want this thing within three miles of home, they haven’t been handed a new principle about water rights or grid economics that convinced them.

Something in our group perception has moved or changed over the last few months. The abstractions of “data,” “cloud,” “grid,” and especially “resource” acquired an address. The resource, kept for years at the safe distance of a statistic, has come near enough to be seen as what it always was... water, power, air, and the particular creek behind a particular house. Once a thing has been perceived that way, the human notion of ethics tends to follow on its own volition, almost without argument or process.

Edith Stein spent her early philosophical work on the question of how one consciousness comes to feel its way into the life of another, and she gave that feeling a careful anatomy. It works beneath judgment, as a mode of perceiving by which the other stops being an object in my field and becomes a center of experience in their own right.

The ecological version of this perceiving is what the poll is showing us, dimly and from a distance. People are beginning to feel their way into the watershed, concerned about data centers. Maurice Merleau-Ponty would say the body wasn’t a spectator of the world to begin with, that we perceive from within the same flesh we are trying to see. The river wasn’t over “there,” a resource across the room. We are already standing in it. Most of the time, we forget, and that forgetting is what lets the term “resource” do its work. The poll is a brief record of a few million people remembering something from home, as Le Guin admonished us.

I keep writing about perception and empathy on Carolina Ecology because the usual order runs in the opposite direction. We’re accustomed to being argued into our ethics by preachers or pundits on a cable news show panel or TikTok influencers, and handed a principle, then asked to apply it. An ethics received that way is mostly held a little at arm’s length, always one counterargument away from collapse. “Prove me wrong” culture via social media Reels makes great use of this.

An ethics that grows up out of perception is harder to talk someone out of. There isn’t a premise beneath it for a clever argument to pull loose. It rests on something they’ve seen or perceived. You can’t easily un-see the creek once it has become your creek. Perception before ethics doesn’t postpone or flatten ethics. Rather, ethics is given a root of sorts. And the perceiving is already doing moral work in itself, before a single ought is spoken, because to see the river as a life rather than a reserve is to grant it a standing the old word of resource denied it. The eye that has learned to look that way is doing the work with every glance.

This is the ground that the Ecology of the Cross brings me back to in my dissertation work this year. The Cross is the place where nearness and cost are held together and can’t be pried apart. The Cross is where love shows itself as the willingness to draw near to what will cost you something (not in the Penal Substitutionary Atonement sense). A perception that costs nothing is usually one that has kept its distance. To let the watershed come within 3 miles, to let it become near enough to grieve for, is to accept that seeing it truly will lay some claim on you... on your comfort, your rates, your sense of what progress is owed. The people answering that poll may not know they have taken on a cost. But the movement in the numbers is the movement of a distance closing, and that new distance asks something of us. That doesn’t cross a party line, but is a human movement, and older than any political party in the United States.

The black walnut in our backyard is dropping its first hard, green-husked fruits now (early this year), given the relative dryness of our summer. The walnut draws its water from the same table the river draws from, the same table a cooling tower would draw from if one came. I don’t think most of us decide to care about such things. I think we are brought, slowly and against our forgetting, near enough to see them, and the caring comes on its own once we do. The poll is a small sign that the bringing-near is underway. Perhaps, a Great Turning. The work now is to keep looking, past the three-mile line, until the whole watershed is close enough to be seen.

PUBLIC NOTICE OF AMENDED HEARING/AVAILABILITY SESSION LOCATION AND EXTENDED COMMENT PERIOD

Around three miles from the black walnut and our home, there is already something to look at. The air permit for the NorthMark data center stays open for public comment until July 31st this month, and the Southern Environmental Law Center has already challenged it. A public comment is perception made a matter of record, a way of saying that you have seen the water and will not consent to un-see it. That window closes at the end of the month here, and what little is ours to do, we do now, or we don’t do at all.

Over the last couple of weeks, the rain has arrived the way it does when the ground has forgotten how to receive it. Rather than the slow soaking of a Piedmont spring, it’s felt more like something impatient, arriving in sheets off the ridgelines and running before it could sink. Lawson’s Fork went from a set of exposed cobbles to a brown, muscular thing overnight, and the Pacolet with it, along with the creek that feeds into Duncan Park Lake in our neighborhood. The red clay, baked to brick through a long dry season, shed the first inches almost entirely and washed down neighborhood roads, the water sliding off toward the creeks as if the land itself had turned its face away. Only later, once the surface had softened, did the ground begin to drink. I like to stand under the black walnut and listen to the rain come down and thinking that this was the sound of a whole country tilting toward its rivers much like the land we live on is tilted towards the creek (which becomes quite apparent when I mow our lawn or we try to find a level place for a backyard inflatable swimming pool for the kids on the hot days).

That tilting is what the map above shows. Brad Panovich, a meteorologist in Charlotte, posted a visualization this week of rainfall gathered across the entire Catawba watershed in 24 hours (before more heavy rains on Monday and Tuesday morning), and to look at it is to see the basin the way water sees it: not as counties and city limits but as one long inclined plane... aiming. The Catawba rises in the Blue Ridge just east of Asheville (near my former home) and runs better than two hundred miles south, yielding along the way to eleven impoundments and dams before it crosses into South Carolina, changes its name to the Wateree, and finally slides through my beloved Congaree National Park (one of the holiest places on the planet) toward what is now the human-created Lake Marion.

The Catawba is named for the people who called themselves the people of the river. What the map makes visible is that every drop falling on Avery, Burke, or McDowell counties in North Carolina is already committed... already bound downhill toward Charlotte’s reservoirs to provide water for its millions of inhabitants, toward the Wateree bottomlands, toward the Atlantic. The watershed is essentially a single intention inscribed in the terrain.

And what makes this week worth writing about is how recently that intention had nothing to carry. In early May, the Catawba-Wateree basin entered Low Inflow Protocol Stage 2, and more than a dozen cities and water districts were placed under mandatory restrictions. Charlotte sat roughly thirteen inches behind on the year, its driest start on record. The reservoirs drew down, the utilities rationed, and reports spoke (in the flat language of modern “water management”) of a system operating below normal. Then the storms of the last two weeks dropped six to nine inches across the headwater counties, flood watches went up across the mountains, and the same basin that had been counting every gallon in May now stood in the road trying to shed the excess. Drought and deluge in a single season, over the same ground, along the same downhill grain.

There’s a great term for what a watershed represents that comes from the third day in the Genesis account of Creation. In the Greek, the Genesis command on that day is Συναχθήτω τὸ ὕδωρ... εἰς συναγωγὴν μίαν (from συνάγω, to gather together): let the water be gathered into one gathering. And in the same breath, ὀφθήτω ἡ ξηρά... let the dry appear. The dry, ἡ ξηρά, shouldn’t be read as a punishment in Genesis. It’s the necessary counterpart of the gathering, the ground that shows itself once the water has found its one place. A watershed is the same: a συναγωγή, a gathering-into-one, the machinery by which scattered rain is collected and given a direction. Drought, then, is something other than the absence of that working. Drought is ἡ ξηρά advancing where it should not, the dry appearing in the reservoir bed and the exposed shoal, the gathering starved of anything to gather. What unsettled me about the drought maps this spring was that the aiming persisted, not that the Catawba had stopped aiming downhill. The basin went on, intending to the sea and had only dust to offer it.

This is a place where ecology and theology stop being two subjects. In the work I have been calling Ecological Intentionality, the wager is that directedness is not something a mind adds to a passive world but something the world is already doing, everywhere, in advance of us. Merleau-Ponty would have us begin with the body’s aiming before the mind’s judging; Aristotle would call the river’s downhill tendency a matter of act and potency (Edith Stein later builds on that), the water in potency to the sea. A watershed is intentionality you can walk. Gravity is its ἐντελέχεια, its being-at-work, and the basin holds its object the way a perception holds what it is a perception of, whether or not the object arrives. The drought didn’t suspend the Catawba’s directedness. It made that directedness legible by frustrating it, the way a covered human eye still turns toward the light it can’t reach. Before we manage a river... before the protocols, regulations, and permits with the arithmetic of storage that has occupied so much of my writing here... there is this prior fact to be perceived... the land is already leaning toward one place, and has been leaning there since the third day and well before humans arrived to consider it.

Which is why this recent deluge in the Blue Ridge and Carolina Piedmont asks a cruciform question rather than a triumphant one. When John’s Gospel reaches for the verb of ultimate gathering, it does not choose συνάγω but ἕλκω: κἀγὼ ἐὰν ὑψωθῶ ἐκ τῆς γῆς, πάντας ἑλκύσω πρὸς ἐμαυτόν... and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all to myself (John 12:32)1. ἕλκω is also the word for hauling a full net of fish up into a boat or the bank, for the drag of a real weight toward a real point. It’s the verb of gravity. And the geometry it names is the geometry of watersheds: the lowest place is the gathering place.

Water is drawn not to the summit but to the trough in this sin(e) wave of geography, and the whole two hundred miles of the Catawba is one long confession that things arrive by descending. The Ecology of the Cross, as I keep trying to say, reads the created order as already shaped this way before Golgotha’s revelation... the low point, the drained and skull-dry place, made into the point toward which everything is drawn. A watershed is a doctrine you can get your boots wet in. It gathers by descending. It draws all to its lowest ground.

So I am wary of calling this week’s rain simply an answer to the spring’s drought or an answer to a corn farmer’s prayers (though it is also that), as though the Excel sheet had been balanced and the season redeemed. The water that saves the reservoir is the same water that tears out the low-water crossing, and the basin does not distinguish gift from threat... it only gathers, only draws downhill whatever falls. What the map gave me wasn’t necessarily relief but more of a recognition. The Catawba was aiming all along, in the dust of May and June as much as in the flooding of July, toward the one gathering it has always intended. Our work, the perceiving before the managing, is to learn to see that aim... and then to live as people of the river who know which direction the ground is leaning, and toward what, and why the lowest place is the one that gathers.

Written under the black walnut in our backyard, after the rain on Tuesday.

You can stand on the bank at Lawson’s Fork here in Spartanburg and watch water become air, the vapor lifting where the current slows over rocks, thinning as the light strengthens, and then gone quickly in a hot July morning. The ancient Hebrew has a term for what the eye is doing there. It’s the word the book we have mistranslated for four centuries sets at its own head, הֶבֶל, hevel, meaning something like “breath” or “vapor.” The mist that stands off the warm water on a cool morning and then is nowhere at all.

Lots of us hear it in sermons, slogans, or rhetoric as “vanity.” הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים, havel havalim, “vanity of vanities” is the superlative that the King James built into a commentary itself on the worth of our world. The whole book of Ecclesiastes has come down to us under that supposition, as though its author, קֹהֶלֶת, Qoheleth, had surveyed the creation and pronounced it worthless.

However, hevel isn’t a moral judgment but more of a perceptual term. Before it can be made to mean emptiness, it means the fog you saw over the water on a cool July morning before the heat of the day sets in, the visible brevity of a form that holds its shape for a span and then disperses. Qoheleth here isn’t condemning the world as vain or worthless, but is describing what it is to be a creature inside time (which sounds like a Bob Dylan album title).

This is why the book belongs to ecology and has been left, mostly, on the devotional shelf of the rarely used church library or used sparingly by a pastor in a funeral sermon when they really weren’t familiar with the recently deceased. Its opening chapter is a phenomenology of return so interesting that I don’t know a better one outside of Henri Bergson’s work.

The sun rises, and the sun goes to its place and rises there again (also one of my favorite books is The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway… I know we’re not supposed to like him these days, but I’m a massive Hemingway fan still). The wind turns to the south, then to the north, and comes back around on its circuits.

And then the line that any of us who have stood in a river already know in the body: כָּל־הַנְּחָלִים הֹלְכִים אֶל־הַיָּם, all the streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full; to the place where they flow, they flow again. Sounds a good bit like Heraclitus’ (maybe... probably wasn’t him despite what Plato says) famous quip. Qoheleth is watching the water cycle (or “watching the wheels go round and round” to invoke Lennon in his prosaic phenomenology). They are watching the same water pass a fixed point and understanding that it is both the same and never the same, that the water I stood beside this morning is already in motion toward the Pacolet, a body of water (funny how we term that), the Fork will never carry past me again.

The philosophical name for what he sees is duration, and the ecological consequence of it sits one verse above the cycles, at the hinge of the whole passage: דּוֹר הֹלֵךְ וְדוֹר בָּא וְהָאָרֶץ לְעוֹלָם עֹמָדֶת. A generation goes, and a generation comes, and the Earth stands forever. Read often as a complaint, this is the futility of human labor against an indifferent world. However, read as observation, which is how I think Qoheleth means it here, it’s the exact structure of ecological perception.

The question Ecclesiastes is asking (and the question I have been reading toward all summer in Deleuze, Ruyer, Bergson, Stein, and Aristotle) is whether the return is the same thing coming back to mock us, or the world coming back in fidelity. Qoheleth answers with the ground. The generations that perceive the Earth are hevel, breath-brief, each one lifting off the surface and thinning into the light. The Earth, as well as The Dude, abides. What looks from inside a single lifespan like futility is, from the standpoint of the ground itself, faithfulness. The return is the world keeping faith, while those who watch it pass through do so.

And here the book touches the argument I have been pursuing this hot summer. A creature is hevel because its form is held in act only for a span. The black walnut in our backyard isn’t vapor because it’s worthless. It’s vapor because the shape it holds, the leafing, the fruiting, the whole standing fact of it against the July sky, is an act, ἐνέργεια, a being-at-work that the tree performs and cannot suspend, and every act of that kind is spent in the performing.

Aristotle’s word for the form fully realized, ἐντελέχεια, carries its own ending inside it, τέλος (telos or “end”), the completion toward which the walnut is always and only underway. To see the tree truly is to see it breathing out. Raymond Ruyer would say the tree is present to itself in that act, a self-survey with no observer standing over it, and that self-presence is real for exactly as long as the form lasts and not one morning longer. I think this is what Qoheleth saw and what later editors, scribes, and translators (later translators, some with theological or colonial agendas of their own) couldn’t forgive him for seeing. Creaturely form is breath. To be is to be spent.

The translators who could forgive it were the legendary seventy who carried the book into Greek with the compilation of the Septuagint (from the term “seventy”... interesting story there for another time). When they came to hevel in the Hebrew, they went with ματαιότης, mataiotēs, ματαιότης ματαιοτήτων in Greek at the start of the book. A couple of centuries later, Paul, writing to an assembly of Christ followers in Rome about the whole groaning creation, uses that term once and pretty decisively: τῇ γὰρ ματαιότητι ἡ κτίσις ὑπετάγη, οὐχ ἑκοῦσα. For the creation was subjected to mataiotēs, to futility, to hevel, not willingly.

The “vaporousness” Qoheleth observes in Ecclesiastes from inside the water cycle is the same condition Paul says the entire κτίσις, the whole made order, has been placed under and groans to be delivered from. The two books use the same word across hundreds of years and a change of language. What Ecclesiastes sees, Romans delivers, I think.

There is one more incredibly interesting place that word hevel has been used. The second son born into the world is named הֶבֶל, Hevel, Abel, the breath, and he is the first of us to die, his life cut off in a field and his blood crying out from the אֲדָמָה, the ground, the very Earth that Qoheleth says stands forever. The first death/murder in scripture is named Vapor, and the Earth that abides is the Earth that received him. I can’t write the word hevel over a Piedmont morning without hearing that the brevity of every creature and the murder of the innocent are, in Hebrew, one syllable. This is the weight the Septuagint carried into Paul’s single word, and why the groan in Romans 8 isn’t meant as despair. Creation subjected to hevel is creation that holds Abel’s blood in the ground and the whole spent, breathing, dying order of things that the Cross gathers up.

Gathers is the right verb here, because it is Qoheleth’s own. The name means the one who assembles, from קהל, the gathering of the people, which the Greek made Ἐκκλησιαστής and the English Ecclesia (a favorite term of startup churches and themed Sunday schools), the speaker to the ἐκκλησία, the called-out assembly. The Preacher is the Gatherer, the one who collects the scattered breath of things into a single seeing. And the Cross is where that gathering is completed.

On the Cross, the form fully in act, Aristotle’s ἐντελέχεια, or completed work, of a human life, is spent completely and in the open, breath given out and taken up. My dissertation work, The Ecology of the Cross, has always meant, for me, that Christ enters hevel to its floor. He becomes the vapor over the water, the generation that goes, the brother in the field, and from inside that spending he makes the return faithfulness where it had been futility. The streams run to the sea, and the sea is not full, and they flow again. The Earth stands forever. And the breath that lifts off the Fork on a July morning, gone quickly, isn’t lost. Rather, it’s gathered.

Tomorrow, the vapor will still be lifting where the current slows. I’ve stood on that bank enough days to know it will do the same tomorrow and that I won’t. הֶבֶל, hevel. It is the truest thing Ecclesiastes, or perhaps the entire Bible, says about me, and standing there or under the black walnut, I don’t hear that as a verdict. I hear it as the sound the world makes, keeping faith.

The black walnut in the backyard has started to drop a few hard green fruits this last week, well before the leaves have even thought about turning from green to brown. I go out most mornings before the heat and stand underneath it. There’s really nothing for me to do there. The tree doesn’t need me. Whatever I know about juglone in the soil, about the way this tree conditions the ground beneath it to keep its own kind close, about the Carolina Piedmont clay and the water moving somewhere under Lawson’s Fork... all of that comes later, and none of it is why I go out. I go out to look. And I have come to believe, slowly, over about two decades of teaching and now these last couple of years of PhD study, that the looking is the whole thing. The looking is where ecology begins, and where the Cross is waiting.

People who know me from the church side of my life sometimes ask how I ended up here, wading through air permits and monitoring wells and matplotlib figures of groundwater data, when I was trained to read Greek (classical and koine) and Biblical Hebrew and stand in a pulpit. And people who know me from the science side ask the opposite... what a Carmelite mystic or a French philosopher of form has to do with a data center’s permit. The answer I keep coming back to, the one I have worked toward for years, is that I do not experience these as two rooms with a hallway between them. I experience them as one room. And the name of that room is perception. It’s not always easy to explain, and I fumble the attempt too often while sharing a coffee or beer with someone at Fretwell or a Council meeting.

Let me tell it the way it happened, which is also the way I would preach it.

It begins, for me, in Genesis (and not where you would expect). Not in the command itself. The first thing God does with the world, in this account, is not use it and not even bless it. The first thing God does is see it. Again and again the refrain comes: וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב, and in the Greek my eye learned to read, καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς ὅτι καλόν... “and God saw that it was good.“ The verb in Hebrew is ראה, appearing here as וַיַּרְא; in the Septuagint’s Greek it’s ὁράω, appearing as εἶδεν. God sees.

The important term here is καλόν. The Greek does not say ἀγαθόν, or good-as-useful, good-for-something. It says καλόν, which is good and beautiful at once (I wish English could hold both senses in one word the way Greek does... but alas we have to work with the tools we’re given), the good that is seen and found lovely. Before the world is put to work, before the human is anywhere in the story, there is a seeing that finds the world beautiful. Perception comes first, and the blessing follows the beholding.

And when the human does at last arrive, the charge isn’t to master or subdue or pull out weeds in the Garden. The human is placed in the Garden לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ, in the Greek ἐργάζεσθαι καὶ φυλάσσειν... to serve it and to keep it, to work and to guard. There’s the ethic.

But notice the order of the whole. The keeping comes at the end. First, the Earth is told to bring forth, βλαστησάτω ἡ γῆ, let the Earth put out green from itself. Then God sees that it is good. Only then, late, is a human told to keep anything.

I’ve come to think and realize that nearly every failure of what we now call ecology is a failure to keep this order. We reach for the keeping, the management, the stewardship, the policy, before we have done the seeing. We try to be responsible for a world we have not yet troubled to behold. And a keeping that has not first been a seeing hardens into control.

So the question underneath all of my work, the theological question and the ecological question at once, turns out to be a question about the eye. What would it mean to see the way that first seeing sees... to find the world καλόν (good and beautiful at once) before finding it useful?

I spent twenty years in Middle and High School classrooms across the Carolinas, teaching AP Environmental Science, AP Physics, Earth Science, Life Science, and Physical Science, and for a long time, I thought I was teaching students facts about systems... carbon, water, nitrogen, energy... the great cycles. I was (I hope), and those facts and understandings do matter. But what I was actually trying to do, what the good days were about, was teaching attention.

Getting a sixteen-year-old to look at the creek behind the school, at the particular creek, this one in this community, with its particular silt and its particular light, until the abstraction “watershed” became a thing they had stood beside. Ecology, I finally began to understand, is not first a body of knowledge. It is a training of perception. It is the discipline of noticing that nothing is alone, that the walnut and the clay and the juglone and the water and I are already bound together before I’ve decided anything about any of it.

Which is where the old voices started to find me. Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess on the Rhine, had a Latin word for what she saw pressing up through the whole created order: viriditas, greenness, greening, the moist living freshness by which God keeps the world from going dry. For Hildegard, in all of her wildness and wisdom, the green of a leaf was not a symbol pointing away to God. It was the very showing of God’s aliveness in the thing itself. When I stand under the walnut, and the light comes green through the compound leaves, I’m not being handed a lesson about God. I am, if I have the eyes for it, seeing viriditas... the world’s aliveness given directly, in this leaf, this morning. Hildegard taught me that perception could be worship, and that the two might actually be the same act.

Then Edith Stein, whom I keep close throughout this whole season of study. She began as a phenomenologist, a student of Edmund Husserl, and her first great work was on empathy, Einfühlung... the question of how I come to know that the other in front of me has an inner life of their own, a center that isn’t mine. Her answer was that I neither infer it nor project it. I perceive it. The other’s interiority is given to me in the encounter, a presence I meet and cannot manufacture. Late in her life, a Carmelite by then with the name St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, she carried that phenomenology all the way down into the ground of being itself, into the Latin term from St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, esse (Endliches und ewiges Sein in her native German), being as the act by which anything at all stands forth from nothing and holds itself in existence. And then she wrote the book she did not finish, Kreuzeswissenschaft, The Science of the Cross.

Stein handed me the thread I most needed in my own perception and work. If empathy is the perception of another’s interiority, then to encounter any living thing rightly is to grant that it has an inside, a center of its own being, that it is present to itself and not simply present to me. The walnut isn’t an object lying in my visual field. It is a form holding itself in being, and my seeing of it is a meeting of sorts (maybe a Sort of Homecoming to borrow U2’s language).

This is where the philosophers of form came in... allow me to be strange for a moment. Raymond Ruyer, whom almost no one reads (sadly), spent his life on a single stubborn intuition he called survol, self-survey, the way a living form is present to itself all at once, without standing back from itself, without a little inner eye watching from a distance. A visual field, he pointed out, is present to itself whole, immediately, with no homunculus reviewing it. So is an embryo.

So, Ruyer thought, is any true form. Life isn’t a machine assembled from outside. Life is a self-presence, an inside that surveys itself in a single act. And Gilles Deleuze, alongside him, taught me to trust difference itself and to stop treating the endless particularity of the world as noise cluttering up the general categories, to see instead that the particular... this walnut, this clay, this fracture in the rock under Spartanburg County... is the real thing, and the concept is the thin abstraction laid over it. Between them, Ruyer and Deleuze gave me permission to take the singular seriously, to believe that the form in front of me is present to itself and worth the whole weight of my attention.

Merleau-Ponty, whom I’ve studied the last two years intently, and now, in my comprehensive exams this summer, ties together so much of this. In his last unfinished work, he kept returning to a French word, la chair, the flesh. His claim, the one I haven’t gotten over since I first read his work just two short years ago, is that the one who sees and the thing that is seen are cut from the same cloth. That’s mind-blowing.

My looking at the walnut is possible only because I, too, am a visible thing, a body in the world, of the same cloth as the tree. Seeing is not a beam I aim at inert “stuff.” Seeing is a reversibility, a chiasm in the Greek, my flesh and the world’s flesh folding into each other so that in touching the bark I am also touched, in seeing I am also seen. Perception is participation. To perceive is already to be inside the relation, already implicated, already bound. There’s no neutral looking from outside, because there is no outside to stand in.

Now put all of that together, and you can perhaps see why I call my dissertation the Ecology of the Cross.

The Cross is... a tree. We forget this because we have made it a shape, a piece of jewelry, a bumper sticker, and a logo on a steeple. But it was a tree, wood, ξύλον, the same word the Greek scriptures use for the tree of life and for the Cross alike. And what happens on that tree is that a form pours itself out, gives its own being away, and in the giving does not vanish but is returned, raised, kept. The word the church reached for was kenosis, κένωσις, from κενόω, to empty... he emptied himself, ἐκένωσεν ἑαυτόν. The form that is most fully present to itself, most alive, is the form that can give itself away without ceasing to be.

I look at the walnut, and I see this. The tree spends itself constantly... leaves let down, fruit dropped early onto the clay, sugars poured underground into fungal networks it will never account for, the whole slow self-giving of a life that keeps itself by not clinging to itself. The juglone paradox (which fascinates me), the tree conditioning its own ground against its neighbors, belongs here too, the Strange Currencies (to borrow the language of R.E.M. and their video about perception here) of a form that shapes a whole world around its self-giving and its self-keeping at once. The Ecology of the Cross is the recognition that this pattern... form given away and returned, self-emptying that is also self-presence... runs through the whole created order and is disclosed most sharply on a particular Palestinian / Roman tree on a particular afternoon. The Cross does not interrupt ecology. The Cross reveals ecology.

This is why perception has to come before ethics, not after. I’m famous and annoying at my school for repeating “empathy before ethics” in our class discussions. If I begin with the command, with keeping, with stewardship, management, and policy, I begin as a manager standing outside of a system I have been made responsible for. But if I begin with the seeing, with καλόν, with viriditas, with the meeting of a form that is present to itself, with the flesh that binds my looking to the thing looked at, then I am already inside. I am already kin. The ethic does not have to be imposed from outside, because the seeing has already dissolved the outside.

To perceive the walnut rightly, as a form holding itself in being, present to itself, giving itself away, is to have already been drawn into the keeping. The keeping was never a duty bolted on afterward. It’s what the seeing became.

This is why, when people ask how ecology is related to the study of religion, or to Genesis, or to a mystic on the Rhine, or to a data center’s air permit, I want to say that they are not related at all. They are one thing, seen from different sides. Ecology is the discipline of perceiving that nothing is alone. The Cross is the disclosure of what such perceiving costs and what it gives. And Genesis was right from the first chapter: before the keeping, the seeing. Before the ethic, the eye. Before we are asked to serve and to guard, we are asked simply to behold, and to find it good, καλόν, beautiful and good and given.

The walnut doesn’t need me this morning. It’s letting its fruit down onto the red clay whether I come out or not. But I go out anyway with my coffee, and I stand there, and I look. That standing and looking isn’t the preparation for the work. It is the work. It is the first and hardest discipline, and everything else, the permits and the poems and the paper due at the end of this month, comes out of it or comes to nothing.

First, the seeing. Then, and only then, the keeping.

The first sign wasn’t a “coming soon” one with a name attached, but a gap in the treeline along South Pine Street, where the pines had stood one week and were gone the next (you can drive by the site and still see the massive collection of pine carcasses), with their root plates turned up red and wet in the June and now July heat. People who drive that road every morning, as I do, have noticed the absence and the large security presence at the entrance. That’s usually how it goes. Land, water, and air tell you something is happening in the only language they have, which is the language of what is suddenly missing, and the paperwork catches up later, if it catches up at all. Before a press release or public discussion, there was a wound, and the wound was legible to those of us with the habit of looking.

Now the story has reached an opinion piece in The Washington Post (archive link), which means the thing many Spartanburg residents have been piecing together from felled trees, public notices, permit applications, county council meetings, rumors, livestreams, and long nights in public rooms has finally become legible to a national audience. Kathleen Parker’s column is useful because it points out what has been true all along... this project arrived through a structure of concealment, euphemism, and delayed public knowledge. The county didn’t receive a data center first. It first received a language system and grammar designed to prevent ordinary people from knowing what they were being asked to accept.

When the name finally did come, it was built to give nothing away. Project MOC-1 was the initial title of the project. A “high-performance computing center,” the county called it, in the flat municipal dialect designed to slide past the ear without leaving a mark. Say it aloud a few times, MOC-1, and notice what the tongue is doing. The name mocks the mouth that tries to hold it. It’s a placeholder wearing the costume of a fact, a set of syllables assembled so that a person reading a council agenda would feel informed but know almost nothing. That was the point, I think. For a good while, the phrase did exactly the work it was hired to do.

“Data center.” We say “data” as though it were the most modern thing in the world, the very substance of the future being poured into a place. But data is a Latin plural, datum in the singular, from dare, to give, and beneath the Latin sits an older Greek word still: δεδομένα (dedomena), the perfect passive participle of δίδωμι (didōmi), to give. Euclid titled a whole book of geometry with it, Δεδομένα, “the given things,” the magnitudes handed to you at the outset so that you could reason your way toward what you did not yet know. We should all read more Euclid. Data means the given, and it means a gift. In this case, the reversal came when the thing named for giving was, in almost every particular that mattered to the public, taken and withheld. Trees were taken while the forty-year tax arrangement was withheld, even though it had already moved through the machinery of approval. The council, we are now told, was bound by nondisclosure and was “not at liberty” to spell the whole thing out loud.^[2]

The withholding wasn’t a failure of communication, but was the architecture of the deal. NorthMark Strategies, a New York investment firm, moved through a subsidiary called Valara Holdings and through a county process shaped by... silence. In April 2025, NorthMark and the governor’s office announced a $2.8 billion “high-performance computing center” at the former Kohler facility. The announcement praised innovation, investment, remediation, and minimal strain on the power grid. It also gave the number that should have stopped every celebratory sentence in its tracks... at least twenty-seven full-time jobs. Twenty-seven, against one of the largest single investments in the history of the state.^[3]

Kohler’s vitreous works turned clay and fire into white vessels meant to hold water cleanly: sinks, basins, and the ordinary sacramental furniture of a house. The bowl you fill, empty, and fill again. Vitreous, from vitrum (glass), is clay-fired, glassy, and impervious, so it could cradle water without drinking it. Now the vessel-making floor is becoming a machine that does the opposite of holding. It will draw on the county’s water and air to cool rooms full of processors, and it will give back what it is built to give back: heat, exhaust, and a low, continuous mechanical breathing that does not stop.

We were told this data center would be different. It would generate its own power off a gas line, would not lean on the Spartanburg County grid, would draw no more than the old plant drew, and would sit “lightly” on the county. To feed the machine, Valara has now asked South Carolina environmental regulators for permission to expand onsite generation with additional natural gas-fired turbines. The draft permit isn’t a minor paperwork adjustment, as the project continues to move toward its end of construction with massive equipment active on the site daily. It’s the document in which the language of quiet promises of “self-generation” becomes stacks, emissions limits, modeling, formal comments, and the public’s belated right to speak.^[4]

If approved, the facility would release hundreds of tons of pollutants annually through exhaust stacks rising over Spartanburg County. Parker’s piece points out that more than nine tons of formaldehyde and 158 tons of fine particulate matter would be emitted. Formaldehyde is a carcinogen. Fine particulate matter is small enough to get deep into the lungs and is associated with serious respiratory and cardiovascular harms. These aren’t abstractions. They’re names for what enters breath.^[5]

And notice what the permit itself is called here. The document now under review is a Synthetic Minor construction permit, a designation that means the applicant has promised to keep its emissions just below the thresholds that would make it a major source. A minor source is the official word for it. This is a facility the Southern Environmental Law Center says would become one of the county’s largest emitters of formaldehyde and fine particulate, under limits the Center argues are written so loosely as to be, in practice, unenforceable. Rather than being a measurement, minor is one more name doing the work that MOC-1 did, and that high-performance computing center did before it, a large thing dressed in a small word so that it can move through a public process without waking anyone up.^[6]

“Self-generation” was a reassurance. The reassurance was the concealment. What it concealed was a decision to spend the breath of a place and to call the spending a gift.

This Spring, I wrote the essay “While We Breathe,” in which I argued that our failure in these matters is finally a failure of attention. We cannot defend what we have not learned to notice, and that breath is the most continuous form of noticing there is, the body’s uninterrupted argument that it belongs to an atmosphere it shares with the walnut in my backyard and the wrens in the fence line and the cicadas whose July drone this generator is meant to drown. The ethics come after the perception. Seeing comes first in proper action. A county is a living form before it’s a tax base, and a living form has a shape it’s trying to hold, a way of continuing itself that is legible if you attend to it. The shoal on Lawson’s Fork, the clay that will not drain, the surface water we impound because the crystalline bedrock under us gives no deep aquifer to fall back on. None of that was given a hearing when it mattered most. The council was not at liberty to share. Liberty, it turns out, was the one thing kept off the table.^[7]

There’s a wonderful Greek term I’ve mentioned here before, παρρησία, parrhesia. It means frank speech, bold speech, the freedom to say the whole thing out loud. It’s not just the right to make noise after the decision has already hardened (or anything akin to our First Amendment right under the US Constitution). It’s the shared civic air in which a community can see what is coming before the bulldozers arrive, before the tax agreement is signed, and before the trees are gone. In many ways, it’s the opposite of an agreement whose central term is silence. The early Christian congregations knew this word well, as evidenced by our texts. It’s the word for standing in the daylight without hiding. It’s the word for speech that risks something because the truth itself has become a public obligation.^[8]

That’s why this story keeps moving, at least for me, between air and speech. A place that cannot speak freely and a place that cannot breathe freely are not separate kinds of harm. They belong to the same wound. Public secrecy is an ecological issue when it prevents people from understanding what will be done to their land, water, air, and future. Pollution is a spiritual issue when it asks a community to inhale the cost of someone else’s abstraction. A nondisclosure agreement is not a smokestack, of course, but it can prepare the way for one. Silence has material consequences.

Nevertheless, the trees came down on South Pine Street, and people noticed. Noticing became calls, posts, and questions. It became a virtual town hall on June 24, then a packed auditorium the next night, then a county that has joined its neighbors in pausing new data-center plans while it remembers how to look. The Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging the adequacy of the air permit process. Residents showed up in the hundreds at the June 25 hearing, and the opposition was all but unanimous, person after person asking the state to deny the permit.^[9]

In a culture organized to keep infrastructure invisible (even with our seemingly infinite access to content to entertain us) until resistance becomes inconvenient, public attention is a real form of power. Attention is not sufficient by itself, though. It won’t scrub formaldehyde out of the air around Spartanburg and Pacolet. But it is a condition from which anything better can begin. The given has to be returned to common hands, and the name has to be made speakable. The permit has to be read, and the air has to be counted as more than an externality. The people who live here have to be treated as more than an afterthought in a forty-year deal.

The public comment period remains open through July 31. That’s the window in which parrhesia is still possible, in which a citizen can say the whole thing out loud into the record. Dum spiro spero, the words cut into the state’s own seal: while I breathe, I hope. The breath is shared. The hope depends on what we are still willing to see and on whether we say so openly before the last day of the month.^[10]

1. Kathleen Parker, “A $2.8 billion data center? Oh no, this is Project MOC-1,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2026. The column’s subhead: “The South Carolina development will hurt the environment and create few jobs.”↩︎

2. On “data” as the given… the English word descends from the neuter plural of Latin datum, “a thing given,” from dare, “to give,” rendering the Greek δεδομένα (dedomena), perfect passive participle of δίδωμι (didōmi), “to give.” Euclid’s geometrical treatise Δεδομένα (Data) concerns the “given” magnitudes from which others may be deduced.↩︎

3. South Carolina Office of the Governor, “NorthMark Strategies selects Spartanburg County to establish first South Carolina operation,” April 22, 2025; NorthMark Strategies, “NorthMark Strategies Announces Historic $2.8 Billion Investment in Spartanburg, S.C. High-Performance Computing Facility,” April 22, 2025.↩︎

4. South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, “Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center” (draft air permit and public notice materials).↩︎

5. Parker, “A $2.8 billion data center? Oh no, this is Project MOC-1”; National Cancer Institute, “Formaldehyde and Cancer Risk”; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Health and Environmental Effects of Particulate Matter.”↩︎

6. South Carolina Department of Environmental Services, Draft Air Synthetic Minor Construction Permit, Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center; Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of Sierra Club Upstate, letter to SCDES contending that the draft permit’s pollutant limits are “not practically enforceable” and that the facility would become one of Spartanburg County’s largest emitters of hazardous air pollutants.↩︎

7. Sam Harrelson, “While We Breathe,” Carolina Ecology, April 3, 2026; Sam Harrelson, “What Evaporates,” Carolina Ecology, May 7, 2026.↩︎

8. On parrhesia as frank or free speech, see Michel Foucault’s incredible 1983 lectures on the term and its Greek etymology.↩︎

9. Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of Sierra Club Upstate, Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County, and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. ↩︎

10. SCDES notes that the public comment period for the draft Synthetic Minor Air Construction Permit has been extended to July 31, 2026.↩︎