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.↩︎

Williamston, SC (Anderson County), has a pipe in the ground where the Upstate begins to run out of foothills, and the land begins its long tilt toward the Atlantic across ancient seashores. A column of water inside the pipe is a little more than three feet below the grass, held in the cracked crystalline rock that is the Piedmont’s true body under its skin of red clay. A sensor lowered into that water takes a reading every fifteen minutes, day and night, and has done so without much ceremony for years. What it records, most of the time, is “breathing.” Through the heat of each afternoon in Anderson County, the water sinks a fraction of an inch as the trees and grasses pull moisture up and out into the air, and through the cool of each night, it eases back. The daily wave is usually small (less than an inch from crest to trough). It’s the respiration of a water table going about the ordinary business of being a place, and there are lots of other shallow pipes across our country doing the same sensing.

On the evening of June 24th, around four minutes past 6 o’clock, the floor of that breathing dropped.

Nearly two thousand miles to the south, beneath the state of Yaracuy in Venezuela, the San Sebastián fault slipped. The Caribbean Plate and the South American Plate, which have been grinding past one another for eons, slipped by a meter or more along a seam in the crust of the planet, and the ground there shook hard enough to take down a third of some cities and to kill, in the first countings, more people than a town the size of Williamston usually holds. The energy released from the slip didn’t stay in Venezuela. It spread outward through the rock of the Earth as a wave, the way a struck bell sends a note through the air, and some fourteen minutes later... about the time a surface wave needs to cross that distance through the crust... it reached the cracked rock under Anderson County.

The water in the pipe “felt the squeeze,” if you will. By half past six, the sensor had logged a drop of roughly an eighth of a foot (about the width of a finger)... something like an inch and a half. And then, having dropped, the water didn’t climb back. The daily breathing resumed at once in the next sensor measurement, unbothered, as it had always been, the same small wave. However, it has now risen and fallen around a new, lower floor, and through the rest of last week, the floor has seemed to hold. The fracture had taken a set even here in the Carolinas, much like the way a green branch bent too far keeps a little of the bend. Here’s the full data set from the USGS sensor.

The first thing this asks of us is wonder at the plain fact of connection. For the length of a pressure wave, the Earth is one body. A column of water in South Carolina is in direct physical contact, through nothing but stone and energy waves, with a fault on the far side of the Caribbean. We’re joined to places we will never see and to griefs we will never witness by the ground we are standing on, and that joining isn’t a clever figure of speech. It’s measurable to the hundredth of a foot. There is a kind of comfort in this, and a kind of terror, and the two aren’t easy to pull apart when you give your ontology its own breathing room to consider and process.

The water registered the event, but it didn’t attend to it. It received the brute strain of the wave and passed it along, and it knew nothing whatever of Venezuela, nothing of the fault or the dead, injured, or displaced. The water wasn’t aware of the distance and velocity of the energy wave in any human sense. Aristotle gives us the language for the gap. To perceive, he says in the De Anima, is to receive the sensible form, the εἶδος (eidos), without the matter, the way wax takes the shape of a signet ring but not the gold (De Anima 424a). The water took the gold and the push of the matter, rather than the form of the thing that pushed it. So, in that sense, the water in the pipe in Anderson County didn’t perceive at all. It’s what Aristotle would call pure δύναμις (dynamis), potency, capacity, a thing acted upon, and it never crosses over into ἐνέργεια (energeia), into being-at-work, into the actuality that perceiving and living in fact are. It has no ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia), no form it holds itself toward, no end it enacts. It is partes extra partes, parts lying outside of parts, a heap of water in a heap of rock, and nothing in it gathers the heap into a “self” as Aristotle here would qualify it.

However, Henri Bergson saw the same thing from the other direction. In Matter and Memory (must read if you’re so inclined), he describes matter as the great aggregate that transmits everything and holds back nothing, while perception, living perception, is subtraction... the body standing in the flux as a center of indetermination, carving out of the total motion of the world only the slender portion that bears on what it might do next. The water table is the aggregate in Bergson’s sense. It transmits the whole planet’s tremors with perfect indifference, the Venezuelan one as readily as the log truck on US 20 that passes through Williamston. To perceive is to choose, and the water chooses nothing.

Likewise, Raymond Ruyer would say it has no survol, no self-survey, none of the way a living form is present to itself all at once without having to climb outside itself to look. The water is all outside. There is no inside there for the wave to reach.

I keep, in my own yard in Spartanburg (about an hour or so drive from Williamston), a thing that does what the water in a pipe underground can’t. The black walnut in the back leans into the light, times the unfurling of its leaves to the lengthening of the days, drops its fruit on a schedule older than the county, and lays down juglone in the soil beneath it to thin the competition that would crowd its roots.

Michael Marder has spent years arguing that this counts, that the vegetal reaching toward light and the timing and the chemistry are the rudiments of intentionality, a directedness, (a δύναμις) that is for something in a way the water’s emphatically is not. The walnut and the well sit only a few counties apart, and the distance between them is the distance my whole work is trying to understand.

Intentionality is not a property the universe adds to certain bodies from the outside; it is a structural feature of living form, present wherever there is form holding itself in act, and absent from the water (no matter how faithfully the water passes the tremor on). The microorganisms in the water are a different story.

Which means the well’s dropped line is a parable about us, and not about water. The registration sits there on the graph above, marked provisional and subject to revision, until a human comes and attends to it... until someone stands at the threshold and reads the lowered floor as the near edge of a far grief, and lets the eighth of a foot open onto 1/3 of a fallen city and the count of the dead, injured, and displaced. That translation, from bare registration into meaning, from strain into significance, is the work of attention.

Teachers and ministers of the spiritual life had a word for it well before the ministries of Jesus and Paul, προσοχή (prosochē), the watchfulness they took to be the beginning of any real interior life. They were right that it has to be practiced, that it does not come for free, that the natural drift of a mind is toward the heap and away from the form.

It’s the same poverty John of the Cross would later call a kind of night, a willed unknowing that empties the senses of their clamor so that something true has room to arrive. This is why I have come to think the ecological crisis is a crisis of attention before it is a crisis of carbon, policy, or machines.

The data center approved in secret council meetings and legal documents, the algal bloom in the Reflecting Pool, the clover renamed a weed so we could be sold a poison... each is a failure to attend, a treating of a living place as though it were only the well, only an aggregate to be transmitted through and drawn from and never once perceived.

Owen Barfield called the older way of knowing original participation, the sense, mostly lost to us, of mind and world as one continuous fabric rather than two strangers. He thought the task of our age was to find that participation again on the far side of our separation, with our eyes open this time. To attend to the well is a small instance of that finding. The water can’t reach back across the distance to Venezuela in any way that means anything. We can.

We are the ones in whom the bare continuity of the rock becomes a felt nearness, the ones who can hold a stranger’s grief in the reading of a line, and this capacity is no burden laid on us from outside; it is the very shape of what we are, form in act, made to perceive. The fracture in the Earth’s crust kept the lowered level like a memory with no one home to remember it. We are the ones at home. The discipline is only to be there, awake, when the wave arrives, and to let it find in us the inside it could not find in the water.

Notes and Further Reading

The event and the data

• USGS NWIS monitoring well 343714082285600 (”And-326”), Williamston, SC. Continuous depth-to-water record. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/USGS-343714082285600/

• Mark Price, “Massive quakes in Venezuela impacted groundwater levels in Carolinas, USGS learns,” The State, June 27, 2026. https://apple.news/Aiv-GzEp3QViLRShZ95a8fg

• “2026 Venezuela earthquakes,” Wikipedia (event overview, San Felipe / Yaracuy, Boconó–San Sebastián–El Pilar fault system). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Venezuela_earthquakes

Why a well in the Carolinas feels a fault in Venezuela

• USGS, “Groundwater Effects from Earthquakes” (Evelyn Roeloffs). The plain-language primary: oscillations, sustained offsets, and why a recorded step can be “instantaneous” only to the resolution of the sampling interval. https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/groundwater-effects-earthquakes

• Brodsky, E. E., Roeloffs, E., Woodcock, D., Gall, I., & Manga, M. (2003). A mechanism for sustained groundwater pressure changes induced by distant earthquakes. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 108(B8), 2390. The paper behind the part that matters most here, that the step holds rather than recovers, with a model of seismic waves clearing a clogged fracture. https://doi.org/10.1029/2002JB002321 (free copy: https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70025130)

• Roeloffs, E. (1998). Persistent water level changes in a well near Parkfield, California, due to local and distant earthquakes. JGR: Solid Earth, 103(B1), 869–889. The persistence classic, including the one-meter step from Loma Prieta. https://doi.org/10.1029/97JB02335

• Montgomery, D. R., & Manga, M. (2003). Streamflow and water well responses to earthquakes. Science, 300(5628), 2047–2049. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1082980

• Wang, C.-Y., & Manga, M. (2021). Water and Earthquakes. Springer (open access). Book-length treatment if you want the full hydroseismology. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64308-9

Mentioned Readings and References:

• Aristotle, De Anima, esp. II.1 (412a, first and second actuality, ἐντελέχεια) and II.12 (424a, perception as the reception of form without matter). Orientation: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Aristotle’s Psychology.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/ (Greek with facing translation: Christopher Shields, trans., Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford, 2016.)

• Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Θ (IX), on the priority of ἐνέργεια to δύναμις (1049b). SEP, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/

• Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896). Matter as the aggregate that transmits all, perception as subtraction. SEP, “Henri Bergson.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/ (Standard English edition: Paul & Palmer, trans., Zone Books, 1991; the 1911 translation is public-domain and free at the Internet Archive.)

• Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism (1952), Alyosha Edlebi, trans. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. On survol, a living form’s self-presence without an external vantage. ISBN 978-0816676293.

• Michael Marder, “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence.” Plant Signaling & Behavior, 7(11), 2012, 1365–1372 (open access). https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.21954

• Michael Marder, “Plant Intelligence and Attention.” Plant Signaling & Behavior, 8(5), 2013, e23902. The companion essay, directly on attention. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.23902

• Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0231161251.

• John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, Kavanaugh & Rodriguez, trans. ICS Publications. https://icspublications.org (public-domain Allison Peers translations free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org

• Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (1957). On original participation. Owen Barfield Literary Estate. https://owenbarfield.org

• Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Christian Alternative, 2019. The Barfieldian lineage and the cruciform reading of participation. https://www.markvernon.com

• Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Michael Chase, trans. Blackwell, 1995. On προσοχή (prosochē), attention as a practiced spiritual exercise. ISBN 978-0631180333.

As I’ve been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I’ve been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write.

That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed). You look back over a few poems, a few essays, a few notes written in the early morning before the kids are fully awake, and you begin to notice the threads.

In the midst of this, a phrase came to me while working in the yard to gather oak, maple, and walnut branches after a summer thunderstorm:

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas.

I like that term because it gives an expression to something I’ve been working on for years without pinning it down too tightly. I don’t think of my poems as “nature poems” in the abstract. I’m not usually writing about nature as scenery or background, and frankly don’t like the term (or “wilderness”). I’m writing about places that have addressed me in some way.

Obviously, there’s the black walnut tree in our yard here in Spartanburg. Cedar roses gathered from the front yard for an anniversary with Merianna, tobacco fields giving way to pine. Red clay and rain in the Piedmont. The Pee Dee. The Lowcountry. Rivers, ditches, old roads, churchyards, school mornings, family errands, and the small objects children leave behind in the grass.

Those things aren’t decorative, but are part of the grammar of my life.

I grew up in South Carolina, left for a while, and have spent a good portion of my adult life trying to understand what it means to belong to a place without pretending that belonging is simple. The Carolinas are beautiful, but they certainly aren’t innocent. Every landscape here carries memory. Indigenous presence and erasure. Enslaved labor and tobacco money. Church bells with pine plantations. Family stories. Stormwater ditches. Kudzu. Development. Black walnuts and cedars. The land remembers more than we do, and much of my writing has become an attempt to listen (before I offer something of an explanation).

That’s probably why trees show up so often in my poems and essays. Trees have become, for me, a kind of theological tutor. Instead of rushing or arguing in the way we argue, they receive weather, injury, children, birds, insects, drought, and time. They aren’t passive as some Aristotelians might veer towards, though. They’re constantly negotiating relation.

Roots, fungi, water, light, decay, growth, fruit, shade. There’s a whole world of attention happening in a tree, and most of it takes place beneath the level of our human perceptions or notice.

My own daily practice beneath the black walnut in our yard has taught me that attention isn’t a mood any more than creativity, with all of its weirdness and fickle muse, is. Attention is a discipline. Some mornings, nothing dramatic happens. A squirrel fusses while a Northern Cardinal cuts across the yard. A walnut falls. A child’s toy sits where it was abandoned the day before. The grass is wet while my coffee gets cold. But given enough mornings, these small things become more than small things. They become a way of being instructed by the world.

That’s where the sacramental language comes in for me.

By sacramental, I don’t mean that every leaf is a sermon illustration, or that every tree needs to be turned into a symbol as quickly as possible. I mean (almost) the opposite. The sacramental begins when the world is allowed to be itself deeply enough that it discloses more than itself, as Merleau-Ponty has taught me. A walnut remains a walnut while a cedar cone remains a cedar cone, no matter how much I want to apply an abstract level of emotion like love onto it. Red clay remains red clay. But in their full presence, they also carry relation, memory, gift, wound, and grace.

That has shaped the way I think about theology, too. I’m an ordained minister, and I still believe that Christian language has something true and necessary to say about the world. But I’ve become much less interested in theology that hovers above place and more interested in theology that has dirt under its fingernails as I’ve aged. The cross, for instance, has become harder for me to imagine only as an abstract doctrine. It was actually wood before it was a symbol. It was tree before it was theology. The Cross belonged to the same creation that Christian faith too often treats as stage scenery for human salvation.

So when I write about the Cross as a ruined tree, or grace as something greening through what has already been given, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m trying to recover something that should have been obvious all along, in my opinion... faith happens somewhere. Salvation, if we are going to use that word (another one of those words I struggle with, much like nature and wilderness), cannot mean escape from this world that God loves. It must involve learning how to see, inhabit, repair, and love this world more truthfully.

That’s also why family appears so often in what I write. My poems are full of trees, but they are also full of children’s laughter, marriage, errands, school mornings, half-finished meals, books, socks in the grass, and the ordinary clutter of a house where life is actually happening.

I don’t want a spirituality that requires me to leave all of that behind in order to find depth. The depth is there already. The trick is learning how to notice it without sentimentalizing it.

A cedar rose gathered from the yard can become a way of thinking about marriage. A walnut falling in the grass can become an invitation. A child’s forgotten shovel near the fence can become part of the liturgy of a morning. These aren’t grand revelations in the usual sense. To me, they’re more like reminders that nothing here is only here.

The Carolina part matters, too. I don’t want to write as if place were interchangeable. The Piedmont is not the Lowcountry. The Pee Dee is not Appalachia by any means. Spartanburg is not Marion County, though both live in me now (and certainly not Greenville, despite how much some folks in elected offices here seem to want that to be the case). Each place has its own ecology of memory. Each place teaches attention differently. The Carolina landscape has formed my imagination in ways I am still trying to understand: the humidity, the pine straw, the old church Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist languages and songs, the roads between small towns, the sound of summer insects, the uneasy layering of beauty and violence, tenderness and history.

Maybe that is why poetry feels increasingly necessary to me in my present context. Prose can explain, and I do love prose for that. Essays let me follow an idea, trace a history, build an argument, and hopefully make a convincing case. But poetry lets me stay closer to the moment before explanation closes around it. Poetry gives me a way to let the walnut fall, to let the cedar open, to let ruin become river before I decide too quickly what any of it means.

I don’t know that I set out to become a person who writes poems of place. I had no idea I’d have numerous poems published in anthologies and literary magazines. I certainly didn’t set out to write “sacramental place poetry rooted in the Carolinas,” because that phrase only arrived rather unexpectedly after the work had already begun. But I can see now that much of what I write is an attempt to practice a kind of ecological attention. I’m trying to attend to the more-than-human world, to the household, to memory, to Christian faith, to the old wounds and stubborn grace of this region, and to the ways all of these keep speaking through one another.

That may be why I keep returning to the same images of trees, rain, children, ruin, roots, rivers, crosses, fields, and birds. The “ordinary” holiness of a yard in the morning.

I’m writing because I want to remember that the world is alive with address.

I’m writing because I want to learn how to receive that address without rushing to master it.

I’m writing because the Carolinas have made claims on me, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life learning how to answer.

These days, that answer often comes as a poem.

And with that, here’s a poem I wrote:

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.

I respect a well-cared-for lawn. The ground beneath the black walnut in our backyard isn’t a lawn per se (and it was never going to be one). I’ve got a green thumb, and when we first moved here, I was perplexed by the understory of this tree that I’ve grown to admire and love. Moss takes the north side of the trunk while violets come up where they want. The grass and anything else that is planted or takes root isn’t so happy with the juglone that the Juglans nigra produces.

By late summer, the seed husks fall and stain our children’s hands the color of old iodine. The tree fixes juglone into its own root zone, the way it casts a shadow over the morning at my beloved sitting spot near its trunk, and the result is a patch of earth that ultimately doesn’t abide by the tidy green expectation we’ve been taught to carry in our eyes before we ever reach the yard. For a long time, I thought of this refusal as a problem to be solved. I’ve spent the better part of these last few years at CIIS in my PhD studies, unlearning that reading.

Perhaps it’s all my reading for comps this summer, but I’ve been fixated on the human eye, and about how much arrives already inside the looking and how much it does to shape our perceptions before images reach our brain via the optic nerve (even those with plaque on them like mine). A few hundred miles north of the black walnut in our backyard, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has spent the past two weeks turning green again.

The basin was drained, resurfaced with a darker coating someone decided to call “American flag blue,” and refilled at a cost that has now climbed into the neighborhood of $15 million, all of it timed to the country’s two hundred fiftieth summer (or someone’s 80th birthday extravaganza). Within days of being “fixed,” the water… bloomed. Crews have recently been pouring in 12% hydrogen peroxide, running ozone through the water in clouds of fine bubbles, and vacuuming dead algae off the bottom like a Carolina backyard pool in July. The official language of someone has ranged from filth to sabotage to now vandalism. Scientists, when the press happens to ask them, keep saying the same patient thing with the pool being shallow, sunlit, slow, and now darker than it was, which means warmer, and warm shallow still water full of leftover nutrients is the most ordinary cradle for algae that the summer knows how to make. The bloom isn’t a wound in the system. Rather, an algal bloom is actually the “system” telling the truth about itself, no matter how humanly constructed the container is.

We don’t see green water and then decide it is filth at first. The judgment is already folded into the seeing itself. The pool was asked to hold a fixed and decorative form, a color borrowed from a flag, and when the living water answered with a form of its own, we read that answer as a failure before we had finished perceiving it. In classical and koine Greek, κόσμος (kosmos) means “order,” or the “arrangement” of a world. K/cosmos also means “adornment,” such as the ornament we lay over a surface, which is why our word cosmetic descends from it. The renovation of the Reflecting Pool aligns with the adornment's intent. It wanted the pool to be an ornament, a held image, the monument’s blue mirror straight out of Forrest Gump rather than MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But what the water did was the first meaning, its own order, with the green arrangement shallow warm water arrives at when left to be what it is.

Aristotle comes to mind as I think about neo-classical overlays, adornments, and perception in the District of Columbia. A thing can be in a state of capacity, δύναμις (dynamis), potency, the not-yet, or it can be in the condition of being fully at work as itself, ἐνέργεια (energeia), and beyond even that, in the completeness of having its end within it, ἐντελέχεια (entelecheia), form held in act. The blue coating is δύναμις that was done and called finished, as a potency frozen into a picture, never to move. The bloom is ἐνέργεια, the water at work being water, the basin coming into the only completeness available to a sunlit shallow with no shade and nothing to do with the light but warm under it. We have spent a great deal of public money and public anger insisting that a living surface behave like a painted one, and we have called its living the very name of its disgrace. There is even a small irony buried in the chemistry. The pigment doing the blooming is named for its color, χλωρός (chloros), the pale green that also names chlorophyll and named chlorine, so that the green we are fighting and the green-named element we long reached for to fight it are kin in the same ancient word and concept of our human vocabulary.

Once you have felt that hinge of perception turn its wheel, you start to notice it everywhere, and nowhere more plainly than in the lawn the Reflecting Pool is meant to crown. Before World War II, the most prized component of a good lawn seed mix in this country was clover (which makes my favorite honey). Gardeners judged the quality of a mixture by how much clover it carried. Clover is a legume that draws nitrogen from the air and fixes it into the soil, so the grass nearest the clover grew the greenest, and the bees worked the small white flowers all summer. Then the war’s chemistry came home. 2,4-D, the first synthetic broadleaf herbicide as Weedone, a chemical of half of what would later be sprayed over the forests of Vietnam as Agent Orange, turned out to kill clover along with the (useful and beautiful) dandelion and plantain, indiscriminately, because that is what a broadleaf killer does.

Dow and DuPont couldn’t make 2,4-D spare clover (or didn’t want to invest in the means to do so after grabbing patents that have long since expired). So, they did the cheaper thing. They changed the eye instead of the chemical. Within a few seasons, the advertising had reclassified clover as a weed, a blemish, a thing to be poisoned out of a respectable yard of a respectable family. One of the men who helped discover 2,4-D admitted in print that calling clover a weed would have shocked the older gardeners who once measured a seed mix by its clover content. The “weed” was invented as a perceptual category dressed as a botanical one, and we bought it by the bag (and still do).

A weed, after all, has never been a kind of plant. It’s a verdict we have learned to deliver at a glance, a name for any living form whose shape does not match the image we were sold for those of us looking to be respectable. However, a uniform green carpet isn’t the natural condition of a yard recovering its order (coming from someone who loves golf in theory). A green lawn is a manufactured κόσμος in the cosmetic sense, an ornament held in place by quarterly chemistry and by seventy years of being told what a lawn is supposed to look like. We learned to see clover as filth for the same reason someone or a crowd at the Reflecting Pool learned to see an algal bloom as sabotage. The seeing was trained, and the training served someone.

Which brings the whole circuit home, down the Piedmont to my own watershed, because the green we demand on the lawn and the green we evidently abhor or cheer in the Reflecting Pool aren’t opposites. They’re the same green, fed by the same thing. The nitrogen and phosphorus we spread to keep our lawns uniform and unnaturally bright don’t stay on the grass. They run off the manicured yards of Spartanburg’s beautiful and respectable neighborhoods with the next hard rain, down the gutters and the storm drains, and into Duncan Park Lake, Lawson’s Fork, Fairforest Creek, and our many tributaries in between, where in the slow warm pools of late summer they do what the leftover nutrients did in the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. They bloom.

The fertilizer that gives the lawn its lifeless perfection is the same fertilizer that greens the creek and starves it of oxygen downstream. We poison the clover to hold an image of health, and the chemistry of that image travels to the water and produces, a few hundred yards away, the very bloom we would call filth if it surfaced at our feet or on our neighborhood’s pond. The lawn and the algae are one process wearing two faces. What we kill in the yard, we feed in the creek.

All of which leaves me with a question I’ve been pondering in my “What if I Were Someone?” mode. What if we left it? Not out of neglect, and not because a bloom is harmless, since a bloom in warm and overfed water is a symptom before it is anything else, an index of the nutrients we put there and the heat we keep adding. But the pool was built to reflect, and a surface held blue by chemistry reflects only what we have already decided to see. A surface allowed to green would reflect the watershed (such as the Potomac with all of its troubles) we actually inhabit, the runoff and the warming and the long summer we have made, and it would hold that condition up at the center of the Mall, where the nation goes to look at itself. Truth that meant unconcealment, or ἀλήθεια (alētheia), the state of a thing no longer hidden as frequently referenced in both the New Testament and countless ancient sources. A reflecting pool left to bloom would be ἀλήθεια in the plainest sense, the most photographed water in the country declining to hide its own metabolism. The question is whether we could bear to keep looking at it, and what it would ask of us once we had. Or would we walk away from Omelas? Plant a tree in Thneedville?

The Reflecting Pool bakes in the warm and humid D.C. summers because it has no shade and nothing between it and the sun; the ground under the walnut stays cool and mossy and clovered because it has too much shade and juglone for any monoculture to take hold. The same condition is seen as failure in one place and as refuge in the other, and the only difference is what we came expecting to see. The slow work, the only work I trust anymore, is learning to let perception run the other direction, toward the living form and not away from it... to see the bloom as the water in act, the clover as the soil feeding itself, the unbought ground beneath an old tree as an order rather than a lapse. The Reflecting Pool was built by humans to reflect monuments of human achievement and bravery. What it has reflected instead, all this green and anxious summer, is us, and the demand we have learned to carry in the eye before we ever arrive at the water.

I love that Spartanburg downtown is a walkable, bike-friendly city. Sure, we have some things to improve, but the momentum is in a positive direction here. Liv does a wonderful job writing about some of this over on The Walking Spartan. Having lived in Asheville, NC (also with positive momentum and a vibrant walking town), Columbia, SC (not so much a walkable city despite the planned grid layout downtown that serves USC and the government functionaries well), Sumter, SC (walking seems to be a punishable offense), and my hometown of Mullins, SC (small town feel and if you can avoid the main highway it’s walkable), I’m glad to say Spartanburg with its Rail Trail, The Dan, incredible team at PAL, and a number of local-led initiatives, is becoming more pedestrian friendly with road diets and more thoughtful road intersections.

I obviously enjoy my walks here, both solo and with our children. Despite recent construction and road reconfiguration, Morgan Square downtown is a good reminder, as light stays sideways along Main Street even on warm summer afternoons. The square is a made thing, and on a quiet morning, you can almost watch it being made again. The curbs run along the sides of streets, and crosswalks where traffic picks back up after the pedestrian-only section lie at right angles to the buildings as designed (and now re-designed). The brick storefronts hold their cornices at a common height, and the whole arrangement gathers itself around the figure of Daniel Morgan on his pedestal, a center fixed a hundred years ago by people with chains and a transit, who looked through a small glass at a distant rod and wrote the town down in numbers as Spartanburg became a town. We are the Hub City because of the ubiquitous railroad tracks that were laid across the area (some of which are now reassembled into our Rail Trail). The streets remember the drawings and surveys, even if they aren’t necessarily straight now, and more metaphorical than resembling a hub with clear spokes (no remark here on our Spartanburg minor league’s team name… ok, I like it). To stand in the square in the morning or afternoon hours is to stand inside a survey... a thing laid out from a point of view, measured from somewhere, held together by a plan that lives in a courthouse drawer and in the habits of everyone who keeps the lines. That’s especially true now, as evidenced by the ongoing construction of a new hotel and center abutting our recently constructed baseball stadium. I won’t touch the thorny Clock Tower issue here.

But sometimes, as we’re in Morgan Square, I’ll kneel down to tie one of our children’s shoes or help confirm their latest sighting of a cool bug near the edge of a planting bed, or at the lip of a storm grate, and I find the other kind of thing entirely.

There’s spotted spurge (Euphorbia maculata) flattened against the warm concrete, its small leaves laddered along red stems, bleeding white when you break them. There is broadleaf plantain in the seam where the sidewalk meets the building, its ribbed leaves fanned out in a rosette that no one drew. There’s a mulberry seedling, or a hackberry, no taller than my hand, holding two true leaves up out of a crack that collects just enough grit and rain to be a soil.

A human didn’t survey these, nor was any transit or construction equipment used to fix them. They weren’t assigned a height to match the cornices. But each one holds a form, keeps a form, presses a form up out of itself into the morning, with an exactness the square doesn’t teach and doesn’t own. The spurge is more itself than the crosswalk is itself in that way. The “made” Daniel Morgan Square is held together from the outside by us. The “weed” (I don’t prefer that term, but will employ it here) in the crack is held together from the inside by nothing I can point to.

I have been heavily reading a French philosopher this summer who spent his life on exactly this difference, and reading him for a particular reason, so let me say who he was and why I am down here on the sidewalk with him.

Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) taught philosophy at the Université de Nancy and wrote more than twenty books, most of which have never been translated into other languages, on the strange seam where biology meets metaphysics. He is little known in English, partly because his major work, Néo-finalisme, remained in French from 1952 until an English translation finally appeared in 2016. He was not a vitalist of the old romantic kind, and he wasn’t content with the machine-talk that was overtaking biology in his lifetime. He wanted to know how a living form holds itself together, how an embryo builds a body, and how a melody stays a melody. Most fascinating to me was that he was willing to follow that question past the edge of what the science of his day could say. The philosophers who read him carefully tended to be the ones who could not be ignored. Deleuze called him the latest disciple of Leibniz.

I’m reading Ruyer and Deleuze now as I’m preparing for comprehensive examinations this summer and fall… that long threshold a doctoral student crosses after coursework and before the dissertation itself begins, as we try to realize how much we still don’t know despite all that we’ve learned (or “to build even more expertise!” as a Mentor optimistically put it). Ruyer sits near the center of the framework I am trying to build there, which I have been calling ecological intentionality. The sidewalk is one place where I test whether the ecological intentionality framework can work (see?).

Ruyer’s central word is survol. It means, literally, a flight over. You “survol” a landscape when you fly across it. In one of Deleuze and Guattari’s books I’ve been working on, the word gets rendered into English as survey, in another as overview, and one careful translator chose overflight to keep the wings in it. I found that translation point to be interesting for my own notes this summer and my own work. I like having all three in the air at once, because Ruyer is after something the ordinary words almost hide.

When a surveyor surveys the square, they stand at a fixed point, sight across a distance, and build the whole out of measured parts seen from where they happen to be standing. Their survey has a center and a circumference, a here and a there, an eye and an object. Ruyer’s survol absolu, his “absolute survey,” doesn’t follow that practice or methodology. The living form, he says, surveys itself all at once, with no distance inside it, from no particular point, with nothing standing outside it to do the seeing. The spurge does not assemble itself, leaf by leaf, according to a plan filed elsewhere and kept in the county courthouse down the street from Morgan Square. The plant is present to itself, whole, in the act of being spurge. There is no surveyor inside the seedling looking at the seedling. There’s only the form, flying over itself without leaving the ground, holding every part in a single self-possession that has no point of view because it needs none.

This is why Ruyer can say the unsettling thing he says, that an embryo is a kind of primary organic consciousness... not because it thinks, necessarily, but because the way it holds its own developing form together is already the deep form of what consciousness will later become. Mind does not arrive later, bolted onto matter from outside. The self-survey is there at the bottom, in the simplest living shape that keeps itself. Matter, in this view, isn’t a heap of parts waiting to be organized by an external hand. The forms in it are oriented, gathered toward an ideal of themselves, working. Ruyer ties three words together tightly here to help make his point: existence, freedom, and work. To exist as a true form is to be at work actualizing a form one is not yet finished being, and that labor, judged against the form it reaches for, is what freedom actually means. The spurge is free in Ruyer’s sense. It’s at work being spurge, and it can succeed or fail.

I find I can’t unsee the difference now when I walk Morgan Square or Spartanburg’s Rail Trails and sidewalks. The city is the great aggregate, the masterpiece of assembly from outside. Every straight line in it is a decision held somewhere other than the thing itself as a code, a permit, a drawing, a maintenance schedule, the muscle memory of the crew that repaints the crosswalks around town. Take away the people who hold the plan, and the painted lines begin to fade, and the grout fails on building facades.

The square doesn’t survey itself. Rather, it is surveyed, and it stays square only as long as the surveying continues. But the spurge in the crack would go right on being spurge with no one watching at all, because the plan of it is not in a drawer. The plan of it is in the act of it. This is the old Aristotelian word (reading lots of Aristotle as well this summer) that I keep returning to in my exam work, ἐντελέχεια, entelecheia, or “being-at-an-end.” Something like form held in act rather than waiting in potency.

Aristotle distinguished a first actuality from a second, the having of a form from the active use of it, and Ruyer’s self-survey lives there as well, in the form that is not a blueprint but an actuality keeping itself actual. The Greek for the working itself, ἐνέργεια, energeia, is the same root we have flattened into a utility bill. Downtown, on a summer sidewalk, the distinction isn’t as academic as that comparison, though. The “grid” (also an interesting metaphor of abstraction we’ve settled on for some reason) runs on ἐνέργεια in the metered sense, fed from elsewhere, and it would die the moment the feed stopped, as it tends to do during major afternoon thunderstorms and hurricanes here. The weed runs on ἐνέργεια in the older sense, the work of a form keeping its own form, and doesn’t ask the city for anything beyond a few spare photons.

I could write this into a sermon against cities and try to take Ruyer in the direction of Le Guin’s fantastic work Always Coming Home as a post-dystopian anti-utopia of Carrier Bag sentiment (maybe I should do that soon!), but that isn’t what the sidewalk is teaching me through this phenomenological exercise of attention and intentionality.

Morgan Square isn’t diminished by being assembled and reassembled. It’s a remarkable thing, a cooperation across two centuries, and the planted willow oaks and crape myrtles along the street are real organisms that someone chose to make room for at some point in all of this assembly work and thought. What the sidewalk teaches here is finer than a verdict or condemnation of urban life for humans and more-than-humans. The sidewalk teaches a way of seeing that holds two kinds of order at once and doesn’t confuse them… the order we impose and must keep imposing, and the order a living form keeps for itself, whether we attend to it or not.

Most of our public arguments about land, about water, about what we are allowed to build and where, run aground precisely because we cannot tell these two apart. From data centers to mono-crop agriculture to Amazon warehouses to ubiquitous carwashes and dollar stores, we treat a living watershed as though it were a grid we surveyed, a set of measured parts we may re-survey at will, and we are surprised, every time, when it does not behave like a drawing. A creek is a survol. It surveys itself. You can route it, culvert it, and write it down, and it will go on being what it is beneath your numbers, and it will hold you to account for the difference (eventually).

So, I have taken to doing a small thing downtown or on the Rail Trail as we make our way to the oasis that is Fretwell on a sunny afternoon: on each walk, find one form that surveys itself and one that is surveyed, and attend each long enough to “feel” or be attended by the difference in my own attention. The lichen on the stone near the Masonic Lodge, grey-green and slow, a single living surface that is somehow two organisms at once, holding a shape across years while the building it grows on is repainted and re-leased and re-permitted around it. The chimney swifts at dusk over the old mills and granaries in the Grain District, a flock that is a single moving form, a melody written in birds, surveying itself across the evening without a conductor and a score. The plantain in the seam. The mulberry in the grate. And then, by contrast, the beautiful surveyed things: the true curb, the square corner, the painted line. I’m trying not to choose between them. But I am trying to keep them distinct, because the day we forget which is which is the day we start treating the living forms as though they were ours to re-draw, and they aren’t. They were keeping themselves long before we arrived with the transit, and they are keeping themselves still, down in the cracks of the survey, flying over their own small shapes without ever leaving the ground.

Back home, under the black walnut where I keep my sitting spot, the same lesson waits in a larger body. The walnut surveys itself. It has been at the work of being a walnut for longer than I have owned the ground it stands on (or have been an embryo-turned-human), and it will go on at that work, free in Ruyer’s exact sense, succeeding or failing at a form it carries whole inside the act of carrying it. The fence around it is surveyed. The tree is a survey. I am slowly learning to tell the difference and to let that change how I live beside both.

References

Aristotle. De Anima (On the Soul). Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin, 1986.

Bogue, Ronald. “The Force that Is but Does Not Act: Ruyer, Leibniz and Deleuze.” Deleuze Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 518–537.

Bogue, Ronald. “Raymond Ruyer.” In Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Ruyer, Raymond. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Originally published as Néo-finalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952).

Ruyer, Raymond. The Genesis of Living Forms. Translated by Jon Roffe and Nicholas B. De Weydenthal. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020. Originally published as La genèse des formes vivantes (Paris: Flammarion, 1958).

Smith, Daniel W. “Raymond Ruyer and the Metaphysics of Absolute Forms.” Parrhesia 27 (2017): 116–128.

Water is never far away in the Pee Dee, and under my home county of Marion, you sense that in the same way that you feel a hardwood floor through a thin rug. The land is low and mostly sandy, laid down by old seas, and the rivers that cross it run dark with the tannins of the swamps they drain, which always made me a little trepidatious skiing and wakeboarding on the Little Pee Dee as a young person when it was high enough for such things. The Great Pee Dee on one edge, the Little Pee Dee and the Lumber (after the ancestral Lumbee People) easing down toward it, Catfish Creek slipping past Mullins. I grew up close enough to that water to know its smell after rain. It was the first landscape I learned to read, before I had words for reading a landscape at all.

This June, the water is far. South Carolina is in drought again, despite recent rains and the inevitability of an El Niño summer and winter that normally bring wetter conditions. Along the coastal plain, farmers are cutting back on what they plant and raising what they charge, because not enough is falling and not enough water is being held in the soil. The rivers the Winyah Rivers Alliance (Hydrologic Unit Code 030402) keeps watch over are running low for this time of year. A county, like Marion, worried about its water isn’t something to be argued about, but is a place where you can walk down to the creek in June and find the pale line on the bank where the water used to be. Now hold that picture, and let’s go back to January.

In the last week of January, while that same coastal plain was bracing for one of the rare winter and snow storms that would close our state down for days, the Marion County Council met and approved a thing it wouldn’t name. On the agenda was Project Liberty. The line item carried no details because the council had signed a nondisclosure agreement and wasn’t free to say what it had voted on. Most of the county was watching the sky, buying rock salt (and bread and milk) from Walmart, bringing in the animals, and doing the small, frightened arithmetic a Carolina town does whenever ice is coming. The meeting was legal, and the notice was posted inside the window as required by law. And almost no one knew it was happening, though.

What had been approved, residents would learn over the following weeks, was a data center. A pretty large one with promises of much-needed tax revenue (eventually). Stream Data Centers, a developer out of Dallas, had its eye on a four-hundred-acre tract in the industrial park off the Highway 501 Bypass between Marion and Mullins that I have driven by too many times to count in my years on this planet and in Marion County. The plan ran through two phases and as many as nine buildings, with a first phase valued near eight hundred million dollars and a full buildout, the county said, of two and a half billion. By the time it surfaced again on a county agenda, even the name had changed. Project Liberty had become Eagle Myra, LLC. A thing approved before it could be spoken, by people who had agreed in writing not to speak it.

Secrecy isn’t incidental to the story. It’s the story’s first fact about how the land is treated. When a county signs away its ability to tell its own residents what is being built among them, it has already decided something about who the place is for. The county’s interim administrator, who also holds a seat in the state legislature, called the nondisclosure agreement ordinary and the usual practice in economic development. As weird as that may sound to those of us not in the day-to-day of governing, he’s not wrong about how common it has become. That’s the trouble, though. The practice is so normal now that a county can trade away the public’s knowledge of its own water and its own air and file the trade under routine.

Each building, the county said, would use something like seven thousand gallons of water a day, the whole campus amounting, by that arithmetic, to no more than a modest neighborhood’s draw in the county. The tax arrangement, a fee paid in lieu of ordinary property taxes, would spare the developer tens of millions while promising the county, at full buildout, more in a year than its entire annual budget. The jobs, when the buildings were humming, would number about sixty at full capacity by the county’s own count, though the developer itself had earlier put the figure nearer twenty (in a county of less than 30,000 humans where the poverty rate runs at twice the national figure and barely two in three households have steady access to the internet, the center would help to serve).

Set the water figure down on the table and look at it in good light. 7,000 gallons a day per building is a modest number, the sort a person can hear and feel reassured by. It is also far below what comparable facilities elsewhere are known to draw, low enough that anyone who has followed these projects would want to ask what kind of cooling produces it and what it costs in electricity instead, and whether the number describes the whole operation or one early, hopeful slice of it. Under a nondisclosure agreement, those questions have no place to land. That’s the deeper problem with a number delivered from behind a signed silence. It’s not a fact you can check. It’s a figure you are asked to accept from people who have promised someone else not to tell you the rest.

I have watched this same logic arrive at the other end of South Carolina in my other hometown. In Spartanburg, here in the Piedmont where I live now, I spent a long while tracing what the NorthMark project meant for our water, and the figures there weren’t modest at all. Hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, the great majority of it lost to the air as vapor, gone from the watershed entirely. Two ends of one state, two different geologies of water. Here in the Piedmont, the rock is hard, and the creeks run fast off it, so what you take you take from the surface, from Lawson’s Fork and the Pacolet. Down in the Pee Dee, the sand is deep, and the water table sits close beneath your feet, and what you take you draw up from an aquifer that the U.S. Geological Survey has already flagged for long-term decline across the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Different water, drawn differently, asked for by the same appetite. The machine doesn’t care which part of Carolina it is standing in… it only cares that the water is there and that the asking can be done quietly.

The reporting that brought Project Liberty into the light set it within a pattern that runs the length of the country: developers using nondisclosure agreements to push these projects into rural, often majority-Black counties with less organized power to push back, sometimes after a wealthier or whiter community nearby has already organized and said no. Marion County is a majority-Black county. It fits the pattern the way a key fits a lock that was cut for it. None of this happens against the grain of policy, either. It runs with the current of a federal push to fast-track data centers in the name of winning an artificial-intelligence race, a push that asks agencies to thin out the very environmental reviews that might otherwise slow things down long enough for a county to read them.

What broke the quiet in Marion was not the policy and not the developer. It was people. They packed the county administration building when the two public sessions finally came, in late February, a month after the vote. The faces sent to answer them belonged to the company and to state agencies, Commerce and Environmental Services. The elected officials who had signed the thing into being were not in the room. The people asked the plain questions, a hidden vote had denied them anyway… what will this do to the water, where is our money going, why were we the last to know? One council member, Joel Rogers, had already said aloud that he received the important documents only a day or two before he was asked to vote on them, and that the county would do well to slow down. Residents organized, not to win a single fight but to make sure the next Project Liberty could not slip in under the cover of an ice storm.

Two days ago, Stream announced (from Dallas) that it would not be moving forward with the data center project. The reason it gave was neither the water nor the people of Marion County. It was utility timing. The power could not be brought to the site fast enough to meet the company’s schedule, and so the project, citing the constraint, withdrew. The language around the leaving was warm. The company said what mattered most to it was the community itself, that it meant to be a good neighbor and a responsible developer, and that the funds it had already pledged would still arrive, routed to after-school programs and library shelves and other good local things, though which ones have not yet been named. It is hard to feel the warmth in the silence that opened the whole affair. A good neighbor, in the Pee Dee or anywhere, is one you have met before they are standing in your yard.

I understand the relief, and I share some of it. The residents who fought this are right to be glad. But I would ask my home county to notice the grammar of the ending as carefully as it noticed the silence at the beginning. The center did not leave because Marion County’s water was judged too precious, or because its people had not been told. It left because a wire could not be run on time. Change the wiring, change the schedule, and the same project, or its cousin, comes back to the same sandy ground, the same shallow aquifer, the same drought-thinned rivers, with the same agreement to say nothing. The thing that produced Project Liberty is still fully intact. Only this particular instance is dissolved, for reasons unrelated to the questions people were asking.

The people who organized against it understand this better than anyone. The groups that formed in the Spring greeted the news with relief and, in the same breath, with a warning to one another… don’t let it be quietly shelved now that it is dead. Push for the kind of ordinance that would keep the next one from ever arriving in the dark. A withdrawal isn’t a protection. It’s a reprieve, and reprieves expire.

There’s a term in the Greek of the New Testament, παρρησία, parrhēsia, that the early church used for a particular kind of courage: speech that is plain, public, and unafraid, the freedom to say the true thing out loud in the open assembly. It is the exact opposite of a nondisclosure agreement. I’ve been teaching a Sunday School class this spring on what it means to be free (thanks, Epictetus), and I keep coming back to how thin our usual sense of the word has become. The developer named its project Liberty. Marion County wasn’t free to say what Liberty was. The residents were free only after the fact, free to be angry, free to demand an accounting of a decision already made. That’s not the freedom worth the name. The freedom worth the name is the one that lets a people know, in time, what is being asked of the water that their children and their farms and their churches all draw from the same low ground.

So I’ll keep doing the only thing I know to do with a place I love, which is to pay it the attention that secrecy is designed to prevent. I’ll keep walking down to the creek with my children behind my home here in Spartanburg and the Little Pee Dee near my family home in Mullins when I’m able to visit. I will keep watching the line on the bank rise and fall. When the next quiet vote comes, and it will come, in Marion or in Colleton or Allendale or in some county whose name I do not yet know, the work will be the same as it has always been. Look first. Name what you see. Say it out loud, in the open, while there is still time to be heard.

The ice storm passed, but the drought hasn’t. And the water under my home county is still there, close beneath the sand, waiting to be either tended or taken.

June in South Carolina is a month of contradictions in many ways. This morning, we’re in the 70’s with off-and-on rain showers. We’ll be back in the 90’s with rising humidity soon enough. July is a different story if the past is any indication of our current weather, climate, and mosquito count.

By four o’clock in June here in Spartanburg, the black walnut has carried its shade most of the way across the back of our yard, and the chair (where I usually sit to meditate, pray, laugh, read, cry, talk Star Wars with my son or Harry Potter with my daughter while she’s on the tire swing), under it has gone from a place I avoid to a place I keep. The shade moves the way a tide moves, slow enough that you cannot watch it and sure enough that you can set your afternoon by it. There is a line on the grass, soft at its edge, where the light stops, and the cool begins, and crossing that line is one of the plainest pleasures I know. The air does not change much. What changes is the radiation falling on my skin and my head, the long press of the sun lifted off in a single step. The walnut does this without effort and without my asking, all summer, for free.

I’ve been keeping this sitting spot beside this tree long enough now (since August of 2024) that I notice the small things ... the way the shade is thinner in early leaf and thickens through July, and the way a breeze through the canopy carries a coolness the still air under it doesn’t have. A body knows shade before a mind has any words for it. You feel the difference at the back of the neck and across the forearms first, and only later does it occur to you to call it relief. This is the order I trust. Perception arrives ahead of judgment, and most of what I have come to think about trees began as something felt under one before it was anything I could argue.

I grew up in a place where that feeling was rarer than it should have been. Mullins sits in the Pee Dee, in the coastal plain, in a country that was made flat and made for tobacco, and the heat there is a different experience from the heat of the Piedmont. It’s a low, wet, standing heat, the kind that settles into open fields and does not move, and in the part of the world I came up in there were long stretches with nowhere to put your body that the sun didn’t reach. A field of tobacco offers a child no mercy at midday as I learned very early (and I’m old enough to remember other young kids selling ice shaving from huge blocks of ice placed on burlap sacks outside of the non-air conditioned tobacco barns when the auctions would start for that year’s harvest in August and September). The shade you found was the shade you went looking for... the north side of a barn, the dark under a porch, a lone live oak left standing at the corner of a field because someone two generations back had the sense or the sentiment to leave it. I wish we’d been able to leave more chestnuts but globalization took care of those here. I learned early that shade was not evenly given. Some places had it and some places had been stripped of it, and a child working in the second kind of place understood the difference in his shoulders by ten in the morning.

The Piedmont where I live now is a more forgiving land for a body in summer, rolling and wooded, its hardwoods closing over the older streets so that you can walk some blocks of Spartanburg in a green tunnel and others in bare glare and open hot asphalt. The contrast between the two regions is more than memory. It’s the first fact I reach for when I try to think honestly about what trees are for when it comes to human perception not their more immediate roles in ecology. We talk about canopy in the language of carbon and stormwater and property value, all of it true, but the older and simpler truth is the one a field hand and a tired walker share. A tree is also a place to stand that the sun can’t punish in a South Carolina summer. The question of who gets to stand there isn’t a small one, either.

What the body senses as relief, our data and instruments also confirm. A surface in the shade of a tree can run twenty to forty-five degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the same surface in full sun at the peak of the day, because a tree’s leaves and branches let only about ten to thirty percent of solar radiation pass through the canopy, with the rest absorbed or reflected back. Temperatures under the canopy of a tree can be as much as twenty-five degrees cooler than in full sun. The cooling isn’t only a matter of the patch of ground directly beneath. Across the built environment of the country, the shading effect of urban trees lowers near-surface air temperature by about three degrees Celsius on a daily average, chiefly by reducing the energy that reaches the pavement and walls that would otherwise store and re-radiate it as heat. A recent synthesis of studies (see below for links and further reading) from cities around the world found that urban trees can lower air temperature at the height a person walks by as much as twelve degrees Celsius, depending on climate, the shape of the streets, and the traits of the tree itself.

The number that comes closest to the felt thing is the one that measures the felt thing. What our bodies actually experience isn’t air temperature alone but a blend of air, humidity, wind, and radiation. Shade works hardest on that radiation. The shade of trees can lower the physiologically equivalent temperature, which is to say how warm we actually feel our surroundings to be, by somewhere between seven and fifteen degrees Celsius depending on latitude. That’s a gap between bearable and dangerous on a July afternoon. It is also, indoors, a matter of money and exposure, since shade from trees has been shown to cut the air conditioning costs of detached houses by twenty to thirty percent. The household that cannot afford the cooling bill is often the same household the trees were never planted near.

There’s an old word underneath all of this. The Greek of the Psalms and the Gospels reaches for shade when it wants to say shelter. σκιά (skiá) is shadow and shade at once, the cool thrown by a thing that stands between you and what would otherwise fall on you. To dwell ἐν σκιᾷ, in the shade, is in that older tongue to be kept, to be covered, to be guarded by something larger than yourself. The Epistle to the Hebrews (not one of Paul’s, btw) uses the same word for a foreshadowing, σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων, a shade cast backward from things still to come. I don’t think this is only metaphor borrowed from agriculture or an agrarian mindset. I think the writer(s) knew, as a field knows, that to stand in shade is to stand inside a kind of mercy, and that the absence of it is a real exposure and not a figure of speech.

When you widen the lens from the single tree to the neighborhood, the mercy turns out to be distributed the way most mercies are in this country, which is to say unevenly and along old lines. American Forests (again, see below for all the links and citations), mapping canopy against income and race across the United States, found that neighborhoods where most residents are people of color have on average 33% less tree canopy than majority-white neighborhoods, and neighborhoods where 90% or more of residents live in poverty have 41% less canopy than the wealthiest ones.

A map of tree cover in an American city is too often a map of race and income. The shade I cross into in my own backyard is, at the scale of a city, a thing some people own a great deal of and others have been left without.

This was drawn on purpose, generations ago, and it has held in our current broken system of housing, especially here in the US Southeast. Studying more than a hundred urban areas, researchers found that land surface temperatures in formerly redlined neighborhoods run about 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in summer than in neighborhoods that were never redlined. Across those areas the pattern was nearly universal ... ninety-four percent of the cities studied showed higher land surface temperatures in the formerly redlined districts, by as much as 7 degrees Celsius, with those areas averaging about 2.6 degrees Celsius warmer than their non-redlined neighbors, owing in part to more pavement and less canopy.

And the disparity is worst where I am from. The largest within-city temperature gaps appeared in southern and western cities, with the smallest in the Midwest. The South built its heat inequities deliberately and then let the trees (or the lack of them) keep the books as we still do with the mega-quick “starter” home developments popping up across counties such as Spartanburg with our lenient laws and ordinances for such things.

What’s at stake in this accounting is not comfort alone. It is years of life. A health assessment of Philadelphia estimated that raising tree canopy toward a 30% target in every neighborhood could prevent on the order of four hundred premature deaths a year, with even modest increases in canopy yielding measurable reductions in mortality, and with the lowest existing canopy found in the lower-income neighborhoods that stand to gain the most. Because heat and its harms fall hardest where the trees are fewest, a given number of trees planted in neighborhoods of color tends to return a greater reduction in mortality than the same trees planted in majority-white neighborhoods. The relationship between greenness and survival is by now well attested. A meta-analysis pooling studies of more than eight million adults across several countries found that more green space in a neighborhood is significantly associated with a lower risk of death from any cause. Closer to the bark, neighborhood tree cover near the home has been linked to better self-reported health overall, working partly through lower rates of overweight and obesity and stronger social cohesion, and to a lesser degree through less diabetes, high blood pressure, and asthma. That’s true in school-aged young people and children as well.

If there is a simple shape to aim for, the foresters have offered one. The rule some of them now propose is called three-thirty-three-hundred, and it sets three plain thresholds ... at least three well-established trees in view from every home, school, and workplace; no less than thirty percent canopy in every neighborhood; and no more than three hundred meters, about a five-minute walk, to the nearest real green space. It is a low bar, written as a floor and not a ceiling, and most American neighborhoods do not clear it. I think of the streets in our beautiful neighborhood that certainly do (one of the main reasons we chose to live where we do and had the privilege to do so), their old oaks and the green tunnel they make, and the streets just a mile away that do not, and I understand that the difference between them was a choice made by people who are mostly dead now, a choice still cooling some bodies and still cooking others.

The walnut over my chair was planted, or allowed to stand, by someone I never met decades and decades ago. Same with the oaks, maples, and cedars that provide an amazing canopy over most of our yard in June and July. I sit in shade I did not earn and did not make, the way most of us do, and the only fitting response I can find to that is to plant for someone I will not meet.

A “shade” tree is the rare gift whose whole point is that the giver will be gone before it is fully given. You put a small thing in the ground knowing the deep shade belongs to a stranger forty years out, a child not yet born who will one day cross a soft line on the grass and feel the sun lift off the back of his neck and call it, without thinking, relief. That’s the work. We arrived at the ethics by way of the body (which is the only way I trust to arrive at it) and the body’s verdict isn’t complicated. Everyone deserves a place to stand that the sun cannot punish. The shade should fall on all of us, and where it does not yet fall, we know how to make it.

Further Reading

A short shelf for anyone who wants to follow the research or general suggestions from my piece here…

Shade and cooling

Roland Ennos, “Can trees really cool our cities down?” The Conversation (2015). The most accessible account of the felt difference. Ennos explains that what we register as relief is mostly a matter of radiation, and that tree shade can lower the physiologically equivalent temperature, how warm we actually feel, by something on the order of 7 to 15 degrees Celsius (depending on latitude). He also notes the indoor implications, like shade can cut a detached house’s air conditioning costs by twenty to thirty percent!

Zhi-Hua Wang et al., “Cooling Effect of Urban Trees on the Built Environment of Contiguous United States,” Earth’s Future 6 (2018). The continental view. Modeling across the country's built environment, the authors find that the shading effect of urban trees lowers near-surface air temperature by about 3 degrees Celsius on a daily average, chiefly by keeping solar energy off pavement and walls that would otherwise store and re-radiate it.

Haiwei Li, Yongling Zhao, Chenghao Wang, Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Jan Carmeliet & Ronita Bardhan, “Cooling efficacy of trees across cities is determined by background climate, urban morphology, and tree trait,” Communications Earth & Environment 5:754 (2024). A global synthesis of 182 studies across 110 cities. Urban trees can lower air temperature at the height a person walks by by as much as 12 degrees Celsius, with the effect depending on climate, street layout, and species. Useful if you want to know the texture of why some shades cool more than others.

Who has trees, and why

Jeremy S. Hoffman, Vivek Shandas & Nicholas Pendleton, “The Effects of Historical Housing Policies on Resident Exposure to Intra-Urban Heat: A Study of 108 US Urban Areas,” Climate 8(1):12 (2020). The redlining-and-heat paper. Formerly redlined neighborhoods are roughly 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in summer than neighborhoods that were never redlined, a pattern that held in 94% of the cities studied and reached as high as 7 degrees Celsius. The largest gaps were in southern and western cities, which is the part that should spur a Carolina reader’s attention.

American Forests, Tree Equity Score (2021, ongoing). treeequityscore.org Both the argument and the tool are interesting. American Forests found that majority-people-of-color neighborhoods have, on average, 33% less tree canopy than majority-white ones, and that the poorest neighborhoods have 41% less than the wealthiest. Their plainest line is the one I borrowed above, with a map of tree cover in an American city, which is too often a map of race and income. The site gives block-level scores, so you can look up your own street, even.

Kirsten Schwarz et al., “Trees Grow on Money: Urban Tree Canopy Cover and Environmental Justice,” PLoS ONE 10(4):e0122051 (2015). An earlier, foundational treatment of the same disparity, naming the so-called luxury effect by which canopy tracks wealth. Worth reading to see how long this has been documented.

What canopy does to a life

Michelle C. Kondo et al., “Health impact assessment of Philadelphia’s 2025 tree canopy cover goals,” The Lancet Planetary Health 4(4):e149 (2020). A mortality study. Raising canopy toward a 30% target in every neighborhood could prevent on the order of 400 premature deaths a year in Philadelphia, with even modest increases yielding measurable reductions, and the lowest existing canopy is in the lower-income neighborhoods that stand to gain most.

“Current inequality and future potential of US urban tree cover for reducing heat-related health impacts,” npj Urban Sustainability (2024). Carries the equity point into the arithmetic of planting. Because heat falls hardest where trees are fewest, a given number of trees planted in neighborhoods of color tends to return a greater reduction in mortality than the same trees planted in whiter, wealthier ones.

David Rojas-Rueda et al., “Green spaces and mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies,” The Lancet Planetary Health 3(11):e469 (2019). The pooled evidence draws on data from more than 8 million adults across several countries. More green space near home is significantly associated with a lower risk of death from any cause. The single best citation if you want one number to stand for the whole field and need to make a point in a conversation (or local planning commission or city council meeting).

Standards and possibilities

Cecil C. Konijnendijk, “Evidence-based guidelines for greener, healthier, more resilient neighbourhoods: Introducing the 3-30-300 rule,” Journal of Forestry Research 34 (2023). The rule the essay ends on is stated as a floor. Three well-established trees in view from every home, school, and workplace, at least thirty percent canopy in every neighborhood, and no more than three hundred meters to real green space. Most urban American neighborhoods obviously do not clear it.

More widely

J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions, 2016). A South Carolina book, and the one I would hand a reader before any of the studies above. Lanham writes the land and the inheritance of who gets to belong to it from inside our own state, and he holds race and place together without letting go of either.

Jill Jonnes, Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape (Viking, 2016). The long story of how American cities came to have, and to lose, their trees. Good companion for understanding canopy as infrastructure that was built, neglected, and can be built again.

Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (1981), and the essays around it. I love Berry, and he is, in many ways, my Patron Saint along with Edith Stein. Berry on what it means to put something in the ground for a stranger you will not meet is the ground the essay’s last paragraph stands on.

The black walnut in our backyard has fully leafed out again, and I celebrated its feat this afternoon while working in the yard alongside it after morning meditation on writing here for a year. It is one of the last trees in the yard to do it, holding back through April while the maples and the oaks rush ahead, and then opening all at once into that high green canopy that throws the back of the house into shade by the first week of June. A year ago, I was standing under it more or less where I am standing now, and Carolina Ecology was a few days old... a handful of posts in my head with a catchy domain name, an idea I was not yet sure how to keep.

The first real essay went up on the fifth of June last year, and it was about forever chemicals and the water of the Carolinas. I did not plan for water to become the spine of the whole year, but it did. The Pacolet and Lawson’s Fork, the shoals that hold the memory of how this land was once tended, the question of how many gallons a day a data center will draw from a county that already worries about drought... the writing kept returning to water the way the walnut keeps returning to leaf, on its own schedule, without asking me.

What I set out to do was simple, and I think it has stayed simple. I wanted to look at particular places in the Piedmont, Midlands, Lowcountry, and Coastal regions of South Carolina closely enough that the looking became a practice, and then to write down what the looking gave me. Perception and empathy first, before ethics (to channel Edith Stein). The argument, if there is one, comes later and comes slower. A creek behind a dam. A tree being cut down on a street I drive every week. The soil under the pines that still remembers a forest no longer standing there.

The pieces that found the most readers this year surprised me, though looking back, I’m not sure they should have. They were the ones where attention met something happening right now, out in the open, while it could still be changed. “Project Spero and Spartanburg’s New Resource Question” and “A Moment of Civic Attention in Spartanburg” reached more people than anything else I wrote and evidently had some impact on County Council conversations that I won’t get into here, and “What East Main Street Is For” was not far behind.

People wanted, it turns out, to see their own place of Spartanburg described with care while a decision about that place was still being made. The data center coverage wasn’t just about the data center(s). It was about whether a community can perceive what it is being asked to give up before it has already given it away.

And then there were the quieter essays I am, privately, more attached to. “What the Soil Remembers” and “What the Shoal Remembers” carried readers I did not expect down into the long history under the surface of the watershed... the fire practices that kept this country open, the durée of a river that does not stop doing what it does. Those essays asked nothing urgent of anyone or of our community. They asked for a slower kind of looking. That they traveled as far as they did has been the year’s best encouragement.

I certainly won’t pretend the number of views, clicks, or “engagement” is large. This is a small site about a small corner of regions that most people drive through without stopping if they’re not living here. But the essays have been opened and read several thousand times over the year, a great many of them in an email that lands in the morning, and a good number of you have stayed. I don’t take that lightly, either. Attention is the one resource I keep writing about as though it were scarce, and you have given me a year of yours.

So, the plan for the second year is the same as the first. Keep walking the Cottonwood Trail along the Fork. Keep watching the walnut do whatever it is that walnut trees do (still working on that). Keep describing what is here, in the Piedmont and the Pee Dee, as plainly and as patiently as I can manage, so that we might come to see these places clearly enough to love them well, and to keep them.

The walnut will drop its leaves early, the way it always does. By then, there should be another year of writing gathered under it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Near the black walnut in our backyard that I often write about here, there’s a place where I have learned to watch rain go somewhere. In the Piedmont, rain doesn’t so much soak as leave. The soil in Spartanburg is thin over rock that was once the deep roots of mountains, and a hard shower runs almost at once into the low places, gathering toward Lawson’s Fork, Fairforest Creek, many tributaries and smaller creeks, over the shoals, down to the Pacolet and the Broad, and at long last the Atlantic. Standing there beside the black walnut in our sloped yard that pitches down to a creek that turns into the dammed-up Duncan Park Lake through a storm is to learn that the water here is weather, held for a little while on its way downhill. It isn’t banked beneath me at any depth. It passes through, and what the ground keeps, it keeps briefly, in the first few feet, in the leaf litter and the saprolite, before letting it go. And the way it passes, I have come to understand, is not original to the place. It was actually taught.

The Piedmont learned to shed water this way over two hard centuries. When William Bartram traveled through in the 1770s, he described streams running clear. The rivers we have now often run red after a storm, turbid with upland clay soil, and the difference is… cotton. Deforestation and cultivation through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stripped the thin topsoil and cut gullies into the red Cecil clay, scars that still lie under the second-growth pine across the Upstate and down through the Sumter National Forest towards the Midlands and Fall Line of our Carolina river systems.

Forest Service researchers who have worked over the past few decades to wire gullies with weirs and moisture sensors found a ground that holds little water. Of eight gullies, only four ran at all across a season, and small rains of six millimeters, then thirteen, passed without producing any flow because the soil was too dry to carry them, until back-to-back days of harder rain finally pushed it past saturation. The land wets at the surface and sheds in pulses, and when it runs, it carries the soil with it. The speed of the water here is the signature of an old taking, and a gully is the place where that taking is still legible in the ground.

I have been thinking about that passage of water and the flows in the Upstate because of a sentence that the NorthMark data center on South Pine Street here in Spartanburg keeps offering as a source of comfort. NorthMark, building its computing facility in the shell of the old Kohler plant, says its water will be drawn “entirely from municipal supply with no draw from groundwater or aquifers,” and that its projected use stays “within approved limits.” Spartanburg Water estimates the facility will take around 460,000 gallons a day, close to 2,000 households’ worth, or somewhere between 1.8 and 2.3 percent of the system’s daily demand.

Carolina Ecology

"While We Breathe"

A few months ago, I started writing about data center projects here in Spartanburg after giving them some thought (my background is a strange mix of religion, ecology, business, and marketing). It’s something like the way you notice a word you’ve just learned... suddenly, they were everywhere. NorthMark Strategies is transforming the old Kohler plant on…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Sam Harrelson

The company says the cooling water will be treated on site and discharged back to the municipal system, and that it will be tested by third parties against the permit. The utility’s chief executive has said the facility would be about half the size of its largest industrial customer. NorthMark has called high-performance computing significantly less water-intensive than the manufacturing or the other “cloud” data centers it is measured against. And the reporting notes, almost as an aside, that most of the water will be lost to evaporation, which I’ve written about here:

All of those statements are true. I want to take them seriously, and that means noticing what kind of sentence each one is. They are comparisons. A percentage of the system’s demand. A multiple of a household. A fraction of the old Kohler permit. A ratio against other, thirstier industries. The comparison does the persuasive work before any argument is made, by deciding in advance what water is. Inside the frame of the comparison, water becomes a quantity and a stock of interchangeable gallons drawn down and replenished and accounted in aggregate, in the way a budget accounts for dollars. This is the same frame the trade press has been settling into for a few years now. A recent Wired piece on the industry trying to address its water use is built almost entirely of these comparisons: a Lawrence Berkeley report projecting that hyperscale centers could consume up to 33 billion gallons a year by 2030, set immediately beside the reminder that this is on par with or less than agriculture or oil and gas, that a single fracked well can swallow one and a half to sixteen million gallons. And let’s not forget about those pesky golf courses that often get brought into conversations about water here in the Upstate! The numbers are arranged to be absorbed.

A line from Shaolei Ren, the engineer at Riverside who has done much of the careful accounting, stands out to me in this framing. Water, he says, is “a highly local, highly regional issue.” It’s the truest sentence, and the discourse around it spends most of its energy doing the opposite of what the sentence asks of us to perceive. To say water is local is to say it cannot be moved into a column and balanced against water somewhere else. The gallon evaporated over South Pine Street isn’t the same gallon that stays in the ground beneath a county in Texas, or returns to a river in Iowa, even though the ledger treats them as fungible. The comparison is a way of looking that resolves a felt unease by relocating it into an accounting that comes out even, much like we do with GDP or life expectancy numbers and comparisons. The cost of that way of looking is the creek. You stop seeing the particular water in the particular place, because the frame has taught your attention to go to the percentage instead.

Here is where the aside about evaporation matters more than it should. The language of treatment and discharge, water returned to the municipal system, and tested against the permit, describes a loop, or water “given” back.

But evaporation is precisely the part that does not loop back to here. It’s a phase change. Surface water becomes vapor and is carried off, and whatever rain it eventually becomes will fall on some other watershed by some other logic of wind. In the Piedmont, this matters in a specific way because the water was surface water to begin with. It was the same weather I watch leave the yard, caught in the reservoirs on the Pacolet, Lake Bowen, and the impoundments that hold our share of the rain before it sheds downhill. The evaporated fraction of those 460,000 gallons is weather intercepted on its way through and sent up rather than down, out of the Lawson’s Fork drainage, out of the catchment the walnut and the shoals belong to. The longer I’ve worked on this issue of perception with data centers and water usage, the more I think evaporation is the honest center of the whole question, and the place where the budget cannot follow the water, because a budget can count gallons in a system and cannot perceive a watershed.

But the sentence I keep returning to in my head from my previous writing on evaporation is the one about the aquifer, because it reveals how far the comforting vocabulary has traveled from the ground it is spoken over. “No draw from groundwater or aquifers.” The coastal plain rides on a thick wedge of sand, clay, and limestone that the U.S. Geological Survey has sorted into a stack of named aquifers, the surficial layer near the top and then, going down: the Floridan, the Tertiary sand, the Black Creek, the Middendorf, and the Cape Fear, each separated from one another by confining beds of clay. Those aquifers recharge slowly, mostly from rain falling on their outcrops near the fall line, and the water then creeps downgradient through the confined layers for a very long time before anyone’s well reaches it. It is, in a real sense, a bank, and it can be overdrawn. The Survey’s modeling shows head declines across much of the eastern coastal plain in the Black Creek and Middendorf aquifers, drawn down for decades by the pumping around Florence and Myrtle Beach, water taken from storage faster than the slow recharge can replace it.

Spartanburg is on the other side of the fall line. The line runs across the middle of the state, through Columbia, as seen in the rocky convergence of the Saluda and Broad Rivers into the Congaree River, and west of it, the layered wedge gives out entirely. The Piedmont sits on crystalline rock, ancient granite and gneiss, and what groundwater exists hides in fractures and in the weathered zone above the bedrock, in yields too small and too local to supply a city. There is no Middendorf here, no deep bank of slow water to spare. Our water is the rain, caught at the surface, in the reservoirs on the Pacolet headwaters, the same system that feeds the shoals where I sit.

So when the NorthMark facility on South Pine Street promises no draw from groundwater or aquifers, it is describing a restraint the geology has already imposed, in terms borrowed from a hydrology that begins a hundred miles to the east. It is the right sentiment for the Pee Dee, offered to the Piedmont, where it sounds like forbearance and means almost nothing, because the water it promises to spare was never there to take. The 460,000 gallons will come, as it must, from the surface, from the weather, from the same held rain the walnut drinks.

I am not yet trying to reach a verdict. The verdict belongs to the rooms where it is properly argued, to the Department of Environmental Services, the turbine permits, and the hearing that the neighbors and the lawyers have asked for, the one with no date set.

What I am after is something prior, the thing my whole practice at this spot beside the walnut keeps insisting comes first. Before we can ask whether 460,000 gallons a day is too much, we have to be able to see the water as this water, Piedmont surface water, weather briefly held, the creek’s water, the reservoir’s water, and the cooling tower’s water, all drawn from one shedding system. The comparison is not a lie. It is a way of looking, and like every way of looking, it shows some things by hiding others, and what it hides is the place. The discipline is to keep the place in view, to let the percentage stay a percentage without becoming the whole of what we can perceive.

There is a long memory in this. Two centuries ago, the taking here was of soil, and the water carried it out of the uplands and into the rivers, where it still clouds them. The taking now is of the water itself, lifted off the surface and into the air over South Pine Street. The ledger reads neither, because it counts gallons in a system at a single moment and cannot hold a watershed across time. The rain is leaving the yard again as I write this. It is going where it has gone since the gullies opened, toward the fork and the shoals and the river, carrying its red memory of the last extraction, except for the share of it, across town, that will go up instead, and not come back down here.

Sources

Hydrology and land-use history

Galang, M.A., C.R. Jackson, L.A. Morris, D. Markewitz, and E.A. Carter. 2007. “Hydrologic Behavior of Gullies in the South Carolina Piedmont.” Proceedings of the 2007 Georgia Water Resources Conference, March 27–29, 2007, University of Georgia, Athens. (USDA Forest Service Treesearch no. 28844.)

Aucott, Walter R. 1996. Hydrology of the Southeastern Coastal Plain Aquifer System in South Carolina and Parts of Georgia and North Carolina. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1410-E. https://doi.org/10.3133/pp1410E

Trimble, Stanley W. 1974. Man-Induced Soil Erosion on the Southern Piedmont, 1700–1970. Ankeny, Iowa: Soil Conservation Society of America.

Bartram, William. 1791. Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida. Philadelphia: James & Johnson. Naturalist edition, Francis Harper, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998).

The data center and its water

Taft, Molly. “Data Center Operators Are Trying to Fix Their Water Use Problems.” Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/data-center-operators-fix-water-use-problems/ (Source of the Shaolei Ren quotation and of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory projection of up to 33 billion gallons of annual hyperscale water use by 2030.)

Boschult, Christian. “Spartanburg data center plans to use 460K gallons of water per day. Here’s what that means.” Post and Courier, May 2026. https://www.postandcourier.com/spartanburg/news/spartanburg-northmark-data-center-water-use/article_a561843e-a832-45c7-ab24-2af7906fcefa.html (Source of the daily-use figures, the share of system demand, and the note that most of the water is lost to evaporation.)

“Company provides update on data center under construction in Spartanburg.” WSPA 7News, May 2026. https://www.wspa.com/news/local-news/company-provides-update-on-data-center-under-construction-in-spartanburg/ (Source of the “within approved limits” and “no draw from groundwater or aquifers” statements and the continuation of the former Kohler water permit.)

“NorthMark data center under scrutiny from neighbors, advocacy groups.” Post and Courier, May 2026 (syndicated). https://www.aol.com/news/northmark-data-center-under-scrutiny-152438775.html (Source of the Spartanburg Water chief executive’s comparison to the system’s largest industrial customer and of the public-hearing requests from Sen. Shane Martin and the Southern Environmental Law Center.)

“How data centers could soon impact Upstate South Carolina.” Post and Courier, August 28, 2025. https://www.postandcourier.com/spartanburg/business/data-centers-impact-upstate-south-carolina/article_51663172-012d-46a8-ba74-f134d368cab1.html (Source of the company’s claim that high-performance computing is less water-intensive than manufacturing or cloud data centers, and of the South Pine Street site details.)

Spartanburg Water. System and source-water information (Lake Bowen and the Pacolet River reservoirs). spartanburgwater.org

My children typically understand a place like Myrtle Beach before I do when we arrive. That is probably true of most places we visit with children, especially places with sand and water and the strange, temporary freedom that comes from being away from home. Adults usually arrive somewhere carrying the categories of the place with us. Myrtle Beach, for many of us in South Carolina, already has a name (and varying degrees of reputation) before we get there. It’s a place for a vacation. It’s the Memorial Day “beach traffic.” It’s seafood in Murrells Inlet, mini golf, beach stores, and towers of hotels facing the Atlantic. Myrtle Beach is also a place many of us have known since childhood, even if our memories of it are patchy and sunburned and mixed with the smell of sunscreen, vinyl car seats, damp towels, and fried food after a long day in the water. Growing up in Mullins, Myrtle Beach was the closest “big city” with a McDonald’s, a movie theater, AND a mall.

But as I’ve noticed in my last two decades of parenthood, I’ve concluded that children arrive differently at places like Myrtle Beach.

For them, the beach is not first a symbol, an economy, or a memory. It’s sand under the feet and the shock of a wave coming faster than expected. The place is a shell that must be shown to someone immediately and curated into their intentional collection. Myrtle Beach is also a horizon that can’t be reached (harkening back to one of my favorite poems because of a poster I memorized on my high school French teacher’s wall that she gave me upon graduation, and I lovingly displayed it on all of my classroom walls through the years). Myrtle is the thrill of sleeping somewhere different (bunk beds!), eating differently, moving differently, and letting the body discover that a week does not have to follow the same architecture as home.

After the last few years in Spartanburg, with our familiar rooms, routes to school, and routines on the Rail Trail, Myrtle Beach opens another field of attention for my children. They didn’t need to explain it out loud, but entered it into their own mindsets. Merianna preached at a dear friend’s funeral on Sunday in Columbia on our journey beachward. Even with that interregnum with our car full of bathing suits and beach toys, and folding chairs, I could see the look of anticipation in their eyes as we saw old friends and paid our respects to an amazing person who helped shape our family’s future and held our children in her arms many times when they were younger.

That realization has been something of a revelation (“you want a revolution, I want a revelation!” as Eliza says) with me since we got back a couple of days ago, partly because I am reading and studying Edith Stein’s Potency and Act for my comprehensive exams in my PhD work this summer. Stein has been on the front of my mind more than usual (which I thought was not possible), so even ordinary family scenes have started to take on metaphysical weight.

That can sound abstract, but I don’t think it is. If anything, Stein helps me see why the ordinary is never just ordinary. A child with a bucket at the edge of the Atlantic is already involved in questions of form, possibility, matter, relation, attention, and becoming. The beach presents and/or gives itself differently depending on how it is approached. The same sand that sticks to legs and inevitably gets tracked by the bucket load into our car also becomes a castle, a road, a wall, a burial mound for feet, a writing surface, a small ecology of shells and fragments, the glass screen on our phones, and ghost crab holes. The same ocean that adults watch from a chair becomes, for a child, a force to test, fear, chase, resist, and trust.

That is one of the gifts of Stein’s language of potency and act. Potency is often treated as if it simply means “not yet,” as if possibility were only an empty space waiting to become real later. But Stein is working with a much richer inheritance. She is thinking through being as something that cannot be reduced to static presence. A thing is what it is, but what it is includes capacities, tendencies, limits, receptivities, and relations. To say that something has potency is not to say that it is unreal. Rather, a thing with potency indicates that reality itself is deeper than what appears at first glance. A being carries within itself possible forms of becoming, and those forms come into act through encounter.

The beach makes this almost embarrassingly clear to me at 47, as I thought I understood metaphysics so well at 37.

Sand isn’t passive in children's hands. Sand receives shape, but not any shape whatsoever. Sand resists, collapses, and dries too quickly. It holds better when wet, as my children each learn in their own due time after practicing the scientific method at an expert level, even though they’d never call it that. Sand teaches through failure as much as success. “Failure is the key to success!” was the slogan we adopted when I taught 7th-grade science and Math at Carolina Day School in Asheville. My students and I had a tough time seeing eye to eye on that mantra, as with all good mantras.

A sandcastle is not imposed on blank matter by a sovereign human mind. It comes about through an arrangement of hands, water, pressure, buckets, patience, and the sand’s own willingness to hold form for a little while. The castle is real, even if it will not last past the next tide in a few hours. Maybe especially because it will not last. A sandcastle’s temporality is not a defect, but belongs to what it is. “Castles made of sand fall/melt/slip into the sea… eventually” as Hendrix reminds us (one of my favs).

The shore itself also works this way. We call it a line, but it is not really a line but something we project onto it. A shore is a zone of exchange. Wave after wave revises it while tides move across it. Children run along it as if it were a border, but it behaves more like a conversation. Land and water meet on a shore without becoming the same thing. They shape one another constantly. The beach is always becoming beach again and always in motion. As with all things… panta rhei (everything flows)… thank you, Heraclitus (well, maybe not him, but close enough).

Myrtle Beach can be easy to dismiss as “that place” while we seek out “quieter” beaches and coastal vacation spots, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about ecology, attention, and place. It is not the quiet marsh. Myrtle is definitely not the protected maritime forest. It is certainly not the lonely barrier island reachable only by boat, with just golf carts on it, or the carefully interpreted preserve. Myrtle Beach is loud, commercial, and built up, a blend of Blade Runner and Idiocracy, and a slew of reality shows on some cable channel we don’t subscribe to. It is a place where the coast has been made to perform for vacation, real estate, leisure, golfers, and memory. There are stretches where the human imprint is so obvious that the place's older life can feel buried beneath concrete, signage, parking decks, and entertainment, except in the small places of memory that still exist, such as the wonderful Ingram Dunes (one of my favorite places in all of South Carolina).

But that judgment can become too simple if we let it. Myrtle Beach is still “shore.” The Atlantic has not become decorative simply because hotels face it, and their human builders have destroyed the once-imposing dunes and maritime forests. The gulls and pelicans have not become props because tourists notice them between meals, or because our 2-year-old learned to hide her goldfish in her swim jacket to avoid another disastrous encounter with them. The tide does not stop its work because someone has placed a chair too close to the water. Even in a heavily commercialized coastal landscape, the world exceeds the uses we assign to it.

That excess is what I kept noticing through my children. They were not naïve about the built environment, of course. Children love all of it. The pool, the elevators, the chlorine smell from indoor pools, snacks, beach ice cream stands, the bright lights on “the strip,” and all of the little rituals of being somewhere else. But they also moved through Myrtle Beach with a kind of ecological openness that we adults often have to relearn. A shell was not “just” a shell. A wave was not background noise. A crab hole was not a minor feature of the sand. The beach was not the scenery behind the vacation. It was the place acting upon them and inviting them into forms of attention that home does not always make available.

This is where Stein becomes helpful to me, not as an escape from the local but as a way of seeing the local more carefully. In Potency and Act, she is trying to think about being with enough patience to account for both form and becoming. The world is not a pile of objects. Nor is it only flux without a sense of stability. Beings have form, but form is not dead fixity as we observe when we attend to most anything. Everything flows, again. Form is alive in the sense that it gathers matter into meaning, capacity, direction, and relation. To perceive something well is to notice more than its surface availability to us.

A coast perceived as vacation property has been poorly received, leading to poor decisions that shape future ecologies. A beach perceived only as a recreational surface has been flattened. A shell perceived only as a keepsake has been removed from its longer story of life, death, calcium, ocean chemistry, and tide.

Stein’s metaphysics here gives me a way to say that things are not exhausted by their usefulness to human beings. Their being includes potencies we may never activate, capacities we may never understand, depths we may never name.

Children often live closer to this truth than adults do, whether through training, the “hardness” of a lived life, or the peculiar way our human brains help us process what we call reality as we get older. This isn’t because children are morally pure or spiritually superior (as a parent of 5, a middle and high school teacher for almost 20 years, and Dean of Students… I can testify to the opposite), but because they are less disciplined by utility. They can spend twenty minutes on a small patch of sand because the patch is still alive with possibility. They can make a world out of a bucket because the bucket has not yet been reduced to function. They can return to the waves again and again because repetition does not bore them when the world keeps arriving differently. The same wave is never the same wave. The same stretch of beach, in the morning and in the evening, is not quite the same place. “Not yet! Not yet!” was the familiar refrain of our almost 3-year-old when we told her it’s time to leave the beach and head back to the beach house.

Maybe this is one reason vacations with children are both exhausting and revealing. Adults often want rest, but children want transformation (or Eliza’s revelation). They want the furniture of the world rearranged. They want beds in different rooms, snacks at strange times, water before breakfast, sand after dinner, and permission to live bodily in a place without immediately translating it into productivity. Their joy is not always quiet or convenient. But it can become a form of instruction.

Watching them at Myrtle Beach, I kept thinking that potency is not a concept floating above the world. It is the world’s unfinishedness made visible. This is the capacity of a place to disclose itself differently when met with a different kind of attention. The beach that adults schedule becomes, for children, a teacher of impermanence, force, texture, and delight. The coast that developers sell as view and access remains a living threshold. The sand that seems like ground is made of histories. The ocean, which seems like a backdrop, is moving with planetary consequences, keeping us alive, fed, worried about sharks, and anxious about the hurricane season that starts in a few days.

That last phrase may sound heavy for a family beach trip, but the heaviness was there too, even if quietly. The Carolina coast carries the pressures of sea-level rise, storm intensification, erosion, development, insurance markets, tourism economies, and all the ways we keep pretending that shorelines are stable enough for our plans.

A place like Myrtle Beach depends on a kind of collective suspension of disbelief. We build close to an “edge” and then try to convince ourselves that the edge will behave. If it doesn’t, we’ll build sea walls and run for Governor! But the shore isn’t inert. A shore acts, receives, gives, erodes and deposits, shelters, and threatens. Its potencies include beauty and danger, memory and loss, play and destruction.

The children sensed some of this without needing the language. They knew the water could knock them down (and it did). They knew a castle and fort meticulously built with loving intentions would not survive the tide. They knew the sun could “burn” and the sand could become too hot. They knew, in their bodies, that delight and vulnerability are often braided together. That may be one of the deepest lessons of the coast… it doesn’t offer wonder without exposure.

For me, coming back inland to Spartanburg after a week at Myrtle Beach felt like returning with sand still somewhere in the seams of perception. The Piedmont has its own grammar of becoming, with its trees, red clay, creeks, heat, kudzu, old mill roads, and thunderstorms building in the late afternoon, as they are doing today. But the coast reveals something different. It teaches through edges and makes form temporary. The coast shows us how quickly the world can receive an imprint and how quickly it can erase it. It reminds us that being is not stillness.

That is what I hear in Stein right now as I read for my comps. Potency and act are not only scholastic categories to be mastered for an exam. These are ways of paying attention to a world that is always more than its current arrangement. A child is not only who they are in this moment, but neither are they merely a future adult. A beach isn’t a vacation site, but neither is it a pure wilderness untouched by human meaning. A shell isn’t only a remnant, but neither is it only a symbol. Each thing gathers what has been, what is, and what may yet come into view.

Our task, then (if you will), is not to force metaphysics onto the beach. The task is to let the beach correct our metaphysics.

My children did that for me at Myrtle Beach this past week. They reminded me that places are not exhausted by adult naming and development. They reminded me that attention is often playful before it becomes analytical. They reminded me that the world’s capacities are disclosed through contact, not distance. Sand under fingernails, salt in hair, tired bodies in the backseat, sunburns, a shell carried home with great seriousness ... these are not interruptions to thought. They are thought returning to contact the world.

That’s why the shore stays with us after we leave it. It’s not because the shore gave us an escape from ordinary life, but because it quietly altered what ordinary life can hold. The beach acted on us. We acted on it. For a week, my children moved through a Carolina coast alive with potencies, some ancient and some newly discovered, some ecological and some familial, some already in act and some still waiting for the right form of attention.

The shore allowed all of that. And for a little while, we were able to notice.

I grew up in Mullins, South Carolina, in Marion County, which means I grew up in the Pee Dee even before I had any real sense of what that meant. As a child, “Pee Dee” was one of those names that was everywhere and nowhere at once. Pee Dee Academy is the name of the independent school between Mullins and our county seat of Marion. It also included businesses, news stations (WPDE), school regions, weather forecasts, sports alignments, and the broad eastern part of the state that seemed to stretch from the Midlands Sandhills around Columbia and Camden down toward the coast. Pee Dee was a name I heard constantly, but not one I was taught to inhabit historically. Like many regional names in South Carolina, it carried more meaning than it might seem to.

My alma mater, Mullins High School, has the mascot “Auctioneer” (shortened to Aucs), which I always found interesting without giving it much thought. We used a representation of an Indigenous Chief as the school's icon (complete with a larger-than-life-sized wooden “Cigar store Indian” at the school's front door). Our rival in the county, Marion High School, is the “Swamp Foxes,” which I was taught not to like but always secretly envied… because what a great mascot!

Mullins itself taught history indirectly as well. There were tobacco warehouses (which I have depictions of on our dining room walls today), old brick buildings, family names, churches, ball fields, sandy roads that I loved exploring with my restored 1989 Jeep with no doors while listening to The Beatles and Fleetwood Mac on my Walkman’s headphones, and the peculiar atmosphere of a small agricultural town after its main crop had begun to recede from view. Harrelson itself is a very common surname there, and our ancestors who headed west to Arkansas in the 19th century would establish their own Mullins, Marion, and Conway’s there (which also led to Woody Harrelson’s family). The land felt flat, practical, hot, humid, and “ordinary” in that weird sense of homeland. Place forms us before we know how to ponder what that really means. We inherit the roads, names, soils, silences, and rituals of place, and we learn where we are before we understand what has happened there.

The Watershed Beneath the Name

The Pee Dee is not simply a region on a South Carolina map. It’s a watershed in the most literal sense of that term. The Great Pee Dee River begins farther north as the Yadkin River in North Carolina and eventually flows through northeastern South Carolina toward Winyah Bay, where my ancestors settled in and around Georgetown after coming from Denmark and Norway. The Little Pee Dee, Lynches River, Black River, Waccamaw, and countless swamps, creeks, and bottomlands form a broader hydrological world of the Pee Dee. The people of the Pee Dee have always lived in relation to water, even when the dominant story has been told through crops, counties, railroads, or towns. The watershed wasn’t the background. It was route, food source, boundary, refuge, danger, market, memory, and field of consequence.

Before the Pee Dee was a “region,” it was the homeland and movement-space of Indigenous peoples. The very name Pee Dee comes from Native people whose history colonial records only partially (and often poorly) preserve. Today, Pee Dee tribal communities continue to identify with the river and northeastern South Carolina, a reminder that Indigenous presence is not only a matter of prehistory or archaeology but of continuing life. Archaeologists and historians also use the term “Pee Dee” to refer to older cultural worlds along the river system, including the Town Creek site in what is now North Carolina, downstream of which the river becomes the Great Pee Dee as it crosses into South Carolina.

One of the errors or control systems (if you will) of colonial and later regional history is the habit of turning living peoples into place names, then treating those names as if they belong more to roads and rivers than to the people themselves. South Carolina is full of such names. Catawba, Santee, Waccamaw, Edisto, Combahee, Wateree, Congaree, Pee Dee, Salkehatchie. These names remain on maps, but maps can be dangerous forms of memory and are often used as colonialist or propagandist mechanisms to define and circumscribe memory or perception. They can preserve a word on a two-dimensional surface while obscuring the third dimension of life that gave it meaning, and make displacement look like geography without the fourth dimension of time (whether you side with Bergson or Einstein on that, I’ll leave to you).

So any honest history of the Pee Dee has to begin before Marion or Liberty County, before Mullins, before tobacco, before cotton, before rice plantations, before enslaved voices, before the railroad, before English land grants. It has to begin with the river as a lived world full of its dimensions and concrescence. It has to begin with Indigenous presence and with the humility to acknowledge that the surviving written archive is partial, often colonial, and often structured by outsiders' perceptions.

European contact brought naming, violence, disease, trade, enslavement, surveying, and land hunger into the region for all of its benefits as well. Spanish expeditions entered the larger Pee Dee world in the sixteenth century (with De Soto and his band traversing parts of the Pee Dee and near what we now call the Great Pee Dee River in their search for gold. English settlers later moved inland from the coast during the eighteenth century. The South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on the Pee Dee River points out that English settlement pushed into the Pee Dee from Winyah Bay and upriver to places such as the now-named area of Cheraw (now with a mascot of “Braves” after the Cheraw tribe there), reshaping the region through trade, agriculture, and, eventually, plantation economies.

This history of European settlement also represents a deep reordering of the world, as all colonialist programs do, whether tacitly or implicitly. Land that had been inhabited, traveled, burned, planted, hunted, remembered, and storied within Indigenous systems of relation became land to be granted, surveyed, owned, mortgaged, inherited, taxed, and sold in our modern context. The river became an infrastructure and a resource, supporting logging floats and the shipment of supplies back to European markets. Forests metamorphosed into naval stores while the swamps and mysterious Carolina Bays of the Pee Dee became rice fields with the labor of enslaved people bought and sold via the slave trade and viewed as resources, property, and collateral themselves.

The early colonial Pee Dee economy depended on the extraction of both land and people. The Florence County Museum’s work on African American rice growers at Mars Bluff, on the border between present-day Florence and Marion Counties, notes that rice expanded rapidly in the Pee Dee during the early eighteenth century and that climate, geography, and the forced migration of enslaved West Africans made the region central to rice cultivation. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture also emphasizes that enslaved Africans and African Americans didn’t provide just labor for rice plantations, but brought knowledge of rice agriculture and engineered complex systems of dikes, floodgates, ditches, and drains across the coastal South through what it calls the rice fields of the Lowcountry (which some communities in the Pee Dee still maintain).

That is one of the central moral facts of Pee Dee history. The region’s soils were fertile, and its rivers navigable, but the area was “profitable” because enslaved people knew how to work, read, endure, and transform difficult landscapes under sometimes violent conditions. Their knowledge was ecological, technical, bodily, seasonal, and spiritual. They knew heat, water, mud, insects, illness, planting, harvest, and the demands of survival. Yet the dominant archive usually names owners before workers, plantations before quarters, and crops before hands. Much like the namesake of my hometown, Mullins, who was a Colonel in the Confederacy.

The Pee Dee was also a place where swamp and river complicated power. Marion County is named for Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War figure known as the “Swamp Fox.” The county’s earlier forms included Queensboro Township, Liberty County, and then Marion District before later county boundaries took shape. The town of Marion developed around the courthouse, and the arrival of the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad in 1854 helped create new towns and stations, including the Mullins Railway Station that became the nucleus of Mullins, while areas like Floydville became the town of Nichols nearby because of the new railroad. That railroad line disrupted many of my morning trips to high school (often running late).

The Francis Marion story of his band of savvy guerrilla fighters camped at Snow Island (an interesting read here on the site's archaeology) is familiar in South Carolina, but I find myself more interested now in the landscape behind the legend. The swamp becomes heroic when it hides a patriot fighter like Robin Hood. It becomes marginal when it shelters the poor, the fugitive, the tenant, the displaced, or the nonhuman, such as enslaved people daring enough to escape their situation. That tells us something about how memory and perception work. The same wetland can become a shrine to clever resistance or a symbol of backwardness, depending on whose story is being told. The swamp did not change, but the attention did.

By the nineteenth century, cotton transformed the Pee Dee backcountry. Flatboats carried cotton bales downriver toward Georgetown and brought goods back upriver. The cotton gin, expanding markets, and enslaved labor reorganized the region again. Then the railroad shifted its movement from river landings to stations and towns. Infrastructure changed what counted as a center. A place did not simply “grow.” It was drawn into new networks of labor, credit, commerce, extraction, and imagination, much like we face today with an economy in transition and clever marketing programs meant to abstract data centers into “clouds” and “grids” instead of ecological mechanisms.

Tobacco Time

Mullins emerged from that railroad world. The town was formally established in 1872, when it was still small, with only a few streets and stores. The city’s history describes how tobacco, introduced in the 1890s, transformed Mullins into South Carolina’s “Tobacco Capital,” with barns and warehouses rising throughout the community. The South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on Mullins writes that Dr. C. T. Ford planted an experimental tobacco crop in 1891, that Planter’s Warehouse was completed in 1894, and that auction sales began that same year.

That is the Mullins I inherited, though mostly after the height of its old agricultural confidence. Tobacco was no abstraction there, even in my childhood, when the fall auctions were still held in person and were quite the spectacle, with rows and rows of sweet-curing tobacco wrapped in burlap sacks whose smell permeated the entire town in August and September. Tobacco structured the dimension of time. It gave the town a smell, a rhythm, a market, a class system, and a seasonal intensity. It shaped barns, warehouses, banks, stores, roads, labor arrangements, and family economies. The South Carolina Tobacco Museum now preserves part of that world in the old Mullins Depot, but museums also tell us that a world has passed far enough away to require interpretation to guide our perceptions.

The tobacco story is complicated because it isn’t a story of economic pride as a trajectory. It is also a story of tenant labor, racial inequality, health consequences, federal policy, market dependence, and rural vulnerability. Tobacco made Mullins visible, but it also tied the town to a fragile agricultural economy over which many people did not have control. When the tobacco markets declined in the 1990’s, it was not just a crop that disappeared. A calendar disappeared, and an entire social rhythm disappeared, even though Mullins still celebrates the Golden Leaf Festival and parade in the Fall, and many of us Mullins-born still have a framed tobacco leaf on our walls, even if we don’t live there anymore.

The decline in the 80s and 90s was dramatic, however. The South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on tobacco asserts that between 1974 and 1992, the number of tobacco farms in South Carolina declined by 70%, as farms became fewer and larger and the older agrarian culture of the Pee Dee faded from view. SCETV’s materials on The Last Auction describe Mullins as South Carolina’s major tobacco market for more than a century, while also noting the later pressures of shrinking allotments, textile decline, and economic change.

But the people of the Pee Dee were never only tobacco people. Regional history often gets reduced to the crop that outsiders can identify most easily. Rice. Cotton. Tobacco. Indigo for the South Carolina history textbooks I read. But, people are not crops. People are not economies. People live inside economies (often painfully) but they also pray, sing, cook, resist, remember, bury their dead, raise children, repair porches, teach school, preach sermons, play ball, hold reunions, eat at Fred’s, and tell stories in parking lots long after official meetings or school are over.

A history of the people of the Pee Dee has to include Black churches, Native communities, tenant houses, schoolhouses, cemeteries, tobacco warehouses, rice fields, courthouse squares, railroad depots, small farms, family land, and the long migrations out and back. It has to include the people who left for better jobs in Columbia, Charleston, Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, or Spartanburg and came home for funerals, holidays, and reunions. It has to include those who stayed, and staying is its own kind of historical act, though I wasn’t brave enough to do so.

It also has to include memory that survives outside the official archive. In rural South Carolina, history is not first encountered in books. Instead, history is often encountered through names. Road, church, cemetery and family names tell histories and shape memories starting at a very early age. Names are spoken with affection, suspicion, reverence, or warning. Names carry old debts and old kindnesses. Names tell you where you are allowed to go, where you belong, where you do not, and what stories you are expected to already know. It’s a vocabulary of developing consciousness.

Learning to See Home Again

This is where the Pee Dee becomes more than regional history for me. It becomes a question of perception. What did I see growing up in Mullins? What did I fail to see? What was hidden in plain sight by familiarity? The old tobacco warehouses were not just old buildings. The fields were not just fields with their careful rows of cultivated tobacco, corn, and soybeans surrounded by the liminal spaces of the edge of fields between human cultivation and “wildness.” The river names were not just names of rivers. The churches were not just churches. The landscape was already speaking, but I had not yet learned how to listen to it.

That’s not a confession meant to produce guilt in my own perception or memory. Rather, it’s a practice of attention and intentionality. To come back to a place historically is not to solve it or issue judgment. We must let the place become strange enough to be seen again. This is especially true for those of us formed by rural towns that are easily dismissed as poor, flat, backward, or politically simple. The Pee Dee is not simple. It is layered with Indigenous memory, colonial violence, African skill, enslaved labor, Black endurance, white agricultural ambition, tenant farming, churches, railroads, tobacco markets, ecological change, and the grief of economic (and political) abandonment. There’s a reason it’s called “The Corridor of Shame” in national news stories.

The region also asks us to think differently about ecology. Ecology is not only wilderness, wetlands, species, forests, and rivers, though it is certainly all of those. Ecology is also the history of relations by which people and land shape one another over time. The Pee Dee is an ecological region because water, soil, labor, plants, markets, and memory have never been separate there. Rice requires water engineering, while cotton required soil exhaustion and enslaved labor. Tobacco required barns, curing, credit, auctions, allotments, and bodies. Railroads required timber, grading, capital, and stations. Churches required gathering. Cemeteries required ground held in memory if they were to survive, which many Black and Indigenous places of burial did not due to development and agriculture.

To write the history of the people of the Pee Dee, then, is to refuse the idea that rural places are marginal to the larger story, like the liminal edge of a cultivated field of row crops. The Pee Dee is one of the places where South Carolina’s deepest patterns become visible in Indigenous displacement, plantation wealth, racial hierarchy, agricultural extraction, Black survival, rural faith, environmental transformation, and the constant question of who gets to belong to a place.

I keep coming back to Mullins in my mind because it gives me a way into that larger field. I don’t want to necessarily romanticize it, though it’s hard for a young Gen X’er / Old Millennial with memories of riding bikes with friends in our neighborhood until the streetlights came on, while playing baseball in Smith’s Lot every day during the summer, all while not being tethered to a mobile phone and parent-tracking device.

I don’t want to condemn Mullins or the Pee Dee from a distance either (as is so often done). I want to pay attention to Mullins and ask what kind of history lives in a tobacco warehouse after the auctions are over (the few that remain, memorialized in a print on our dining room wall in Spartanburg). I want to ask what a railroad town remembers once the train and the capitalistic vocabulary of trade no longer feel like destiny. I want to ask how a region named for Native people can remember Indigenous presence as more than a map label. I want to ask how the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants remains present in fields, drainage systems, foodways, churches, and family memory, even when official plaques are few.

The Pee Dee is not a forgotten place. It’s a place many people have often chosen not to remember or perceive carefully.

That may be the beginning of a different kind of regional history. Rather than a grand or nostalgic story or myth, more like a history of attention. A history that starts with the land and then listens for the people. A history that recognizes that rivers remember even when towns and their settled humans forget. This is a history that sees Mullins not as a small town outside the main current of South Carolina history, but as one of the places where that current comes close enough to touch.

To grow up in Mullins was to grow up inside of a history that rarely attended itself as history. But, history and memory were there in the soil, the warehouses, the churches, the fields, the roads, the cemeteries, and the name Pee Dee itself. What people said and what people did not say shaped that history. The old agricultural confidence and the quieter uncertainty that followed shifting economic conditions molded that history in the modern context. That history is in recognizing that “home” is never only where we are from, but also what we are responsible for learning to see.

Rain is one of my favorite Beatles songs (and an incredible drumming performance by Ringo). Such a classic, but also on my mind today here in Spartanburg as we welcome some much-needed rain after a long and punishing dry spell that has put us in severe drought status (and also shifted local high school graduations to Wednesday night, causing some consternation about our water cycle).

The first rain after a dry spell can feel like forgiveness. The leaves darken, and the pavement releases the ozone smell that the human nose has evolved to detect with great intensity. The gutters begin their small metallic music of their own on our home. In a neighborhood like Duncan Park, where old trees, roofs, lawns, storm drains, clay soil, and backyard gardens all receive the same weather differently, rain feels immediate and local, and as sound before it becomes thought.

But rain is not the same thing as recovery. That may be one of the hardest lessons of a drought. We are quick to perceive weather and slower to perceive water. Weather happens to us in the present tense. It gathers on the radar, interrupts the afternoon, changes the feel of the air, and makes us look up from whatever we were doing. Water moves through longer memories. Soil moisture, streamflow, reservoirs, roots, seepage, evaporation, treatment plants, pipes, fields, bills, and habits all keep time differently than a thunderstorm. A few wet days can interrupt dryness without ending the drought. They can make the world look relieved before the watershed has actually recovered.

That dynamic is important and timely this week in Spartanburg. As rain returns to the forecast, Spartanburg Water has asked customers to follow voluntary water restrictions, noting that all South Carolina counties, including Spartanburg, have been upgraded to severe drought status. The utility also notes that the current rainfall deficit began in August 2025 and is not expected to dissipate in the coming weeks, as rain is forecast over the next few days. Drought.gov’s Spartanburg County page makes a similar point that all of Spartanburg County’s population is affected by drought, and January through April 2026 ranks as the second-driest year-to-date period in 132 years for the county.

That is the kind of fact that ought to slow down our attention. It means we should learn to see the rain within a longer cycle.

Most of us first learn the water cycle as a diagram (at least that’s how I taught it for years as a middle school life science teacher). There’s a cloud with an arrow pointing down. There’s a nondescript river with another arrow pointing up. Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff. It is one of those school images that become so familiar they almost disappear. But the diagram is not wrong because it is simple. It is wrong only when we treat it as something that happens somewhere else. The U.S. Geological Survey’s description of the water cycle reminds us that water moves between the atmosphere, land, rivers, groundwater, plants, and human systems through evaporation, evapotranspiration, precipitation, runoff, streamflow, infiltration, and recharge. The cycle is meteorological, but also vegetal, geological, municipal, agricultural, and bodily (to invoke Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

In the Upstate, that cycle has a unique shape. The far northwestern mountains of South Carolina receive some of the state's highest rainfall totals. The South Carolina State Climate Summary notes that annual average precipitation ranges from around 80 inches near Lake Jocassee to less than 39 inches in parts of the Midlands, with most of the Upstate averaging roughly 45 to 55 inches. Moist air is forced upward by the Appalachian (Team -Latch with how I pronounce that, in case you were wondering) Mountains, then released as rain. That rain enters streams that become creeks, rivers, reservoirs, and eventually human drinking water. It also enters the red clay, slowly or poorly depending on where it falls, what has been paved, what has been compacted, and what has been rooted deeply enough to hold it.

That is why drought in the Piedmont is never the absence of rain. It is the thinning of relations. The creeks drop in volume, and the soil tightens. The hay fields struggle, and our reservoirs record a deficit. The tree closes its pores in its bark while water treatment plants become part of the story. The suburban lawn becomes part of this story. The dishwasher, the shower, the leaking toilet, the glass of water placed on a restaurant table before anyone asks for it... all of these suddenly belong to one field of consequence.

This is where the water cycle becomes a matter of perception. Not because perception replaces policy, infrastructure, or hydrology, but because, without perception, we misread the conditions of our own life. We see rain and assume abundance (or a missed recess at school). We see a reservoir and assume it is permanent and that the “lake” has been there forever. We see a faucet and assume distance from the creek. We see a green lawn on the 16th hole of our favorite country club golf course and forget the watershed that made it possible.

Spartanburg’s own history is a history of learning, forgetting, managing, and being humbled by water.

Long before municipal reservoirs or textile mills, the waterways of this region were part of Indigenous life and movement. The earliest archaeological records do not map neatly onto the later tribal names that appear in colonial documents. Still, places like the Pacolet Soapstone Quarries remind us that the Pacolet River area carries traces of human attention going back thousands of years. Soapstone was quarried and shaped into vessels and tools. Waterways weren’t scenery for recreation. Instead, they were orientation, material access, seasonal movement, food, memory, and relation.

Later historical records identify the larger Indigenous worlds of the Catawba and Cherokee in and around this broader Piedmont and mountain region. The Catawba Nation describes its people as yeh is-WAH h’reh, “people of the river”, a phrase that should make any modern watershed conversation reflect and take a moment to ponder. The river isn’t a resource in that naming or vocabulary. It is identity, continuity, and belonging. Likewise, the Cherokee Nation’s history names South Carolina as part of the broader Cherokee territorial world at European contact, and the Cherokee Path linked Charleston with Cherokee communities across South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. These paths often followed rivers, fords, ridges, and crossings. The landscape was already known, traveled, storied, and contested long before European settlers translated it into deeds, mills, roads, and county lines. We still find a good number of arrowheads and Indigenous tools as well as use many of the same well-traveled paths for our highways to this day.

I obviously don’t want to use Indigenous presence as a decorative preface to the later history of the Upstate’s hydrology. That is one of the subtle habits of colonial memory in that we mention Indigenous people at the beginning, then let them disappear as “real history” begins. A better approach is to admit that the water cycle of this place has always been entangled with questions of belonging, displacement, use, and responsibility. The streams were never empty, and the rivers were never just waiting to become power in the hands of Europeans.

European settlement and industrialization actually changed the visible form of that relationship. In the nineteenth century, the Piedmont’s rivers and creeks became engines. The South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on industrialization notes that textile manufacturing became the most significant early industry in the Upcountry and Piedmont, with factories taking root along backcountry rivers after 1814. Spartanburg County’s waterways were especially suited to this transformation. Falling water could be made to turn wheels, power machinery, and gather labor into mill villages.

You can still feel that history at Glendale. Glendale Shoals Preserve, along Lawson’s Fork Creek, is now a beloved public space with trails, birds, plant life, ruins, a waterfall, and the old mill site. But in the nineteenth century, the area was known as Bivingsville and was home to the Glendale Cotton Mill and a mill village. The creek was not incidental to the place. It was the condition of the place. It gave the community that grew around it power, shape, risk, and identity.

The Pacolet River tells the same story with a more devastating event. In the late nineteenth century, Pacolet became one of the major textile centers of Spartanburg County. The South Carolina Encyclopedia notes that by 1895, the three mills at Pacolet formed the largest textile manufacturing complex in the county. Then, on June 6, 1903, the Pacolet River flooded. Mills 1 and 2 were destroyed, Mill 3 was severely damaged, and total losses at Pacolet and Clifton Mills were estimated at $3.5 million. The South Carolina State Climatology Office describes the Great Pacolet Flood as the greatest loss of life from river flooding in South Carolina during the twentieth century, with sixty-five people drowned and water rising so rapidly that land near the river was covered by forty feet of water within one hour.

Drought and flood aren’t necessarily opposites in a moral sense. They are both part of the same cycle in which land, atmosphere, development, and human expectations meet. The same river that powered the mill could destroy it. The same rain that brings relief can arrive too quickly for dry ground to receive. The same community that fears scarcity can also be vulnerable to excess.

This is one of the reasons I find the language and vocabulary of “water management” both necessary and incredibly insufficient. Of course, water has to be managed in a human context. A city cannot live on poetic attention alone (though maybe we should give it a shot). Spartanburg’s drinking water system is itself a history of management. Spartanburg Water’s reservoir system begins with Municipal Reservoir #1 in 1926, then Lake Bowen in 1960, and Lake Blalock in 1983. Together, those reservoirs help provide more than 26 million gallons of drinking water each day to more than 200,000 customers. That is an extraordinary civic achievement. It is also an extraordinary form of dependence.

A reservoir is a part of the water cycle, albeit artificially created. It is one of the ways we enter it more deliberately. We dam, store, treat, pipe, meter, and bill water, but we do not make water. We receive, redirect, and depend on water’s return. The reservoir can make water feel stable, and most days that stability is a mercy. But drought reminds us that storage is not creation. A full glass of water is never only a private possession. It is a momentary arrangement of rain, rock, pipe, public trust, ancient molecules, and restraint.

That is why voluntary water restrictions deserve more than annoyance or passive compliance. They are not just bureaucratic language, but are a form of civic perception. Spartanburg Water asks customers to water lawns and vegetation only between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. to reduce evaporation, to follow assigned watering days, to repair leaking toilets and faucets, to take shorter showers, to run dishwashers and washing machines only with full loads, and to stop washing down driveways, gutters, sidewalks, buildings, and other hard surfaces except where immediate fire protection requires it. These are small acts, but small acts are often where a culture’s assumptions become visible.

Turning off the faucet while brushing teeth won't end the drought. Skipping power washing the driveway won't restore a watershed. But these practices can train attention. They interrupt the illusion that water appears from nowhere and disappears into nowhere. They remind us that a private habit can have a public watershed behind it.

This is where empathy enters the water cycle for me. Not empathy as a vague feeling toward nature, and not empathy as a sentimental performance of concern, but empathy as a disciplined enlargement of perception. Edith Stein, in her work on empathy (my dissertation focus), was concerned with how we come to recognize another life as genuinely other and yet meaningfully given to us. We do not collapse the other into ourselves. We learn to perceive that the other’s experience is real, even when it is not our own.

A watershed asks for something like that. The creek does not experience drought the way I do. The sacred black walnut tree in our backyard does not experience rain the way I do. A farmer, a reservoir manager, a child running through a storm, a restaurant owner, a wastewater worker, and a fish in a warming stream do not experience the same weather in the same way. But they are not separate stories. The practice of ecological perception is learning to hold those differences together without flattening them.

Rain makes this harder, not easier. When the storm finally comes, my body wants to relax. The smell of wet soil tells me something has been restored. The trees look washed while the native grasses in our yard begin to lift. The creek sounds more like itself outside our windows. But the deeper lesson of this week is that perception moves more slowly than the weather. It has to stay with the longer accounting.

So maybe the practical question is not simply, “Did it rain?” Maybe the better question is, “Where did the rain go?”

Did it run off a roof into a gutter and into a storm drain? Did it soak into the compacted lawn? Did it reach the roots of a tree? Did it enter Lawson’s Fork, the Pacolet, the Tyger, the Enoree, the Broad? Did it recharge groundwater? Did it carry oil, fertilizer, sediment, or trash? Did it fall too quickly to be received? Did it lower demand on a reservoir for a day while leaving the long deficit in place?

That question changes how we see the place we live in. It turns a rainstorm into a local teacher and asks us to see Duncan Park not only as a neighborhood of humans but also as a watershed for Gaia. It asks us to see Glendale not only as a preserve, but as a memory of water power and industrial dependence. It asks us to see Pacolet not only as a small and lovely town but also as a river valley shaped by both human labor and hydrological forces. It asks us to see the faucet not as the beginning of water, but as one brief opening in a much older cycle.

The rain coming back is a gift. It is also a test of attention. If we treat it as permission to forget drought, then we have misunderstood the gift. If we receive it as part of a longer discipline of care, then even a thunderstorm can become a teacher.

The water cycle is not only above us in the clouds or beneath us in the soil. It is also between us, in the habits and histories that decide how a community lives with what it has been given.

Further reading

Spartanburg Water: Voluntary Water Restrictions
Current local notice on drought conditions, conservation practices, and voluntary water restrictions for Spartanburg Water customers.

Drought.gov: Spartanburg County Conditions
Current drought data for Spartanburg County, including precipitation deficits, population affected, agriculture, streamflow, and drought classifications.

USGS: The Water Cycle
A useful overview of precipitation, runoff, streamflow, infiltration, groundwater recharge, evapotranspiration, reservoirs, and human water use.

South Carolina State Climate Summary
Climate context for South Carolina, including Upstate rainfall patterns, mountain precipitation, and changes in extreme precipitation.

Spartanburg Water: Our Lakes
Background on Municipal Reservoir #1, Lake Bowen, and Lake Blalock as part of Spartanburg’s drinking water system.

South Carolina State Climatology Office: Storms of the Century
Includes a concise account of the 1903 Great Pacolet Flood, one of South Carolina’s most devastating flood events.

South Carolina Encyclopedia: Pacolet
Local history of Pacolet, including its textile mills, the 1903 flood, and the community’s survival after industrial decline.

SPACE: Glendale Shoals Preserve
Local history and ecological context for Glendale Shoals, Lawson’s Fork Creek, the Glendale Cotton Mill, and the preserve’s current role.

South Carolina Encyclopedia: Industrialization
A broader account of industrial development in the Upcountry and Piedmont, including the role of rivers in early textile manufacturing.

South Carolina Department of Archives and History: Pacolet Soapstone Quarries
National Register documentation for ancient quarry sites near Pacolet, pointing toward the much deeper human history of this watershed.

Catawba Nation: About the Nation
Tribal history from the Catawba Nation, including the name yeh is-WAH h’reh, “people of the river.”

Cherokee Nation: History
Cherokee Nation history, including the wider southeastern homelands that included parts of present-day South Carolina.

South Carolina Encyclopedia: Cherokee Path
History of the Cherokee Path as a trade network connecting Charleston with Cherokee communities across the southern Appalachians.

South Carolina Department of Archives and History: Mills in the Upcountry
A historic context study on mills in the Upcountry, useful for connecting water power, settlement, labor, and industrial landscapes.

Carolinas Integrated Sciences & Assessments: 1920s Drought
Historical context on one of the major drought periods in the Carolinas and its impacts on agriculture, hydropower, and regional life.

SCDNR: Keystone Drought Events in South Carolina
A recent overview of major drought events in South Carolina’s historical record.

The proposed merger between NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy is being described in the language of scale, efficiency, affordability, and growth. I’ve discussed how this is the vocabulary that announcements of new data centers and corporate consolidation almost always use. The companies say the combined utility would serve around 10 million customer accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and here in South Carolina (mostly the Lowcountry, dealing with its own slew of data center proposals in rural counties along with development pressure on areas such as St. Helena and the areas inhabited by Gullah-Geechee but also the Columbia metro area), with 110 gigawatts of generation and more than 80 percent of its operations in regulated utilities. Dominion shareholders would receive NextEra stock, NextEra shareholders would own most of the combined company, and customers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina would receive proposed bill credits after closing. The deal is valued at roughly $67 billion and still needs shareholder and regulatory approval.

For those of us living outside of Dominion’s footprint here in the Carolina Piedmont, this isn’t only a business story, but is also a landscape story.

The story here is one about rivers, substations, transmission corridors, forests, county councils, ratepayers, server farms, and the strange new moral geography of artificial intelligence. I’ve often written here that we dress up these stories in other vocabularies, but they are often ecological and perceptual at heart. Ultimately, this is a story about attention and what we are asked to notice, what we are encouraged to ignore, and what gets hidden inside the smooth language of “energy demand.”

The timing isn’t accidental. Electricity demand in the United States has begun rising after years of relative flatness, and much of the current surge is tied to data centers, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and the broader digital infrastructure that now underwrites ordinary life. Reuters describes the deal as part of a broader utility response to the energy needs of AI-driven data centers, especially across the Southeast and the PJM Interconnection region. Dominion is already deeply entangled in this context through Virginia’s “Data Center Alley,” while Florida-based NextEra brings enormous generation and development capacity.

Dominion is part of the state's physical and political ecology after it purchased the ash remains of SCANA when it spectacularly failed to complete the VC Summer Nuclear facility in Fairfield County (earthquake-prone, btw) in the 2010s, which led to significant political fallout. The merger materials specifically name Dominion’s existing operational headquarters in Cayce, South Carolina, as part of the future structure of the combined company, and Dominion’s own merger page says customers in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina would receive $2.25 billion in bill credits spread over two years after closing.

So while the headlines may point to Wall Street, Florida, Virginia, or the enormous buildout of AI infrastructure, this story has a Carolina address.

Here in Spartanburg, we have already been learning how to read these stories. Project Spero, the failed AI data center development at the Tyger River Industrial Park, has made clear how quickly “the cloud” comes down to earth. What appears in national conversation as artificial intelligence or digital transformation arrives locally as land use, megawatts, water, tax agreements, transmission capacity, public secrecy, and unanswered questions about who benefits and who pays. The vocabulary of innovation often comes first, and the material accounting comes later.

This is why the NextEra-Dominion deal feels important beyond the business pages. It isn’t that one large utility may absorb another (although that is certainly worthy of attention and scrutiny in our current economic context). The energy system is reorganizing itself around the demands of computational scale, and the electrical grid is being asked to serve a new geography of artificial intelligence. That shift won’t happen in some invisible digital realm, but across watersheds, neighborhoods, rural corridors, industrial parks, and monthly power bills.

Vocabulary like “large-load opportunity” sounds sterile, almost harmless. But a large load is never only a number on an investor slide. Instead, it’s a claim placed somewhere. That vocabulary requires a river, a right-of-way, a cleared site, a substation, a financing structure, regulatory approval, and a community that understands future growth as a good in itself. Sometimes that growth may bring real benefits. But even then, it’s not weightless or “in the cloud.” The more our economy depends on computational scale, the more we need to learn how to see the physical forms beneath the digital promises.

The more I work on my PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion, the less convinced I am that our central crisis is only one of bad technology or insufficient regulation. Underneath them is a perceptual crisis. We have built systems that train us not to see the relations that sustain us. We see the app but not the power plant, while we see the chatbot but not the water withdrawal. We hear the vocabulary of a corporate announcement but not the watershed. We see “the grid,” but not the living land through which it passes.

This is where phenomenology becomes more than an academic discipline for me. To attend to the world is not simply to think harder about it. Allowing the world to show itself again beneath the layers of convenience and abstraction is to pause before the phrase “energy demand” and ask, “Whose demand, for what purpose, at whose cost, and in what place?”

The merger announcement says the combined company will help meet rising demand while keeping bills affordable. That’s the promise, as we are all comforted by the vocabulary of “affordability” in a time of economic instability and rising energy prices, due to factors that feel beyond ordinary citizens’ power to control. Families are already feeling the strain of utility bills here in South Carolina. Energy poverty is real and a growing concern for our communities. No serious ecological policy can ignore the burden placed on households when infrastructure decisions are made far above them. The Associated Press notes that the merger arrives amid public and political concern about rising electricity bills and rate hikes across several states.

But affordability cannot be reduced to a temporary bill credit of a couple of hundred dollars, either. A two-year credit may soften the political edge of a merger, but it doesn’t answer the deeper question of what kind of energy future is being built. If the grid is expanded primarily to meet massive computational demand, ordinary customers may still find themselves living in an infrastructural vocabulary designed around someone else’s priorities. The bill may arrive at the mailbox, but the real costs are distributed across air, water, land, and public power.

That phrase, public power, is interesting when the utilities themselves are investor-owned. Electricity isn’t a luxury good in the ordinary sense, but a condition of modern life. Electricity shapes health, education, food storage, communication, heating, cooling, work, and care. Because of that, utilities occupy a strange moral space in my opinion. They are “corporations,” but they also govern possibility. They decide, often alongside regulators and political bodies, what kinds of futures become materially available.

So when a utility grows larger, the question is not only whether it can finance more projects efficiently, but also whether it can do so in a way that supports its mission. The question is also whether communities will have any meaningful say in the future being built around them.

In South Carolina, we should be especially attentive to this. Our state has long been treated as a place where infrastructure can be routed, land can be made available, and energy-intensive development can be welcomed in the name of jobs and growth. Sometimes those promises are real. Sometimes they are thin. But they always deserve public scrutiny, especially when projects are wrapped in the language of inevitability.

Artificial intelligence is often presented as inevitable. Data center growth is presented as inevitable if we are to “beat” China in some Strangelovian drama in the vocabulary of “winning.” Rising electricity demand is presented as inevitable because progress is depicted as always linear. Utility consolidation is presented as the rational response to the inevitability of efficiency. However, inevitability is often just power speaking in a calm voice, using the vocabulary of placation, when an issue is in the news cycle.

Ecology teaches a different grammar. Nothing arrives without relation, and nothing scales without consequence. The immaterial vocabulary of “grid,” “cloud-based,” or “closed-cycle” doesn’t apply. The cloud is not in the sky, but it’s in the watershed. It is in the copper, concrete, steel, gas turbine, solar array, battery field, transmission line, and rate case. In this way, it is in the political economy of places like Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

And relation is here, in the ordinary landscapes we are tempted to overlook, that the spiritual question emerges.

What kind of intelligence requires us to become less attentive to the world?

That’s the question I keep returning to in my writings here and in my research. I am not against technology or artificial intelligence, much to the chagrin of one of my gurus, Wendell Berry. That’s because I don’t want to romanticize some imagined past before electricity or computation. But any intelligence worthy of that vocabulary term should deepen our perception of relation, not flatten it. It should help us become more accountable to the land, not more skilled at hiding extraction behind abstraction.

There is an old theological temptation to treat the spirit as an escape from matter so that our true selves can either float up to play a harp on a cloud for eternity or ascend to the higher gnostic or docetic realms of being. Much of my own work pushes in the opposite direction. The spiritual isn’t what floats above the material. The spiritual is the depth of relation within the material. It is the more-than-human communion that becomes visible when we stop treating the world as an object and “resource” for our projects. Trees, rivers, soils, power lines, homes, cooling systems, and human bodies all belong to the same field of consequence and consciousness.

This is why a utility merger is so fascinating to me.

Ecology is not only about forests, birds, and rivers. Ecology is about the pattern of relations that makes life possible (the name comes from the Greek terms indicating a “Study of the Home,” after all… where we belong). A merger of this size alters the pattern and shifts leverage. A business merger, in the vocabulary of such transactions, changes how energy futures are financed. It changes the scale at which decisions are imagined. The distance between a household in Spartanburg and the boardrooms where the future of the grid is being described as an opportunity is altered.

The work before us is not simply to oppose or accept, but our work is to perceive differently.

We do need to ask what this merger means for South Carolina ratepayers. We also need to ask which new generations will be built and where. We should ask how much of the new load is driven by public need and how much by private computational expansion. We must ask what data center growth will require from our rivers and our rural counties… whether regulators will treat ecological cost as central or peripheral. We need to ask whether local communities will be invited into real decision-making or merely informed after the terms have already been set.

Most of all, we need to refuse the convenience of invisibility.

The grid is not elsewhere. The cloud is not elsewhere. The future is not elsewhere. The future, past, and present are here, in the Piedmont, in the hum of wires after dark, in the cleared lots at the edge of town, in the rivers whose names we forget until someone wants to use them, in the monthly bill on the kitchen counter, in the language of economic development, and in the habits of attention we either cultivate or surrender. Just as it is in Dominion’s vocabulary of “footprint” in the Lowcountry and Midlands (interesting that we use the term “footprint” for such discussions, isn’t it?).

The proposed NextEra-Dominion merger may become one of the largest utility deals in history. But its meaning will not be found only in market capitalization or shareholder ratios. Rather, that meaning will be found in how it reshapes the conditions of life and ecology across actual places. Including this one.

And that means we should pay attention before the deal becomes another fact of the landscape and learn to perceive the vocabularies meant to shape our consciousness and our ecologies.