Carolina Ecology

What a Pool and a Walnut Reflect

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:31:17 GMT

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.

The Surveyor and the Survey

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:21:32 GMT

More about our beloved Rail Trail here: https://www.cityofspartanburg.org/238/Mary-Black-Rail-Trail

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.

Love it or hate it, spurge is abundant.

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.

I’ve always liked this portrait of Ruyer… from Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Ruyer

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.

What Was Called Liberty

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:28:33 GMT

via the Post and Courier here: https://www.postandcourier.com/pee-dee/news/sc-pee-dee-data-centers/article_1afcd3af-40d1-4e00-8465-b0e3fb912862.html

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.

Where The Shade Falls

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:07:18 GMT

from Tree Equity Score: https://www.treeequityscore.org/map#10.52/34.9481/-81.9757

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.

A Year Under the Black Walnut

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:36:22 GMT

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.

What Does Not Return

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:15:45 GMT

Taken about 1935 by the Department of Agriculture. The caption says, "Active roadside gully formed in old roadbed. Note new location of roadbed. This is the way many gullies in the Piedmont are formed. Farm of George Smith, near Switzer [Spartanburg County], March 1935.”

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…

3 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

The Beach as Potency: Edith Stein, Children, and a Carolina Shore

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:14:50 GMT

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.

An Ecology of Memory in the Pee Dee

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 26 May 2026 14:52:19 GMT

from https://m.yelp.com/biz/south-carolina-tobacco-museum-mullins

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.

“Located in northeastern South Carolina, Marion County is shaped like a knobby sweet potato, with its skinny southern end approximately fifteen miles from the Atlantic Ocean.”
https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/marion-county/

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.

Fascinating read here on De Soto and the Lady of Cofitachequi in the Pee Dee: https://digital.library.sc.edu/blogs/caroliniana/2025/02/18/de-soto-and-the-lady-of-cofitachequi/

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).

Marion and his men at Snow Island from The Liberty Trail’s site: https://thelibertytrail.org/sc/trail-sites/historic-sites/snows-island

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.

from https://m.yelp.com/biz_photos/south-carolina-tobacco-museum-mullins?select=xA6SI_MAz2mSOVymBWs5pA

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.

From https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/marion-county/

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.

I spent lots of time in a canoe on the Little Pee Dee River: https://www.gopaddlesc.com/waterways/trail/pee-dee-river

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.

When the Rain Comes

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:19:14 GMT

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.

Soapstone Outcropping with Bowl Scar

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.

Maps are often problematic, colonialist, and propagandist (President Jed Bartlet was right about the Mercator Projection), but this one is interesting as well.

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.

From Pacolet Memories: http://pacoletmemories.com/flood.html

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.

When the Grid Becomes the Landscape

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:23:12 GMT

Dominion Energy’s “Footprint” in South Carolina https://www.dominionenergy.com/south-carolina/save-energy/electric-vehicles/infrastructure-availability-map

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.

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The Green Isn't a Reset

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:12:52 GMT

I’m delighted that the trees here in Duncan Park have filled in again. The red maples, beloved oaks, sweetgums, tulip poplars, and black walnuts have moved from the tentative green of early spring into something thicker and more confident. The roadsides have become unruly in the best way with Queen Anne’s lace, clover, violets, and grasses rising in the margins where mowers have not yet flattened them into compliance. The air feels different now, too. It’s heavier and more inhabited. The evenings carry that particular Upstate dampness that makes every sound seem closer than it was in February, even though we’ve had low relative humidity lately.

After rain, especially after dry weeks, the Piedmont knows how to perform abundance. But that performance can mislead us.

One of the habits I am trying to unlearn in my own ecological attention is the assumption that green equals well. We are deeply trained to read greenness as health, as recovery, as restoration. A brown yard signals trouble. A green yard signals success! A full canopy suggests resilience, and a swollen creek after rain suggests replenishment. We look at the surface and assume the system beneath it has returned to balance. Maybe I’ve been reading too much Hildegard and her wonderful concept of viriditas.

But the world is often more complicated than that.

The recent rains across South Carolina have certainly been welcome. You can feel it in the garden soil and see it in the leaves. Farmers and growers across the state have needed it, and the first good soaking after a dry stretch carries a kind of bodily relief. The dust settles while the plants lift themselves. Even the birds seem to sing with more gusto. The human nervous system seems to unclench a little when rain finally arrives after weeks of watching forecasts and clouds that do not deliver. We all certainly need that these days.

But rain is not the same thing as repair.

A very dry spring does not disappear because we had a wet weekend. Drought doesn’t end in the imagination simply because the yard turns green again. The deeper question is not whether the leaves look alive (and they certainly do). The question is what the soil has been asked to endure, what the roots have had to negotiate, what creeks have carried too little for too long, and what kinds of pressure will follow now that heat and moisture are arriving together.

This is where mid-May becomes such a revealing season in the Upstate. It is beautiful, but not simple. The same rain that brings relief also brings potential rot, fungus, insects, and disease pressure in fields and gardens. The same humidity that makes the woods smell alive also creates the conditions for other forms of stress. The living world doesn’t move from scarcity to abundance in a straight line. It moves through entanglement. Moisture returns, and with it come both healing and vulnerability.

We could learn something from that.

We tend to want ecological stories to resolve quickly. Drought, then rain. Damage, then recovery (especially in the aftermath of storms like Helene). Extraction, then mitigation. Development, then offset. The pattern is familiar because it is so common in public discourse about land use in the South. Something is taken, but something else will be added. Trees are cut down and removed, but landscaping will be installed. A watershed is burdened, but the impact will be managed. A data center requires water and power, but “efficiency” will be improved along with our ubiquitous access to cutting-edge AI, promising a better life. A road is widened, but traffic will flow. A field is cleared, but growth is on the way.

There is always a promise that the system will absorb the wound. But the land keeps a different kind of perspective, I believe.

The Piedmont is not a blank surface on which we place our projects, like a game of SimCity. It is old, worn, eroded, beautiful, and still living while echoing its ancient past and the many people who have lived among these hills and creeks. Its red clay remembers forests, Cherokee hunting grounds, farms, textile mills, highways, subdivisions, churches, schools, creeks, and the long history of people treating land as background rather than participant. When rain falls here, it does not fall onto abstraction. It falls onto compacted yards, wooded ravines, kudzu edges, storm drains, construction sites, school playgrounds, church parking lots, farms, and the thin green borders left between one human claim and another.

To pay attention in mid-May is to notice how much is happening at once.

The black walnut in our backyard is fully awake now. Its leaves have moved past emergence into declaration. The shade beneath it has returned, not yet the dense shade of July, but enough to change the feel of the ground below, and as I moved our patio furniture across the yard to enjoy its shade and the shade from a mighty oak, I said my prayers of thanksgiving. Around the black walnut, smaller plants are negotiating their place in the walnut’s chemical field, that quiet allelopathic power by which the tree shapes its own neighborhood. The cardinals, squirrels, and wrens move through its branches with an ease I envy. In the evening, the whole tree seems to hold the day’s heat and then slowly release it.

It would be easy to look at that tree and see only beauty. I often do. But the better practice is to see beauty without letting beauty become anesthesia.

That is the temptation of spring in the Carolinas. The world becomes so visually generous that we stop asking harder questions. We stop asking where the water came from, where it went, what it carried, what it failed to replenish. We stop asking why some trees leaf out while others decline. We stop asking what happens to insects when we spray every edge into silence. We stop asking why our neighborhoods are hotter where shade has been removed, or why some communities inherit asphalt while others inherit canopy. We stop asking why “growth” so often means the thinning of the very world that makes life here bearable.

The green world can comfort us, but it should not pacify us. I keep thinking about this in relation to Spartanburg’s current context. So many of our local questions are ecological questions, even when dressed as economic development, traffic planning, school construction, housing demand, or utility infrastructure. The debates over data centers, road diets, water use, and industrial recruitment are not separate from the greening (Hildegard again) trees of mid-May. They are part of the same story and ask what kind of attention we are willing to practice before decisions become consequences.

Because once a tree is cut, it is not enough to say the neighborhood still looks green and once a creek is burdened, it is not enough to say the rain has returned. Likewise, once a community is asked to absorb another large-scale project, it is not enough to say the numbers look good on paper.

The work of ecological attention is slower than that. It asks us to remain with the place after the obvious drama has passed (Donna Haraway has a wonderful phrase of “staying with the trouble”). It’s not just about public meetings, but the watershed afterward. Rather than just the chainsaw, attend to the silence afterward. Enjoy the rainstorm, but practice attention towards the soil afterward. Not just the promise of investment, but the long life of what has been altered.

That kind of attention can feel inconvenient because it resists closure and refuses the easy relief of saying, “At least everything is green again.” It asks us to notice the difference between appearance and recovery, between growth and flourishing, between greenness and health.

Mid-May in the Upstate is one of the best teachers of that difference. The world is lush right now. It is also strained. The rain has come, but the deeper thirst remains. The leaves are full, but the systems beneath them are still negotiating drought, heat, compaction, runoff, and our endless appetite for more before the inevitable hot weather of June and July. To see all of that together is not to become gloomy. It is to become more faithful to the place itself.

The green is real, but so is the wound. Maybe the real work of Carolina ecology begins there, in refusing to let one cancel out the other.

On Noticing a Tree Being Cut Down

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:12:50 GMT

We live in a beautiful leafy neighborhood in Spartanburg. I can see the watershed of the creek we decided to dam in the 1930’s to create a lake out of my office window. When it’s raining, I can hear the water passing by. There’s a major half-marathon and 10k (Merianna is running!) going through the neighborhood this morning under the canopy of oaks, maples, walnuts, and cypresses that line the main street and side streets. I’ve cataloged well over 100 species of various birds, owls, hawks, ospreys, and geese over the past few seasons just in our yard alone (thanks to the incredible Merlin app from Cornell).

Our neighborhood was devastated by Hurricane Helene in the Fall of 2024. We lost countless trees, from solid oaks to the ever-present pines, as we took the main brunt of the storm early that September morning. Duncan Park looks different today than it did in May 2024. Houses are still being rebuilt and remodeled, and you’ll occasionally see a Lorax-like tree stump in someone’s yard as a reminder of that event.

Yet, we’ve bounced back as both humans and vegetal life in this little corner of Spartanburg, known for its shaded streets and great neighborhood vibes.

Still, there was something almost liturgical about the sound of chainsaws echoing across our street yesterday. The sound, vibration, and smell of fresh pine and oak death wasn’t sacred in any comforting sense, but ritualistic all the same. The grinding repetition began sometime after breakfast when I got home from taking our youngest to school and continued for hours into the late afternoon across the street from our house. One tree came down, then another, then another. Limbs crashed against the earth with that strange combination of violence and finality that only accompanies the falling of something that has been alive longer than many of the people watching it.

And I found myself asking a question I suspect many people quietly carry but rarely voice aloud...

Why do we cut down trees in our yards?

Of course, there are practical answers. Some trees are “diseased.” Some threaten roofs or foundations. Some people fear storms after Helene. To my disdain, insurance companies often encourage removals. Developers prefer clean lines and open lots for efficiency’s sake. Our non-native but oddly prized green crabgrass and Bermuda grass grow more easily in uninterrupted sunlight. Leaves clog gutters while roots “disturb” sidewalks.

Trees are messy in the same way human life is.

But standing there yesterday listening to chainsaws tear through our neighborhood canopy, I realized the practical explanations only explain part of the story.

What struck me most was how normal it all seemed.

No one gathered in mourning. There wasn’t any paused traffic as we do for human funeral processions here in the Carolinas. No one seemed to lower their voice. The removals happened with the ordinary efficiency of suburban maintenance. By dinner, the trunks were already sectioned into neat cylinders. The canopy that had filtered afternoon light onto that street for decades was simply... gone.

And perhaps that is the deeper question beneath the ecological one. Not merely why we cut down trees, but why we have become so accustomed to their disappearance.

Obviously, I have been thinking a great deal lately about attention as an ecological practice with my PhD work. About perception itself as a moral and spiritual act. Thomas Berry often wrote that the ecological crisis is fundamentally a crisis of relationship. I increasingly think it is also a crisis of perception. We do not destroy what we genuinely perceive as alive within the horizon of our own existence. We destroy what has become background.

A mature oak becomes “shade,” while a maple becomes “yard debris.” A stand of pines becomes “property value” or timber assets to eventually “harvest” and sell. The tree ceases to appear as a living participant in the world and instead becomes an object, obstacle, or commodity within a human-centered landscape.

This is not usually cruelty. That would almost be easier to confront. It is something quieter, perhaps more unsettling... indifference produced by habit.

Growing up in South Carolina, trees have always been there as part of my history and perception. Longleaf pines along interstates and highways, and dirt roads of Marion County. Water oaks leaning over parking lots in Hilton Head. Pecans in old yards all over Florence. Sweetgums dropping those impossible spiked balls that turn into great pretend objects, from grenades to baseballs for children growing up in Latta every autumn. The ubiquitous Sabal Palm is on our state flag and lines our Atlantic coast (and a few yards here in Spartanburg). Trees formed the architecture of memory itself. You measured neighborhoods by them and summers by them. Their shade altered entire emotional geographies. Even now, when I think about childhood, I often remember trees before I remember buildings or even fellow humans.

I can see the Sweetgum in my grandparents’ backyard in Temperance Hill in my mind.

Yesterday’s chainsaw chorus and dirge also reminded me how physically visceral tree removal feels. The sound really bypasses abstraction. You feel it in your chest. The vibrations travel through walls and windows with an alarming thud when a solid and alive oak lands suddenly. It unsettles birds, and dogs bark differently. Even the light changes almost immediately once a canopy disappears. A yard that felt sheltered in the morning suddenly feels exposed by afternoon.

There is a phenomenology to tree loss that environmental discourse often misses. We talk about carbon sequestration, heat islands, runoff mitigation, biodiversity, and property values. All of those matter, obviously. But there is also the immediate lived experience of absence. A street feels different when older trees disappear. The scale of things changes. Time itself feels altered. Older trees bring a sense of temporal depth to neighborhoods. They silently witness generations.

Edith Stein’s work on empathy comes to mind, especially her insistence that perception is never neutral. To perceive another being as alive requires a kind of openness that exceeds utility. Perhaps ecological intentionality begins precisely there... in learning again how to perceive the more-than-human world not as scenery or resource but as neighbor.

That sounds overly romantic to some, I know. And yet anyone who has sat quietly beneath a mature tree shortly before a Carolina summer thunderstorm probably already understands this intuitively. Trees shape consciousness. They alter acoustics, humidity, imagination, memory, and even prayer. They are not passive decorations around human life. They participate in the worlds we inhabit.

Which returns me to yesterday.

I do not know why those particular trees were cut down. Maybe there were entirely legitimate reasons (the house was recently purchased, and I haven’t met our incoming neighbors yet). Maybe the owners had worried about storm damage, roots, or decay. I’m not interested in condemning neighbors from across the street by any means.

But I do think the question matters.

Because every removed tree reveals something about how we imagine our relationship to place. Whether a yard is merely owned space or a shared habitat. Whether shade is an inconvenience or a gift. Whether we understand ourselves as managers, stewards of landscapes, or participants in living ecologies.

Late yesterday evening (after the chainsaws finally stopped), the street became strangely quiet. Too quiet. The birds had relocated somewhere else for the night. The remaining trees stood at odd new angles against the sky because the canopy had been interrupted. I walked outside after dinner and instinctively looked toward the gap where branches had been that morning.

And for a moment, Duncan Park felt just a little less alive.

What Evaporates

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:02:38 GMT

From the US Drought Monitor this afternoon here: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?SC

There’s a drought here in South Carolina. We had rain this morning, which is helpful, but it’s going to take exceptional spring rainfall in these remaining few weeks before summer to get us back to baseline. You can see it in Lawson’s Fork if you know where to look... the watermarks on the exposed limestone shelves rising above the current surface, the way the shoals are quieter than they should be in early May, the vegetation at the margins leaning inward toward the diminished channel. Spartanburg Water has already asked customers to conserve in parts of the county served by our watershed (over towards Greenville) rather than our reservoirs and lakes. The language of scarcity is in the air, which is itself drier than it ought to be.

Into this particular spring comes news that the NorthMark data center going up on South Pine Street, the former Kohler site, will use somewhere between 460,000 and 581,000 gallons of water per day, according to reporting from The Post and Courier’s Christian Boschult this morning. That wasn’t a typo. I had to double-check myself. That upper figure, the maximum daily draw, is what you get on the hottest days, when the servers are working hardest, and the cooling towers are cycling fastest... which is to say, the days when the rest of us are also watering gardens and running taps and watching our lawns go brown. Spartanburg Water’s CEO, Guy Boyle, framed it carefully that the average draw represents between 1.8 and 2.3 percent of current daily demand, and since the current system is operating at only about a third of its maximum capacity, the data center’s share works out to roughly 0.6 percent of what the infrastructure could “theoretically” handle. These are the numbers that are meant to be reassuring, after all.

What the reassuring numbers don’t carry is that 86 percent of that water will not return to the watershed. It will evaporate from the cooling towers as vapor and become part of the atmosphere, part of whatever the weather does next, no longer available to the Catawba-Wateree system, to Lawson’s Fork, Pacolet River, or to the small aquifers beneath the Piedmont clay. Only the remaining 14 percent returns as effluent, which is treated and discharged into the municipal wastewater system... 65,800 gallons per day (if the estimates hold). The rest is, in the literal sense, gone.

Yesterday, before Boschult’s article, NorthMark published a statement to their Spartanburg neighbors. It is a careful document, written in the reassuring register that large capital projects tend to adopt when local scrutiny is rising. It mentions that the facility operates under the same municipal water permit as the prior Kohler plant, a sentence designed to anchor the project to something familiar, to something the county already absorbed without crisis and provided jobs for our community. What the sentence cannot tell you is that the Kohler plant, making plumbing fixtures, had a different relationship to water than a server farm does. Kohler used water in manufacturing processes that involved discharge and recovery, while a cooling-tower operation that is 86 percent evaporative is a different kind of draw on the hydrological commons. The permit is the same, but the hydrology is not.

I want to be careful here because I have no interest in pretending the numbers are catastrophic when the utility’s own CEO says they aren’t. Spartanburg Water has substantial capacity. The treatment infrastructure appears adequate. The PFAS testing requirement and third-party discharge monitoring are the kinds of conditions a community should insist on, and they appear to be in place. None of this is the story of a company doing something illegal, or even particularly unusual by industry standards. Cooling towers that evaporate the majority of their draw are standard practice. This is how data centers work.

What I keep returning to is the concept of evaporation itself... the sheer scale of what leaves the watershed and does not return. On its worst day, this single facility will send something approaching the daily water use of 2,000 homes upward into the South Carolina sky. In May. During a severe drought. Under conditions where the state is asking voluntary conservation from every other customer, with the word “voluntary” doing a great deal of work, as it always does in these situations.

The Catawba-Wateree is already one of the most heavily managed river systems in the southeastern United States, a staircase of reservoirs from the North Carolina mountains down through the Piedmont, each one mediating between agricultural demand, municipal demand, industrial demand, recreational use, and the increasingly erratic precipitation patterns that attend a warming climate. Lawson’s Fork feeds into that system, carrying the memory of the Piedmont’s watersheds downstream. The Cherokee and Catawba people understood this creek as part of a living network that required ongoing attention and care... their land management practices along these banks were oriented around long-term reciprocity with the watershed rather than extraction from it. On the contrary, we have mostly organized ourselves differently.

I am not arguing that the data center should not exist, or that Spartanburg should have declined the tax revenue (projected at something like $15 million per year by 2029, which is genuinely significant for a county with real school and roadwork funding needs). These are genuinely complicated tradeoffs, and the people making them are not villains. What I am saying is that 86 percent evaporation during a drought is a kind of relationship with a watershed, whether or not we name it as such.

Water that rises into the atmosphere above South Pine Street was, the day before, rain that fell somewhere upstream... rain that ran off the red clay hills into creeks and tributaries that moved through the shoals and riffles I walk along in the mornings, that was drawn up through the roots of the trees along the bank. It was part of a cycle. After the cooling towers, it is part of a different cycle, or no particular cycle at all if you take the intended metaphor of “the cloud” as data centers are being marketed to heart.

The permit is the same. The water is not.

A Gift from the Black Walnut

Sam Harrelson — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:05:54 GMT

For weeks, the black walnut in the backyard had not leafed out. Everything else had started to erupt in leaves, with the oaks coming first, then the dogwoods, the red maples, the tulip poplars climbing the slope behind the fence. The cedars in our yard shed their winter coat (lots of sweeping of our porches attest to this). Even the vile Bradford pears planted in earnest around Spartanburg by do-gooders and lawn contractors supplied from Lowe’s bloomed and lost their bloom (thankfully). The redbuds made their brief argument. But the walnut stood in its own calendar (like our youngest daughter), unbothered by what the rest of the yard was doing, and if you didn’t know better, you might have thought it wasn’t going to bloom again.

This is one of the things the Upstate of South Carolina teaches me every year that I’ve lived here (if you live here long enough to pay the kind of attention it asks for, you’ll know). The season doesn’t move as a single event. It moves in layers, and the layers don’t agree with each other. April here is not the arrival of spring so much as the negotiation of it... a warm week followed by a cold one, the redbuds catching a late frost, the insects starting up and then going quiet. Leaves still piled up by those of us not barbaric enough to rake. And underneath all of that, the black walnut was doing its own calculation, holding its own new leaves in reserve while the rest of the canopy committed. It had reasons, I suppose. The last frost date in the Piedmont is a moving target, and the walnut has been tracking it for longer than any of us has been alive.

There is a particular quality to May light in the Upstate that I keep trying to describe and keep getting wrong. Growing up in the Pee Dee region, I learned a different light entirely... coastal plain light, which carries its heavy humidity visibly, which softens edges and holds the morning in a kind of suspension. In the Lowcountry, the air is a presence in itself and plays a key role in how you perceive the day and night. It thickens over the blackwater rivers, hangs in the long leaf pine stands, wraps the Spanish moss until the moss seems to be breathing. You don’t so much see the Pee Dee landscape as you receive it through a medium that is always slightly opaque, always slightly (or very) warm, the way you might perceive something through water that is almost but not quite clear. The fog that settles over the mysterious Carolina bays surrounding my hometown before dawn is not merely weather. It is a condition of perception, a way the landscape announces that looking here requires patience with obscurity.

The Upstate doesn’t offer such a cushion. This light has angles, as I realized as a freshman at Wofford College, with a dorm room window facing east. It comes over the Blue Ridge foothills with a directness that the piedmont clay seems to answer... that red-orange earth, dense and iron-laden in a way the sandy Pee Dee soils and heavy top soil never are, holds the morning light differently, gives it back warm and specific. The Pee Dee soils are pale and acid, leached by rain that moves quickly through sand toward a water table that is never far below your feet. You can dig two feet almost anywhere in the Lowcountry and find moisture. The land there is in constant negotiation with water, which is why the bald cypress and the tupelo grow with their feet submerged, why the pocosins hold their dark water for months, and why the whole ecology is organized around the premise that water is close and the ground is only provisionally dry. In the Upstate, the red clay holds its structure differently. It is stubborn, slow to drain, and prone to cracking in August when the rain stops. This spring has been much drier than usual, with a drought settling into Spartanburg County in a quiet march that the recent rains only partially addressed. The things that grow here have to push through something denser, which may be part of why they arrive later, why the walnut in particular takes its time.

In the early mornings, the May light falls through the gap in the trees along the back fence with a clarity that feels like attention rather than illumination. You notice things in it that you don’t notice in summer, when the canopy closes, and the air thickens and the whole landscape retreats into a kind of green privacy. The Pee Dee’s summer is a disappearance into humidity. You stop seeing the landscape clearly and start moving through it by texture, heat, and proximity to finding shade or shelter from afternoon thunderstorms. The Upstate’s summer is a different kind of concealment… almost more architectural... the hardwood canopy simply closes over everything and the filtered light underneath loses its angles and goes green and general. May in the Upstate is also the last month in which the landscape is still visibly organized, still showing you how it works, before the heat covers everything and you have to take it on faith.

What I notice in May here that I didn’t have to notice growing up is the sourwood beginning to distinguish itself from the other understory trees by its particular leaf shape, narrow and finely toothed, and the way the chestnut oaks on the rocky slopes are slower than the willow oaks in the low places. The fireflies of my youth in the Pee Dee came in enormous, synchronizing pulses, a coastal plain phenomenon tied to flat terrain and thick, humid air, a display so total it reorganized your sense of what a corn, tobacco, or peanut field was. The fireflies in the Upstate are more individual but still present, scattered across a hillier darkness, blinking in patterns that don’t resolve into the same collective rhythm. It is a different kind of attention the Upstate asks for at night... not the overwhelm of the Pee Dee’s simultaneous pulse, but something more patient, more like tracking or following a single light, then another, and then losing both in the treeline.

For weeks, I could see the shape of the walnut clearly... the architecture of the branching, the slight asymmetry, the branch that reaches further south than the others, as though it had learned something about sunlight that the other branches hadn’t yet. I knew the structure would eventually be hidden. The leaves would come in waves, the compound fronds opening outward from each bud in sequence, and by July, nothing would be visible but canopy. But while the “skeleton” as may be considered (perhaps unwisely) was still exposed, the light that fell through it onto the ground was detailed in a way it won’t be again until November.

What the walnut was also doing, below the surface, is more difficult to see but no less organized. The roots extend well past the dripline, releasing juglone into the soil... a compound that inhibits the germination and growth of a long list of plants that would otherwise compete for light and moisture. This is sometimes described as allelopathy, as though it were a kind of aggression, but I’m not sure that framing serves the tree or any tree doing similar things. The walnut is reorganizing the terms of its neighborhood, slowly and continuously, without announcement, in a way that reflects a long series of calculations about what kind of community it can thrive in, much like I tend our gardens. Those calculations include droughts like this one, and storms worse than drought... Hurricane Helene came through in 2024, and the walnut stood through it, the way it has stood through every wet and dry season this particular slope has offered, adjusting its chemistry, canopy, and root spread to whatever the year required. The plants that grow near a walnut have either adapted to juglone or learned to give it space. The soil remembers the tree’s decisions. What the tree remembers is harder to say, but I don’t think the question is as strange as it sounds.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer called this kind of self-organizing purposiveness “neofinalism”... the idea that living forms are not merely subject to chemical processes but are in some genuine sense the authors of them, that an organism surveys its own form from the inside in a way that has no spatial equivalent, no outside perspective from which to observe itself. The walnut releasing juglone, timing its leafing to the last reliable frost, shedding bark in the drought... these are not mechanisms running on the tree but expressions of what the tree, in Ruyer’s sense, already knows about itself and its situation. A wonderful distinction, and I think Ruyer is right. A mechanism can be interrupted. What the walnut is doing is more like memory made active, a long argument with its own conditions that nothing from the outside fully determines.

The Upstate is not a landscape that announces itself. The mountains that shape the region’s weather, light, and micro-climate are just over the line into North Carolina... you can clearly see the Blue Ridge from certain areas here in Spartanburg on clear days, as I do when I take our children to school on Union Street, but they don’t necessarily dominate the view. The rivers here run brown with tannins from the piedmont clay, and they move through terrain that is neither flat nor dramatically elevated, just undulating in a way that conceals its own organization from anyone moving through it quickly. You have to slow down. You have to develop the kind of attention the walnut practices... patient, cumulative, tracking the long-term pattern of temperature, soil chemistry, and available light rather than any single dramatic event.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is not something we do to the world but something we do with it... that the body and its environment are caught up in each other in ways that precede any deliberate act of looking. I think about this in May in the Upstate, when the light is doing something particular and the whole landscape is in a state of visible process rather than settled appearance. Perception here is a matter of learning the calendar the landscape is keeping, which is a different calendar than the one on the wall and which has as much to do with juglone concentration, frost probability, and the angle of morning light as it does with dates. I grew up learning one version of that calendar. I am still, after years in the Piedmont, learning another. Quarter 2 isn’t so scary anymore.

The leaves did come. I was sitting beside the walnut on this Tuesday morning in early May, upper sixties, blue sky, low humidity, the kind of weather we say we love because it fits our idea of what a morning should feel like, and the compound fronds had opened... bright green, almost translucent in the direct light, the leaflets still soft enough that they moved individually in the breeze coming through the yard. The honeybees had found the privet blooming along the fence and were working through it with their characteristic single-mindedness, indifferent to drought or season or the particular quality of the light. And there, at the base of the trunk where I usually sit and visit and attend (and be attended by) the walnut, was a piece of bark. A substantial piece, deeply furrowed, gray-brown, with a little lichen beginning its slow work on one edge. I don’t know when it fell or what loosened it... whether it was the wind, or the drought contracting the outer layers, or simply the tree’s ongoing process of shedding what it no longer needs. I picked it up and held it for a while, the way you hold something you weren’t expecting to receive. The texture was almost geological, more like a piece of eroded ridge than something that had been alive. Layers much like my beloved archaeological digs at Dura Europos or Nineveh. And I thought about what the tree had gone through to produce that texture, what decades of weather and drought and storm had compressed into that particular surface, and what it meant that the tree had left it there in my sitting spot on a morning when I happened to be paying attention. I don’t want to make too much of it. But I don’t want to make too little of it either. That is, I think, what the walnut keeps teaching... that perception requires us to stay in the register of what is actually happening, which is always more than our categories for it, and to receive what is offered without insisting on knowing in advance what it means.

That gift from the walnut now has a sacred place on my desk, and I just smiled as I stole a glance at it while typing this.

Further Reading

Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism (1952; translated by Anika Skuli Reuter, University of Minnesota Press, 2016). The source of the “neofinalism” argument in my post here... can be very dense for a lay audience, but it’s worth your effort, especially the chapters on organic surveys and the inside of form.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945; translated by Donald Landes, Routledge, 2012). The philosophical ground beneath everything here is about bodies, environments, and the priority of perception.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2013). The best existing model for writing about plant intelligence in an incredible way that neither oversimplifies nor overclaims.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Pantheon, 1996). On perception, landscape, and what it costs us to stop attending to the more-than-human world.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907; translated by Arthur Mitchell, Dover, 1998). For the argument about duration and living form that runs underneath Ruyer (which it inspired, as it does my own work).

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896; translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, Zone Books, 1988). Bergson on memory as something the body carries rather than the mind stores... relevant to what the walnut “remembers.”

Robert Tulecke, “Juglone: Autotoxin of Black Walnut,” Phytochemistry (various editions). For the actual chemistry behind the allelopathy claims, if you want to go further down that particular root.

Douglas W. Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens (Timber Press, 2007). Practical and perceptual at once... good on the community logic of native trees, including walnut, in Piedmont landscapes.

Attention as Ecological Practice

Sam Harrelson — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:52:21 GMT

This long-form paper, titled “Attention as Ecological Practice: AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene,” starts close to home… literally. A $2.8 billion computing facility is going up on South Pine Street in Spartanburg, in the shell of an old Kohler plant. A few miles away, a different $3 billion proposal, Project Spero, named after South Carolina’s state motto, drew hundreds of residents to County Council chambers in opposition before the developer withdrew. A third site remains in the works.

The argument I’m making is that the crisis these proposals represent isn’t only an energy and water problem (though it is that). It’s a crisis of ecological perception, and the way the promotional apparatus around data center development is specifically designed to make planetary costs invisible while foregrounding jobs, tax revenue, and American competitiveness. The Tyger River watershed, the regional grid’s carbon intensity, the cumulative water withdrawals from the Broad River basin… none of that appears in a Governor’s press release.

Drawing on Yves Citton’s account of attention as a distributed, politically structured field, alongside Francis’s Laudate Deum, Donna Haraway’s contact zone concept, and Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, I try to make the case that what happened in those County Council chambers, a community briefly and collectively organizing its attention against a machinery designed to prevent exactly that noticing, points toward something worth taking seriously. Not as a substitute for structural and regulatory transformation, but as its necessary condition.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. The paper tries to think through what it would take to keep these systems visible before decisions are made rather than after.

Attention As Ecological Practice Ai Data Centers And The Limits Of The Anthropocene

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Receiving Rather Than Projecting

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:45:57 GMT

I noticed a spicebush at the edge of the trail that you would walk past without noticing if you were moving at the pace most of us move. It is not large. It does not announce itself. But in late April in the South Carolina Piedmont, Lindera benzoin is already fully leafed and carrying its small yellow-green flower clusters before most of the canopy has committed to anything, and if you stop long enough to look at it, something accumulates that is difficult to name without either flattening it or overstating it. The shrub is doing something. Not responding to stimuli or executing a program, but it’s doing something by pressing its particular form of life into the available light with a specificity that belongs to it and not to the general category of plants-in-spring.

This is the thing the Piedmont forest keeps trying to tell us if we slow down enough to hear it. Instead of a lesson, or a moral, it’s something more like a disclosure, the way a place reveals itself when you stay with it rather than pass through it.

The understory moves first. While the oaks and tulip poplars are still reading the light and the soil temperature, still holding their own counsel about whether spring has actually arrived, the spicebush and the serviceberry and the redbud have already made their commitment. Amelanchier arborea, the serviceberry, blooms so early and so briefly that most people miss it entirely, those white flowers appearing in the gray weeks before the canopy leafs out, pollinated and gone before the forest fills in above. Bloodroot pushes through the leaf litter with its flower already formed inside a curled leaf, carrying its own opening within it, the whole sequence of emergence already organized from within before any of it is visible from outside. There is something worth pausing on in that, in the way the bloodroot’s development is not assembled from the outside in but expressed from the inside out, oriented toward a form it is already, in some sense, becoming.

By the time the tulip poplars are fully committed, the forest has become something different from what it was in March. Liriodendron tulipifera is a signature tree of the Piedmont canopy, the one that tells you where you are, and in late April those big distinctive leaves are unfurling with a kind of urgency that the botanists will tell you is about light capture and competition and the math and physics of photosynthesis. All of that is certainly true. But something is also happening that the math of photosynthesis does not quite account for, which is that each tulip poplar is doing this in a way that is recognizably its own, asserting its form into the space available to it in the way that a century of growth on that particular slope with that particular soil and aspect and water table has made possible. The tree is definitely not a mechanism running a program. It is a history organizing itself forward into a present, carrying everything it has been into everything it is becoming by eating light and transferring that to energy.

Richard Powers understood something about this in The Overstory, which is the rare novel that manages to take trees seriously as something more than scenery without losing the reader in abstraction. What his characters keep discovering, each in their own way and often too late, is that the forest has been communicating all along, that what they took for silence or indifference was actually a form of expression they had not learned to receive. The mycorrhizal networks, the chemical signaling, the way a chestnut oak on a dry ridge holds its leaves longer into autumn than the same species in a wetter hollow... none of this is metaphor. It is the forest being specifically, irreducibly itself, and the question the novel keeps asking is whether we have the perceptual equipment to receive it.

That question isn’t rhetorical. There are permits being processed right now in the Carolina Piedmont for data center infrastructure that will draw from the same aquifer and the same electrical grid that the forest depends on, developments that are moving forward because the people making the decisions have access to impact assessments and growth projections and demand forecasts, and all of those are real, and none of them requires anyone to have spent twenty minutes watching a spicebush in April. The failure is not primarily a failure of regulation, though it may become that too. It is a failure of attention, a trained incapacity to receive what the living system actually discloses when you stand still long enough for it to disclose anything.

The sourwood will bloom in July, those long racemes of white flowers that make the tree look like it is trailing something behind it, and the bees in the Piedmont know exactly what to do with that, and the sourwood honey is a consequence of a relationship that has been developing between Oxydendrum arboreum and its pollinators for longer than the category of management has existed. By late October the sourwood leaves will be the deepest red in the forest, a red that seems almost aggressive in its specificity, as if the tree is insisting on being seen before the winter closes in.

This is what the forest keeps doing, in every season and at every scale from the bloodroot’s single spring flower to the tulip poplar’s century of canopy presence and insisting on its own form of life, pressing its own particular interiority into the world, being, as precisely and as persistently as the conditions allow, itself.

The philosophical name for this is what I call ecological intentionality in my work as an idea that what we call interiority is not a property belonging exclusively to human consciousness but a structural feature of living form as such, the way organisms participate in and disclose meaningful worlds through their own modes of growth and activity. But you do not need the philosophical name to feel the weight of what the spicebush is doing at the edge of the trail. You need to stop, and stay stopped, and let attention do what attention does when it is patient enough... which is to receive, rather than project, what is genuinely there.

The forest has been disclosing itself for a long time. The question is whether we are learning to listen.

What East Main Street Is For

Sam Harrelson — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:15:51 GMT

Thanks to The Walking Spartan for the inspiration to write this.

On the morning of February 22nd, Dolores Dalton was trying to get to church.

She was 75 years old, a faithful Catholic, a hairdresser by trade, a woman whose obituary describes as someone who “never met a stranger.” She had attended St. Paul the Apostle on East Main Street here in Spartanburg for fifteen years. She parked, she stepped out, she crossed East Main Street, with its four lanes and a 25 miles per hour speed limit sign (something closer to 40 in practice), when an SUV traveling westbound hit her. She died at the hospital at 8:28 that morning.

The driver was also on their way to church.

Two people, headed toward the same general hope on a Sunday morning, separated by a road that was designed, not accidentally, not through indifference exactly, but through a specific philosophy of space, to move cars as fast as possible through the kind of urban fabric that makes a city worth living in. The road didn’t just fail Dolores Dalton. It failed the driver, too. It failed everyone who has to calculate, every time they step off a curb, whether the gap is wide enough, the cars slow enough, the morning light bright enough to make a crossing across a third of a mile of uninterrupted asphalt. There are no crosswalks on that stretch. The South Carolina Department of Transportation is now proposing to change all of that.

The proposal is called a “road diet,” which I think is an oddly metabolic term for what is really a philosophical reorientation. Between Converse Street and East St. John Street, SCDOT wants to reduce East Main from four to two lanes, with a center turn lane, bike lanes on both sides, and crosswalks. The project would take place in coordination with already-scheduled repaving work, so there would be no additional footprint or cost, just a different answer to the question of what a road is for.

The opposition, which showed up at the April public meeting and will likely show up again before this is done, is easy to predict from congestion, inconvenience, the fear that a slower East Main will push traffic into Converse Heights, and the vague sense that something is being taken away. These concerns are understandable, and they deserve honest engagement. But the data on road diets is, at this point, not particularly contested. SCDOT’s own spokesperson pointed to a comparable project on Augusta Road in Greenville that saw a 42% reduction in crashes. The Federal Highway Administration has found reductions between 19 and 52 percent, depending on the corridor. What feels counterintuitive turns out to be basic physics, since when a road has excess capacity, drivers fill it. Widen a lane, and people accelerate or likewise narrow it, and they slow down… not because they’ve been moralized at but because the perceptual field has changed.

Back to my ongoing point about humans' perceptual field!

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (bear with me here, because this is actually practical) argued that perception is not a camera recording a fixed external world. It is a bodily orientation toward possibility. We don’t just see a chair, we see a place to sit. We don’t just see a door, we see an opening. And crucially, we don’t just see a road, we see an invitation to move at a certain speed, with a certain kind of attention, past a certain kind of environment. A four-lane arterial invites one mode of being. It says that you are a vehicle. Move. What is beside you is not necessarily your concern.

This isn’t a metaphor, it’s phenomenology applied to transportation and civic engineering. The width of a lane, the number of lanes, the presence or absence of a median, the proximity of sidewalks to moving cars… these aren’t neutral choices about infrastructure. They are decisions about what kind of creatures we assume people to be, what relationships we assume they are capable of, and what they will notice as they move through space. A road built for maximum throughput at 40 mph does not ask you to see the person on the sidewalk as someone who might need to cross. It asks you to see the red light ahead, the gap in traffic, and the time you’re going to be late.

The city of Spartanburg and SCDOT have been trying to think this through, in fits and starts, for years. The Hub City Hopper, Denny’s Tower, the walking trails along Lawson’s Fork and out to Glendale Shoals, and the ones here in Duncan Park are fragments of a different vision and a different set of assumptions about what the body moving through a city might want to encounter. The road diet on East Main is, in this sense, not just a safety measure. It is a tentative argument about perception. It is the city saying, “Here is a stretch of road where we want to invite a different kind of attention.”

There is something worth noticing about the specific geography of this proposal. The stretch between Converse Street and East St. John runs along the edge of what you might call the contested urban margin, or the zone where downtown’s institutional density begins to give way to older residential neighborhoods, where churches sit across from parking lots, and where foot traffic is not hypothetical but actual. St. Paul, First Baptist, and First Presbyterian are right there (and our beloved Venus Pie). So is the Denny’s Tower, and Converse University is just up the road as well as the shops on East Main. People walk here. People cross here. They do so because the geography of their lives requires it, not because a planner has designated it “pedestrian-friendly.”

What the current road says to those people, functionally, is that you are tolerated, not designed for. The four-lane configuration is a legacy of when East Main served as a U.S. highway, before St. John Street took over that function. The road is overbuilt for what it currently does as it carries traffic volume that could be handled by two lanes, but it carries that volume at a speed and with a perceptual field that treats the whole corridor as a through-road rather than as a place. That’s a huge difference.

I also want to say something about opposition to projects like this, because I think there’s something real underneath the noise about congestion. People who push back on road diets are not, in most cases, simply in love with cars or indifferent to safety. They are often expressing something more like a territorial anxiety or a fear that change is being imposed on a place they understand and that the understanding they’ve built up, the mental map they carry of how to move through this city, is being invalidated without their consent.

That is a real thing and I understand that view. I think it deserves acknowledgment. And it also needs to be pointed out that territorial anxiety is largely a product of the fact that we built and then rebuilt this city (like so many in the mid 20th century as car culture dominated) around a set of perceptual assumptions that centered the driver of vehicles, and any adjustment to those assumptions will feel, to people whose habits formed within them, like a loss. It is not a loss in any objective sense. The evidence is clear that road diets reduce crashes, do not meaningfully reduce traffic capacity on over-built corridors, and tend to increase the economic vitality of the adjacent urban fabric. But, it feels like a loss because it shifts who the street is oriented toward, and that shift is perceptible even when it can’t quite be articulated.

Dolores Dalton’s death is, in this light, not an exception or an anomaly. It is the kind of outcome that the current perceptual field makes probable. The coroner’s report noted that the driver simply didn’t see her in time. The road was designed for a speed at which seeing and responding are not the same thing.

I live on the East Side and drive East Main regularly as I also attend church there with my family. I have noticed what Officer Parris pointed out at the public meeting about the proposal regarding the width of that road, which invites a speed that the posted limit doesn’t authorize. It seems like a through-corridor even when you’re trying to move through it at residential pace. The buildings and parking lots slip by in a kind of peripheral blur and the sidewalks feel like afterthoughts as they often do on Union or Pine Streets.

After a road diet, that would change. Not because the city has passed a law requiring you to pay attention, but because the geometry of attention would be different. The field of movement would be narrower, and narrower fields of movement produce slower speeds, which produce more time for the eye to settle on what is beside and ahead, which produces the perceptual conditions in which a person crossing a street is visible as a person crossing a street and not as an obstacle in a threshold zone.

This is what Strong Towns calls human-scale infrastructure or what Merleau-Ponty would call the perceptual conditions for an encounter with the other. What I’d just call a street you can actually be on.

I am aware that “the road diet is philosophically sound” is not, by itself, a complete argument for anyone who commutes across Converse Street every morning and is worried about an extra four minutes in traffic. So I’ll just say this plainly… the evidence from comparable projects shows that the traffic concerns are mostly unfounded. The Augusta Road diet in Greenville reduced crashes by 42% without triggering the congestion spiral opponents predicted. Research on similar corridors across the country consistently shows that road diets on overbuilt urban arterials maintain traffic throughput within a few percentage points of previous levels while dramatically improving safety metrics. The people who say “no one bikes in Spartanburg” have not, I think, been paying attention or at least on the Rail Trail or here on the East Side of Spartanburg lately. More importantly, the reason bike infrastructure often looks empty is that its absence has selected out the population of people who would use it. Infrastructure precedes demand in this domain, not the other way around.

I don’t know what Dolores Dalton saw in the moment she stepped off the curb on a Sunday morning in February, the air still cold, the church a few hundred feet across the width of a road that was built to be something different from what it is now surrounded by. I don’t know whether she looked both ways, whether she tried to use a crosswalk that wasn’t there, or whether a gap in traffic closed faster than she anticipated.

What I do know is that the city manager called a third of a mile without a crosswalk “a concern,” and that the road diet would add crosswalks and a center refuge, reducing by seventeen feet the distance a pedestrian has to cross while navigating moving traffic. I know that another pedestrian death on that corridor in that circumstance is, after this summer, less probable than it was last February. I know that probability is not guarantee, and that guarantee is not the point.

The point is that a road is an argument about who the city is for. East Main’s argument, until now, has been for fast-moving cars, just as Pine Street’s feels like fast-moving tanker trucks. The proposed revision says that the argument would also be for people moving slowly, crossing, cycling, and attending church on a Sunday morning.

That is not a radical argument. It’s a modest one. It is exactly the kind of small reorientation, the kind that gets approved at a public meeting with a handful of residents and a DOT spokesman and a police officer who has driven that road long enough to see what it does, that gradually changes the perceptual field of a city, the assumptions that accumulate in the body as it learns to move through a place, the possibilities the street seems to hold.

I hope it goes through for Dolores and all of Spartanburg.

Sources & Further Reading

Local reporting

“A Section of East Main Street in Spartanburg Will See a Road Diet.” Walking Spartan (Substack), April 2026. — Highly recommended, especially the parking-protected bike lane argument.
“Road Diet Proposed for Portion of E. Main Street in Spartanburg.” WSPA 7News, April 2026.
“Spartanburg Residents Weigh In on Proposed East Main Street ‘Road Diet’.” WSPA 7News / AOL News, April 17, 2026.
“Spartanburg Road Diet Plan Aims to Improve Safety on East Main Street.” FOX Carolina, April 17, 2026.
“SCDOT Public Invited to Learn More About Proposed Road Diet in Spartanburg.” FOX Carolina, April 13, 2026.
“A Section of Spartanburg’s East Main Could Soon Get Thinner.” Post and Courier, April 2026.
“Officials: Woman Hit, Killed by SUV in Spartanburg While Walking to Church.” FOX Carolina, February 22, 2026.
“Woman Hit by Car, Killed in Downtown Spartanburg Crash.” WSPA 7News, February 24, 2026.
Obituary: Dolores Briseno Dalton. Jackson Funeral Service, February 2026.

Data & policy

East Main Street Road Diet — SCDOT Project Portal. South Carolina Department of Transportation.
“What Are ‘Road Diets,’ and Why Are They Controversial?” Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University, 2015.
“Road Diet Seven Years in the Making — Was It Worth Every Minute?” Strong Towns, June 2022.
“A Los Angeles Road Diet That Worked.” Strong Towns, October 2016.
Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. North Point Press, 2012.
Marohn, Charles. Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town. Wiley, 2021.

Philosophy & phenomenology

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald Landes. Routledge, 2012 [1945].
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Trans. Barnaby Norman. Polity Press, 2017.

Einfühlung and Perceiving More Than Humans

Sam Harrelson — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 22:24:58 GMT

Warning… this one is a little more philosophical than I normally post here, but in the spirit of disclosure, it lays out why I do what I do. Feel free to skip over if you’re not into that!

There’s a moment (you’ve had it, I’ve definitely had it) when you stop in the middle of something like a walk and feel, with a certainty that precedes any argument, that something is happening in the organism a few feet away from you. Not that it is moving, or making noise, or occupying space in a way that catches your eye. It’s something more interior than that. A stillness that isn’t empty and a kind of attention in the world that is not yours.

It could be a crow on a fence post, watching you with that particular corvid watchfulness that doesn’t feel like surveillance so much as being assessed. It could be a stand of white oaks at the edge of a parking lot, their roots negotiating some underground arrangement you’ll never see. It could be a box turtle holding perfectly still in the leaf litter while you stand two feet away, the two of you caught together in something that doesn’t quite have a name.

You feel it, and then you feel slightly embarrassed about feeling it, because the dominant story we’ve inherited says that whatever is happening over there is happening in the dark and that the lights of inner experience are a human franchise, or at best a mammalian one, and that the crow and the oaks and the turtle are performing the outward signs of life without anyone home to experience them. The embarrassment is cultural, but the feeling is older.

I’ve been thinking about Edith Stein lately, and about what she might say to this moment.

Stein’s contribution to philosophy, at its most concentrated, is a theory of how we ever know another mind at all. She called it Einfühlung, or empathy, though the German carries something richer than the English… literally, a feeling-into. Her 1917 dissertation (written under Edmund Husserl, in the phenomenological tradition, before WW1 had finished) asked a question that seems obvious until you try to answer it… how do I know that you have an inner life?

It’s not how I infer it, or simulate it, or project it from my own case. How do I know it in the primary, pre-reflective, perceptual sense that I know there is a table in front of me or that the light has gone warm and late? Her answer was that empathy is itself a mode of perception. I don’t reason my way to your interiority, but I perceive it, the way I perceive depth in a visual field. The perception can be mistaken, refined, or enriched. But it is perceptual first.

What interests me so much is that Stein was careful about something most readers slide past because she distinguished between empathy as an act (I reach toward you) and empathy as a structure (there is something there to reach toward). The act depends on the structure. I can only empathize with something that has an interior to meet. And she was explicit that this interiority is not identical to the consciousness humans experience. Rather, empathy is a more basic feature of what it means to be a subject at all, to have an inner life that is genuinely yours, from which you encounter the world.

The question she didn’t fully pursue, and I think this is because the intellectual world she was working in hadn’t yet given her the tools or even vocabulary in terms of ecological intentionality, is what it would mean to extend that structure beyond the human. What if the crow is a subject? Not a metaphor for subjectivity, not a cute approximation of it. Actually, a locus of interior life, capable of being met?

Raymond Ruyer was a French philosopher working in the mid-twentieth century who was, for a long time (until very recently), almost unread outside of France, until Deleuze cited him, and then, later a group of philosophers, including Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux started to take him seriously, and then he was rediscovered again by thinkers working on biology and consciousness. His central claim is strange and precise in a way… every living form exercises what he called absolute survey or a kind of self-enjoying, self-forming awareness that cannot be reduced to spatial extension.

This sounds mystical, but it isn’t. It’s more of a biological claim. The embryo developing into an organism isn’t executing a genetic program the way a computer executes code. It is surveying itself, holding its own form in view, orienting its development toward what it is becoming. The cell is not merely processing information, but it has a kind of first-person orientation toward its own activity. This isn’t a capacity that emerges at some threshold of neurological complexity, but it’s a feature of living form as such. The amoeba surveys. The developing limb surveys. I’d argue the mitochondria do the same. There is no organism (or division or formative part of it) without some minimal version of this self-enjoying interiority.

What this means for Stein’s question is significant. If Ruyer is right, then there is genuinely something there, some interior to be met, in every living organism (and we can extend that to its parts and even down to the atomic or quantum level if thought out). Empathy isn’t being extended beyond its proper domain when we feel it toward a turtle or an oak. It is operating precisely as Stein described and perceiving an interiority that is actually present. The embarrassment was a category error.

Henri Bergson adds the temporal dimension. His notion of durée, or duration as lived time, describes how every living (maybe more-than-living) thing carries its past forward in a genuinely creative, not mechanically determined, way. The organism is not a static configuration that happens to move; it is a memory in motion, accumulating its history in a way that shapes its encounter with each new moment. The bird knows its territory the way your body knows how to ride a bicycle as a kind of lived past that has become part of what it is, rather than an explicit piece of information stored and retrieved.

This matters for empathy because it gives the encounter thickness. When you stop and feel that something is happening in the organism (or rock?) a few feet away, what you are meeting is not just a present configuration. You are meeting a duration, and an unfolding, an other with its own temporal interiority, its own accumulated past pressing forward into the present. The feeling of interiority you perceive is not a projection. It’s the trace of that duration registering on your own perceptual field.

Stein, Ruyer, and Bergson are not saying the same thing, of course. Stein is doing phenomenology and describing the structure of the perceptual act. Ruyer is doing philosophy of biology by describing the structure of living forms. Bergson is doing philosophy of time by describing the structure of living memory. But they triangulate on something that, taken together, amounts to a fairly serious challenge to the dominant story… that empathy across species is possible not because we are projecting human experience onto non-human life, but because interiority is a feature of life itself, graded and various, and the perceptual capacity to meet it is something we actually have.

There is a spiritual dimension to this that I can’t ignore or try to pass over without mentioning.

Stein herself became a Carmelite nun and was eventually martyred at Auschwitz along with her sister. She was killed as a Jew, having been born into a Jewish family and having converted to Catholicism after reading Teresa of Ávila in one long night of encounter with a text. She never treated phenomenology and spirituality as separate projects. For her, the capacity to perceive another’s interiority was not merely a cognitive achievement. It was a form of participation in the ground of being and a way that consciousness opens toward what is genuinely other, which she eventually understood in terms of the soul’s movement toward God.

I am not trying to import that theological framework wholesale. But something in it strikes me as exactly right when I stand in the Carolina Piedmont landscape and feel that quality of attention coming back at me from the world. The embarrassment I described at the beginning… the cultural reflex that says you are projecting, anthropomorphizing, romantically confused… that anxious embarrassment assumes that the proper direction of consciousness is inward, toward the self, and that any apparent opening toward the world is a kind of sentimental error.

Stein’s phenomenology and the biological philosophies of Ruyer and Bergson suggest otherwise. The opening toward the other is not an error. It is the structure of consciousness itself and the capacity to be oriented toward an interiority that is genuinely not yours, to receive it without collapsing the difference between you. And if that capacity extends, as I believe it does, to the more-than-human world… then what we wrongly call “nature” is not a backdrop to the drama of human consciousness but a field of genuine subjects, each carrying its own duration, each available in some degree to the kind of participatory perception Stein was describing.

This is where the spiritual layer or dimension becomes unavoidable, at least for me. Because if the world is structured this way, and if there is really something happening over there, and if we have a perceptual capacity to meet it, then the question of how we inhabit the Piedmont, how we attend to the shoals and the hemlocks and the red-tailed hawk quartering the field at dusk, is not merely an aesthetic or ethical question. It is something closer to a contemplative one. The attention itself is a form of participation. The capacity to stop and feel that something is happening over there, and to let that feeling be more than embarrassment, is a practice… not a conclusion.

Stein did not survive to work out the full implications of what she had begun. Ruyer died in 1987, still relatively obscure here in the United States universities and colleges, and in mainstream thinking. Bergson, at least, was famous in his time, though his reputation later suffered the usual eclipse that attends thinkers who insist on the reality of time and memory against the reductionist program (especially after the Einstein debate). But the three of them together sketch something I keep returning to in my own lived experience… the world is not dark. The lights are on in there. And we have always known how to read them; we just stopped trusting ourselves to do so.

The crow on the fence post is still watching you. The box turtle has not moved. The oaks have not stopped their underground negotiations.

What you feel, standing there, is not nothing. It is, if Stein is right, a genuine perceptual act, the meeting of your interiority with another. If Ruyer is right, there is something in the turtle that is doing something not entirely unlike what you are doing: orienting toward its own form, surveying its situation, being present to its own being. If Bergson is right, the turtle is carrying a duration, a history, a lived past that shapes this present moment of its encounter with you.

None of this requires you to believe that the turtle is having human thoughts, or that the oak is happy or sad when you walk by, or that the crow is pondering your moral character (though I am genuinely uncertain about that last one). It requires only that you take the feeling seriously, not as projection, not as sentimentality, but as perception. As the beginning of a different kind of attention to the world we actually inhabit.

The Piedmont here in South Carolina is full of subjects, their histories, and lived time. We have always lived among them. Learning to meet them, without collapsing the difference or dismissing the encounter, is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice there is.

What the Black Walnut Knows

Sam Harrelson — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:01:46 GMT

I have been intently watching the black walnut in our backyard for just over a year now, and I am still not sure I know what it is doing.

That sentence probably sounds strange. We have words for what trees do, from photosynthesis and transpiration to allelopathy and mast production, and the black walnut is particularly well-documented in this regard. Its roots secrete juglone, a toxic chemical compound that harms many neighboring plants, meaning it does not merely occupy space but actively shapes the community around it. It is doing something, in the measurable sense. We have instruments for this.

But I mean something else by the question. I mean, what is the walnut doing from the inside?

My teacher / friend / kin / Juglans nigra

I started “watching” (being with) this tree as part of a graduate seminar in my PhD studies in January 2025, a practice of almost daily observation, written reflection, or just sitting “with.” The assignment was simple enough at the time... return to the same organism at the same location over an extended period of time and attend carefully. No agenda. No hypothesis to confirm. Just attention, sustained and patient, as a discipline in itself.

What I did not expect was how much of that practice would consist of watching the tree appear to do nothing.

Through November and into December, the walnut shed its compound leaves in long, slow stages, the leaflets dropping before the central stalk, the stalks yellowing and releasing one by one until the branches stood bare against the gray Piedmont sky. January brought ice once and a good deal of snow yet again, a glaze that made the bark look lacquered, every ridge and furrow filled with light. February was mostly stillness. I would stand at the edge of the yard in the cold and take notes and feel, some mornings, faintly absurd... a man in his late 40’s with a notebook watching a dormant tree, waiting for something that might not come.

The bark was the only thing that changed, and then only when it rained. The walnut’s bark is deeply furrowed, almost architectural in its ridging, dark gray-brown in dry weather. When rain comes, the furrows darken first, then the ridges, the whole surface shifting toward black, toward something that looks almost wet and alive in a way the dry bark does not. I began to look forward to rainy mornings specifically. The tree seemed more present to itself somehow, more legible, though I could not have said what it was saying.

Then, this past week, in early April, the first buds appeared.

Not leaves just yet... just the swelling at the branch tips, a greening at the nodes, the faint suggestion of what is coming. After five months of apparent stillness, the tree is doing something visible again. And what surprised me was not the buds themselves but my response to them as something close to relief, or recognition, as if the tree had confirmed something I had been quietly doubting all winter.

Which raises the question again, in a different way. What was the walnut doing in February? Was it dormant (which is to say, was it doing nothing), or as close to nothing as a living thing can come? Or was it doing something for which we simply do not have good instruments?

The philosopher Henri Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the deepest problem in how we think about living things is that we borrow our categories from physics. We understand matter in terms of isolable parts, reversible states, and spatial positions. We understand organisms the same way as machines with components, as systems with inputs and outputs, as mechanisms whose behavior can in principle be mapped and predicted. What we lose in this borrowing, Bergson thought, is time. Not clock time, not the time we measure, but duration... the continuous, irreversible, accumulating character of a life actually being lived.

A stone has no past in the relevant sense. You could, in principle, reverse all its molecular states, and it would be the same stone. An organism cannot be reversed. It carries its history in its tissues, its timing, its chemistry. The black walnut in my yard is not the same tree it was in January, not because something dramatic has happened, but because it has continued, because duration has moved through it and left its mark in ways that no instrument fully captures.

The French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, writing in the mid-twentieth century, pushed this further. An organism, he argued, is not a surface that can be observed from outside, but it is what he called an “absolute surface,” a domain equipresent to itself, holding its own form together through something like immanent self-attention. Not a machine surveyed by an engineer. A form that surveys itself. The walnut in February, bark darkening in the rain, held its form from within and was not dormant so much as equipresent to itself in ways I was only beginning to notice.

This is what the buds in early April are telling me, I think. Not that the tree has woken up, as if it were sleeping before. But that what looked like stillness was in fact a kind of accumulated tending and the slow work of a living form carrying its past forward into a new season, doing something for which dormancy is not quite the right word.

There is a philosophical tradition, running back at least to Plotinus in the third century C.E., that holds contemplation to be not an exclusively human act but the fundamental activity of all living things. Plants, animals, even the generative forces of nature itself... all are understood, in this tradition, to produce form through a kind of silent, attentive self-coincidence. Not thinking in the way we think. But not nothing, either. A mode of presence to one’s own form, and through that form, to the whole of which it is an expression.

I find I cannot dismiss this idea when I am standing in front of the walnut in April, watching the buds swell. It is too easy, and I think finally too dishonest, to say that what the tree is doing is merely chemical, merely mechanical, merely the sum of its processes. Something in the act of sustained attention resists that reduction. Not because attention is mystical, but because it is precise — and precision, held long enough over a living thing, keeps turning up more than mechanism accounts for.

The juglone in the walnut’s roots is not random cruelty. It is a claim on the surrounding soil, a shaping of the community according to the tree’s own requirements, or, as ecologists call it, allelopathy, and what I am tempted to call, less technically, intention. Not conscious intention in the way I intend things. But a directedness. A form that knows, in some sense, what it needs and moves toward it.

I do not know what the walnut knows. I am not sure that formulation is even quite right. But after a year of watching the bare winter branches, the bark darkening in rain, the five months of apparent stillness, and now these first buds opening in early April like a sentence the tree has been composing all winter, I am less certain than I was that the question is a category error.

The tree is doing something. I am trying to learn how to see it.

What We Carry Home

Sam Harrelson — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:08:28 GMT

From Margaret Chodos-Irvine’s artwork for Always Coming Home https://chodos-irvine.com/projects/always-coming-home/

There is a word the Kesh people speak before taking any life. Before hunting, before felling a tree, before squashing a mosquito in the heat of a Carolina summer. The word is arrariv... “my word[s]”... and it is spoken not as prayer exactly, but as acknowledgment. As a way of saying: I see you, I need you, I am implicated in this. Ursula Le Guin invented the Kesh for her novel Always Coming Home, set in a far-future California valley, and I encountered the word last summer in a course on transformation and ecology. I have been reaching for it ever since in places where it is conspicuously absent.

The Piedmont does not lack for such absences. The announcement language of development and extraction here tends toward gift vocabulary... opportunity, investment, growth, the future arriving like a favor. Nobody speaks arrariv before zoning meetings or the groundbreakings. Nobody names what will be taken from the particular watershed, the particular stretch of second-growth forest, the particular quality of a place that has been slowly composting its own history for longer than any press release acknowledges. The formula is omitted as a matter of course. And Le Guin, writing forty years ago about a fictional future people in a California valley not entirely unlike this one, understood exactly what that omission means and where it leads.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything alongside Le Guin recently, which is not a pairing Klein would have anticipated but which feels increasingly necessary. Klein’s argument is structural and urgent: the period in which climate science became undeniable was precisely the period in which neoliberal ideology consolidated its grip on global governance, and this was no coincidence. The liberalization of trade regimes, the dismantling of public capacity, the shift toward financialized extraction... all of it happened in roughly the same two decades that would have been our best window for a managed transition. Her concept of extractivism as a logic rather than a practice is clarified in a way that I agree with. Sacrifice zones are not anomalies or accidents. They are the predictable outcome of a framework that requires some places and some people to absorb costs on behalf of the rest of the world. The Piedmont has been absorbing those costs for a long time, in ways that predate the current climate conversation by several centuries.

What Klein diagnoses with precision, though, she struggles to prescribe. Her “People’s Shock”... a bottom-up rupture that reorganizes political possibility the way elite shocks have reorganized it from above... is more wager than blueprint. The critical political economy tradition is, by design, better at naming the problem than at articulating what comes after. I have come to think this is not a failure of imagination so much as a structural limit of the genre... that the tools adequate to diagnosing extractive capitalism are not quite the same tools adequate to imagining its alternatives. The spear is good at identifying other spears. It is less useful for imagining the carrier bag.

Which is Le Guin’s term, drawn partly from Elizabeth Fisher’s work on human origins. The carrier bag theory of civilization holds that the first human technology was not the weapon but the container... the bag, the basket, the gourd, the vessel for carrying gathered food back to a shared place. Civilization, on this account, begins not with conquest but with a different kind of accumulation: tending, gathering, storing, bringing home. We have told ourselves for centuries the other story, that history moves like a spear, that change arrives through rupture and force, that the arc of development bends toward more power, more speed, more extraction. Klein’s extractivism is the logical endpoint of that story told long enough and believed hard enough. Le Guin’s Kesh are what happens when a people decides, across generations, to tell a different one.

Le Guin develops this idea most directly in a short 1986 essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," where she argues that the dominant narrative of civilization... the spear, the hero, the conquest... is not just a story about the past but a story about story, a way of insisting that only certain kinds of action count as significant. The carrier bag, by contrast, holds many things at once, in no particular hierarchy. It does not have a climax. It does not resolve. It accumulates. The essay is worth reading alongside Always Coming Home because it makes explicit what the novel enacts obliquely... that the alternative to extractive logic is not a counter-heroism but a different relationship to time, to significance, to what counts as mattering at all.

The Kesh don’t practice the carrier bag as an ideology. They practice it as a habit, embedded in language and daily gestures. The arrariv formula spoken before every act of taking. The pottery work that slows thought “to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.” The deliberate pace of a culture that has decided accumulation means something different than extraction... that what you carry home matters more than how fast you move or how much you take. These are not policies. They are perceptual orientations, ways of inhabiting a place that make the sacrifice zone logic not merely unethical but grammatically impossible within the language the community has built around itself.

I think about this in relation to the Piedmont specifically because this landscape is itself a kind of carrier bag... a middle ground, literally, between the mountains and the coast, neither dramatic enough to be iconic nor degraded enough to be cautionary, just persistently, quietly here. The red clay holds what falls into it. The creek systems remember their own courses even when we redirect them. The second-growth forest is carrying something forward from the longleaf and chestnut ecosystem it replaced, incompletely but stubbornly. There is a kind of ecological memory at work in this landscape that operates exactly the way Le Guin’s carrier bag operates... not as conquest or rupture but as patient accumulation, tending what can be tended, carrying forward what can be carried.

The question Klein’s book leaves open, and that Le Guin’s valley quietly answers, is what it would mean to organize a human community around that logic rather than against it. Not a utopia, exactly... Le Guin is careful about that word, and her Kesh are not perfect. But a reorientation of what counts as practical. The carrier bag, it turns out, is an extremely practical technology. It is how most of what matters has actually been transmitted across time... not through rupture but through the daily practice of picking something up, putting it somewhere safe, and bringing it home.

Le Guin opens Always Coming Home with an image I have not been able to shake. She describes the only practical archaeology of the future people she is imagining: “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.”

There is no policy platform in that image. There is no rupture event, no binding agreement, no People’s Shock. There is a person standing under an oak, facing a creek, holding a baby, being quiet. The baby might perceive something the adult has already been trained not to. That is the whole of it... and I find, the longer I live in this Piedmont landscape, the more it sounds less like fiction and more like the most practical instruction I have encountered for how to begin.

Further Reading

Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home: Author’s Expanded Edition. Library of America, 2019. loa.org

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. Grove Press, 1989. Full text via Monoskop — also on her official site

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon & Schuster, 2014. Bookshop.org

Fisher, Elizabeth. Woman’s Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. Anchor Press, 1979. WorldCat

Carolina Ecology

What a Pool and a Walnut Reflect

The Surveyor and the Survey

References

What Was Called Liberty

Where The Shade Falls

Further Reading

Shade and cooling

Who has trees, and why

What canopy does to a life

Standards and possibilities

More widely

A Year Under the Black Walnut

What Does Not Return

Sources

The Beach as Potency: Edith Stein, Children, and a Carolina Shore

An Ecology of Memory in the Pee Dee

The Watershed Beneath the Name

Tobacco Time

Learning to See Home Again

When the Rain Comes

Further reading

When the Grid Becomes the Landscape

The Green Isn't a Reset

Further Readings:

On Noticing a Tree Being Cut Down

What Evaporates

A Gift from the Black Walnut

Attention as Ecological Practice

Receiving Rather Than Projecting

What East Main Street Is For

Einfühlung and Perceiving More Than Humans

Further Reading

What the Black Walnut Knows

Further Reading

On trees and plant intelligence

On duration, living form, and the philosophy behind this essay

On attention as ecological practice

On Black Walnut specifically

What We Carry Home