"While We Breathe"
AI Data Centers and the Limits of the Anthropocene
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 South Pine Street into a $2.8 billion high-performance computing facility. Project Spero nearly put a 250-megawatt AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park before the community organized and pushed back. A third site at 300 Jones Road is still quietly in play. Spartanburg County has become, in the space of a year, a data center frontier.
The following is the conclusion of a seminar paper I wrote for my religion and ecology doctoral program at CIIS this spring, analyzing what the data center buildout in Spartanburg and the broader Southeast reveals about how we see, or fail to see, the planetary costs of digital life. The full paper is attached as a PDF below if you want the copious footnotes, bibliography, data, and argument from the beginning about ecological perception related to data centers and how they are “sold” to communities. But the conclusion stands on its own if you just want to read about breath, and wrens, and what it means to notice, I think.
—
Conclusion: While We Breathe
Project Spero was named after South Carolina’s state motto, Dum Spiro Spero: while I breathe, I hope. Breath is not abstract. It is the most intimate and continuous form of our participation in the atmosphere that we share with every living being on the planet, the rhythmic exchange of gases that connects human bodies to the bodies of trees, of soil organisms, of the Tyger River’s aquatic communities, of the Carolina wren outside the window. To breathe is to be in relation. It is the most basic form of what Pope Francis calls communion with creation and what Donna Haraway calls being in a contact zone as the ongoing, involuntary, life-sustaining encounter with a world that is not ours but in which we are included.
The data center, as this paper has argued, is an infrastructure organized around the systematic forgetting of that breath, around the engineering of distance between human projects and the living systems that sustain them, around the rendering of planetary costs as abstract, distant, and therefore negotiable. Project Spero’s invocation of the state motto was either a profound irony or a genuine aspiration that the facility’s design would have betrayed. The community that showed up to oppose it was, in the most literal sense, defending the conditions of breath.
That defense was temporary and incomplete. The NorthMark facility is proceeding. The 300 Jones Road situation remains unresolved. The broader Southeast buildout continues at a pace that no single community’s organized attention can match. The planetary boundaries documented by the IPCC with such careful, restrained precision continue to be transgressed, and the AI infrastructure expansion now accelerating will press against at least three of those boundaries simultaneously in the coming years. The window for meaningful response, as the IPCC’s 2023 Synthesis Report concludes with high confidence, is narrowing.
And yet something happened in Spartanburg County in February 2026 that is worth noting and examining in this framework of attention. A community organized, through in-person presence and online communication, against a promotional apparatus designed to prevent exactly that kind of noticing. The grid and watershed became present. The contact zone became, however briefly, visible in the County Council chambers, in chats over coffee at local establishments, and in online conversations with community members.
That visibility is what attention as an ecological practice is for. Not as a substitute for structural and political transformation, and Wainwright and Mann are right that the machinery of Climate Leviathan will absorb and reorganize even genuine community resistance if it does not produce durable institutional change. But as the necessary condition for wanting that transformation, and for sustaining the collective will to pursue it past the moment of immediate crisis. You cannot protect what you cannot see. You cannot grieve what you have never noticed. You cannot make kin, in Haraway’s phrase, with a creature whose existence you have been organized to overlook.
The building going up on South Pine Street will generate its own power, employ a few people, and process computational tasks for a portfolio of investment clients whose names and purposes are not publicly disclosed. The Tyger River will continue its way toward the Broad and the Congaree. The watershed will absorb what it absorbs. The wren will sing from whatever tree remains near the fence line of the industrial park. Both of these things, the facility and the wren, the server rack and the river, are happening simultaneously, in the same county, under the same atmosphere. What we choose to notice, and what institutional structures we build to make noticing possible and consequential, is the question that attention as an ecological practice puts before us.
Dum spiro spero. While I breathe, I hope. The breath is shared. The hope depends on what we are willing to see.
—
The full paper (22 pages including citations and bibliography) is available to download here:
