ESSAY · 2026

We talk about AI as if it lives in the cloud, floating somewhere above the messy realities of land, water, and darkness. In Broadview, Montana, "artificial intelligence" now has a proposed street address: 5,000 acres of prairie outside a town so small it doesn't have a stoplight. It has a thirst that never sleeps, demanding water day and night to cool warehouses of machines that never agree to rest. And it has a glow — a permanent artificial dawn — that threatens to wash out the night sky for the people and wild creatures who have always depended on darkness to navigate, to hunt, to sleep.

In that new light, everything changes. Migrating birds that once followed the stars will be pulled off course by an industrial halo on the horizon. Nocturnal animals that rely on the cover of night will find their world flattened into a constant, disorienting shimmer. Families who moved there for the quiet and the stars will draw their curtains against a facility that pulses and hums 24 hours a day, its lights reflecting off bedroom windows and barn roofs, its presence turning "home" into the edge of a machine.

And at the center of this is water — the same fragile groundwater that fills kitchen taps, feeds cattle, and keeps native grasses alive through dry spells. Every gallon diverted to cool server racks is a gallon that doesn't return to a well, a creek, a root system. In a place where people already plan showers around water pressure and worry about their wells running low, the idea of a massive, continuous industrial user isn't just a technical question. It is an existential one. For the nearby families, for the ranchers and farmers, and for the native species that have adapted to this particular balance of light, dark, wet, and dry, the arrival of a 24/7 data campus is not an abstract innovation. It is a direct decision about whose needs matter — and who becomes collateral damage in someone else's digital convenience.

In Broadview, that decision is being made on a staggering scale. A 5,000-acre campus is being mapped around a community of roughly 140 people, a place with one café, one gas pump, and no stoplights. The proposed data center complex would stretch across the landscape in a way that, once built, is effectively permanent: concrete, steel, transformers, transmission corridors, and an industrial skyline where there was once only open prairie and snow-framed mountains. For local residents, this is not a story about technology. It is about losing the horizon line they wake up to every morning, the stars they teach their children to recognize, and the groundwater they depend on in a semi-arid climate.

The environmental risks are specific, measurable, and deeply local. Cooling systems for large data centers can consume water at a rate comparable to a small city, especially in hot or dry conditions where evaporation is high. That water does not fall from the sky as a special "AI supply"; it comes from the same constrained aquifers and surface sources everyone else relies on. When you stack that demand on top of existing domestic wells, agricultural use, and the needs of native vegetation and wildlife, the math becomes unforgiving. Even small drawdowns in groundwater levels can mean dry taps for households, reduced flow in springs and creeks, and stress for species that are already living at the edge of their environmental tolerance.

Light pollution carries its own quiet violence. People who have never lived under a truly dark sky may not understand how radically a single industrial complex can alter the night. The constant glow from high-mast security lighting and illuminated buildings can obscure the Milky Way for miles, disorient migratory birds, disrupt the feeding and breeding patterns of bats and insects, and alter predator–prey relationships that evolved in the rhythm of day and night. For families living nearby, it means the end of dark backyards, the end of teaching children the constellations, the end of lying awake under a sky that feels like it belongs to you.

Noise and heat add another layer. Massive fans, chillers, and backup generators introduce a continuous hum and periodic roars into landscapes that have been defined by wind, birdsong, and the occasional truck on a two-lane highway. Waste heat, vented into the surrounding air or water, subtly shifts local microclimates and can affect nearby streams and wetlands if not carefully managed. None of these factors are "anti-technology"; they are straightforward environmental stressors that stack on top of each other until a place is no longer the same place, even if every home and barn technically remains standing.

The families who live around these proposed sites feel that shift first. They are the ones who notice when the well takes longer to recover, when the frogs are quieter in the ditch, when the stars fade behind a permanent industrial twilight. They are the people who will live with the aftermath long after construction crews move on and press releases celebrate new capacity in "the cloud." They are asked to absorb the risks so that far-off users can enjoy seamless digital services with no awareness of the watershed, the night sky, or the species being asked to bear the cost.

This is why it is so important to separate our feelings about the technology itself from the physical infrastructure being built to support it. One can be fascinated by the potential of new tools and still insist that their supporting facilities respect water limits, protect dark skies, and safeguard local ecosystems and communities. The problem is not curiosity or creativity; it is the quiet assumption that the land and water around rural towns are empty, available, and expendable.

From my home in rural Virginia, I recognize Broadview's story. Different state, different watershed, different species — but the same pattern: large energy-hungry facilities proposed in places that officials sometimes treat as blank space on a map. The same meetings where residents ask very simple questions about water use, light, noise, and wildlife, and are told that the answers will come later, after approvals are granted. The same pressure to accept an irreversible transformation of the landscape in exchange for promises that are vague at best and, even when fulfilled, cannot replace a lost aquifer, a dark sky, or a disrupted migration path.

In my book project, I call this moment "the last window" — the brief time we have to look clearly at what is being built, what it demands from our rivers and aquifers and night skies, and what it will mean for the people and species who already belong to these places. It is not a window into algorithms or abstractions. It is a window onto land and water, onto the line where new infrastructure meets old ecosystems. If we close that window without really looking, we will tell ourselves the story that nothing much changed — that the cloud is weightless, that the night is still dark, that the water will always be there when we turn the tap. But the families and creatures who live in the shadow of these facilities will know otherwise.

If Broadview's story sounds familiar, it is because the same questions are being asked closer to home. See what it means for Augusta County, Virginia →