Is a river a being? Can it suffer, heal, or speak — if not in words, then in water’s own fluent language?
Robert Macfarlane
These are the questions at the heart of Is a River Alive?, the bestselling new book by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane (Underland, The Old Ways). Part travelogue, part ecological inquiry, the book explores a powerful idea whose time has come: that rivers are not just resources, but living entities deserving of recognition and rights. With journeys through Ecuador, India, and Canada — each place facing its own battle for the future of its waters — Macfarlane builds a compelling case for a world where rivers are understood not only scientifically and legally, but relationally and spiritually.
In the following excerpt from the book’s first section, Macfarlane travels deep into Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest, a haven of astonishing biodiversity and the site of a groundbreaking legal victory for the Rights of Nature. He’s joined by a small group of defenders: Ecuadorian ecologist Agustín Bravo, biologist and fungal advocate Giuliana Furci, legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, and a local guide named Ramiro. As they reach a hidden waterfall on the Río Los Cedros, joy turns to reflection — and a deeper reckoning with what it means to say a river is alive.
Excerpted from Is a River Alive?. Copyright (c) 2025 by Robert Macfarlane. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
We do not knowingly enter the cloud. It moves up from below us or gathers from around us; I cannot tell which. But we are in it, it is on us.
Fog numbs sound; mist sparkles on skin and cloth.
It is peaceful to be in that cloud of unknowing. I feel ignorant in the first, and at ease with my ignorance. Any questing after facet and reason is overwhelmed by profusion and difference.
The path thins towards nothing. We begin to criss-cross the Río Los Cedros more often, working slowly upbill, following the water’s path back into the higher forest. A white noise becomes audible at the edge of things, then fills the gaps between them, rising slowly to a roar. We turn a corner. Silver surges through green.
A wide white veil of waterfall is above and ahead of us — thirty feet or more high and twenty feet or so across — crashing into the wide pool it has hollowed from the bedrock over thousands of years. This is the biggest waterfall on the Río Los Cedros. Spray-mis floats and dances, rainbowed where the sun finds it.
The invitation is not to be refused. I strip to my shorts and wade in, boulders slippery underfoot, my arms out for balance like a funambulist’s, feeling steel manacles of cold slide up my legs from ankles to knees to thighs — and then I just launch myself, huffing with the shock, and strike out across the pool towards the waterfall.
Others follow me in: first Giuliana and César, then Ramiro, who yells so loudly he sets the forest echoing and startles birds from the trees. Then Agustín, who peers moleishly without his spectacles and is tentative on the greasy rocks.
I swim back across the pool and wade out to help Agustín. He reaches out both hands for support. I take them and guide him in: him stepping forwards and me backwards. We move like eighteenth-century dance partners hesitantly working out a quadrille.
‘This is the river you helped save, in the forest you helped save,’ I shout to him over the sound of the waterfall.
‘I was only one among very many,’ says Agustín. ‘And the forest . . . spoke for itself, spoke to us all.’
We embrace. I am touched. When we reach the deeper water, Agustín releases my hands and leans forwards into the river, feels it take his weight, support him, then he swims in neat breaststroke across to the base of the waterfall.
I watch in surprise as Agustín first stands up, then backs into the white veil of water so that it’s pummeling his head and his shoulders. He lifts his head back, closes his eyes, flings his arms out wide and stands there, cruciform, with an expression on his face partway between joy and agony.
‘Happy birthday, Agustín!’ I shout, but he can’t hear me.
Then I realize that the water pouring over the lip of the waterfall is running rust-red, stained by silt and cyanide from the forest’s felling, from the mountain’s mining, from the river’s poisoning — and that red is pouring over Agustín’s head and shoulders and is filling the pool itself with old blood . . . and then I blink and the mining has not yet happened and may never happen, and the forest is still unfelled, the mountain whole and the river clear.
A few minutes later I swim over to the waterfall. As Agustín had done, I find my footing on the bed of the pool, then lean back into the shifting, turbulent veil of water. A thousand little fists punch my shoulders, a thousand cold wasps sting my skin.
I close my eyes, feel skin and scalp and spirit ringing and singing. It elates me. This river has an aura into which we have passed, I think, and which is changing our being, enlivening us. Would a dying river do this?
It seems clear to me then, in that strange, bright water, that to say a river is alive is not an anthropomorphic claim. A river is not a human person, nor vice versa. Each withholds from the other in different ways. To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’, and in so doing — how had George Eliot put it? — ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’.
“To call a river alive is not to personify a river, but instead further to deepen and widen the category of ‘life’…”
But then I’m counterstruck by the sheer, incorrigible weirdness of this white water, by the profoundly alien presence of the river — and all that I’ve just thought feels too easy, too pat. Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards? By what proof? As for speaking to or for a river, or comprehending what a river wants — well, where would you even start with that process? Surely all our attempts to bend the law round so that it recognizes the rights of rivers or forests will only end up with human proxies, jockeying for their own positions and speaking in incorrigibly human voices — ventriloquizing ‘river’ and ‘forest’ in a kind of cos-play animism.
We could call it the ‘Solaris Problem’ — the question of how on earth to open a plausible line of communications with a river — after Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 SF novel Solaris, about a planet whose ocean behaves in ways that perplex the usual mechanistic reductions of water to matter. In ways, in fact, which seem to human observers to be intentional, sentient . . . alive. Entire institutes become dedicated to the study of ‘solaristics’: theoretical attempts to comprehend the ocean’s properties and ontology, and practical attempts to establish contact with it. All methodologies, however, prove futile.
Standing there with the water clattering my skull — as I clumsily, hopelessly probe the River of the Cedars for legibility, for utterance — a line from Lem’s novel bounces into my brain: How can you hope to communicate with the ocean if you can’t even understand one another?
I notice Giuliana has swum to a corner of the pool and is floating there quietly, looking downstream, facing away from the rest of us.
I think that it’s unlike her not to be whooping, not to be at the centre of the party.
I wonder if she is dreaming or remembering.
Then I see that she is crying, adding her tears to the river’s flow.
What if animals used names like we do — not just sounds, but unique vocal labels to call out to one another across the wild? A groundbreaking study recently confirmed that African elephants do just that, revealing one of the rarest forms of communication in the animal kingdom. For Dr. Joyce Poole, co-author of the study and Scientific Director of ElephantVoices, the discovery is part of a lifetime spent listening to elephants and decoding their rich, emotional world.
In this intimate conversation, Poole reflects on what first drew her to elephants as a child in East Africa, the pivotal moments that shaped her decades-long career, and what it means to truly hear and understand another species. From early discoveries of infrasound to the recent revelation of elephant “names,” Poole shares the wonder, heartbreak, and urgency of protecting these intelligent, socially complex beings.
Note: For listening to the audio clips included throughout, the use of headphones is recommended.
Bioneers: What first sparked your interest in elephants, and what has motivated you throughout your long career studying elephant behavior?
Joyce Poole: I was very fortunate to grow up in Africa. My family moved there when I was just six years old, and I met my first elephant in Amboseli. My family was living in Malawi at the time, and we drove all the way to Kenya in our Land Rover. I asked my father, “What would happen if the elephant charges at the car?” He said, “Well, it could squish the car down to the size of a pea pod.” We ended up being charged by the elephant, and I hid under the Land Rover seat, as my father stalled the car. As a six-year-old, it was pretty scary, of course, but also impressive. Growing up, we were often on safari during our school holidays, and I had lots of interactions with elephants, but that was the first.
Another key moment came when I was 11. I was lucky enough to go to a lecture by Jane Goodall at the National Museums of Kenya, and I turned to my mother then and said, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up: study animals.” My father was later offered a job back in Kenya, running the African Wildlife Foundation’s Nairobi office. At the time, I was 19 and had just finished my first year at university. I said, “Well, I’m not going to be left behind. I want to take a year off.” My parents agreed to that, so long as I applied myself to a worthwhile project. I was so lucky, because that worthwhile project turned out to be elephants in Amboseli, where I had first been charged by an elephant.
That was in 1975 at the beginning of a generation of behavioral ecologists. Iain Douglas Hamilton had just completed the first study of individually known wild African elephants, and Cynthia Moss, the woman who founded the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, was just beginning hers. I joined Cynthia in Amboseli. Being among the first to study individually known elephants meant there were countless discoveries waiting to be made. I soon found that male African elephants have a sexual cycle and come into a period of heightened sexual and aggressive behavior called musth. This phenomenon had been known about for centuries in Asian elephants, but those who came before me, all of whom were men, said it didn’t exist in African elephants. Cynthia and I documented musth in African elephants in a paper published in Nature in 1981. Making a major discovery at a young age and having my first publication in such a prestigious journal really propelled me forward.
Bioneers: When did you start paying attention to the different types of sounds that elephants made and in what context they made them?
Poole: During my early work on musth, I noticed that when musth males threatened me, they approached flapping their ears in a characteristic way, and making a kind of soft ga-dunk, ga-dunk, ga-dunk sound, like water flowing through a deep tunnel. At first, I was puzzled whether the sound I was hearing was a vocalization or just the vigorous flapping of their large ears. And I thought it was so strange that these very aggressive, enormous animals were threatening me with a sound that I could barely hear. Gradually, I realized that the ga-dunk-ga-dunk sound was a type of rumble vocalization.
While elephants are well known to trumpet and roar, their most common vocalizations are deep harmonic sounds known as rumbles. I named those made by males in musth, musth-rumbles. It was then, around 1984, that I began to suspect that elephants were producing some sound that we couldn’t hear. And it turned out that in addition to audible sound, they were producing very low-frequency sound below the level of human hearing. Females and calves are much more vocal than the males, and I became very interested in the huge variety of vocalizations they made and the contexts in which they gave them.
I was put in touch with Katy Payne, who studied humpback whales and co-produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale” with her then-husband, Roger Payne. Because of her work with whales, Katy had gotten a similar hunch about Asian elephants. While visiting a zoo, she became aware of this sort of fluttering sensation in her chest when she was in the presence of elephants. When I contacted her, she was preparing to return to the zoo with a microphone capable of recording very low-frequency sound. I told her that if she found that Asian elephants were producing infrasound, she should come to Kenya so we could record African elephants together. Her hunch about Asian elephants was correct and together Katy and I found that all of the different rumbles produced by adult African elephants contain infrasonic components — some are so loud and powerful that they carry several kilometers and others fall completely below the range of human hearing and can only be detected through the use of sensitive recording equipment and observed on spectrograms.
Bioneers: What were some of the first observations you made of elephants that made you suspect they addressed each other by calls akin to names? What do these calls sound like, and in what contexts are they typically used?
Poole: Females live in multi-generational families generally made up of several related adult females and their offspring, which can range from just a mother and her calves to up to 50 or more individuals. Elephant families are very tightly bonded. Like our human families, they’re not together all the time — they may split up for a couple of hours, a day, a week or more. When family members reunite after having been separated, they greet one another with a special rumble and greeting ceremony.
But when they’re apart, they use what we call contact rumbles to try to find one another. An elephant will give this very powerful rumble, often with the head raised and the mouth open, and will then listen afterwards. You’ll see the elephant spreading her ears and turning her head from side to side, trying to localize an answer. Often, we don’t hear that answer because the elephant that she’s calling may be quite far away, but we can pick it up on a spectrogram. It was through observing these contact calls and answers that I started to suspect that elephants might be using something like names for one another.
We would see an elephant give a contact rumble, and then observe one particular elephant answer, and everyone else in the group would carry on feeding or just ignore the calling elephant. At the time, I thought a contact rumble was a general call to the family, and so, I wondered why these elephants were ignoring her. Then maybe a half hour later, she would give another contact rumble, and somebody totally different would answer. I started thinking, Well, does she have some way of directing that call to particular individuals? I thought then that maybe they had names for one another, but I didn’t dare suggest that. In my book published in 1996, Coming of Age With Elephants, I wrote instead that perhaps they had some way of referring to particular individuals, such as a sister or an eldest daughter.
Then, in 1998, something interesting happened. I was told that some orphan elephants rescued by the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust were making a very weird sound that no one had ever heard before, and I was invited to record their voices. The Trust rescues orphaned baby elephants and slowly reintroduces them to the wild. These particular orphans were being kept in an enclosure at Tsavo National Park at night when, I was told, they made the sound. I’d been listening to elephants for so long, and I was quite skeptical that it was a sound that I hadn’t heard before. I went to the enclosure with my recording gear, and dusk fell. Suddenly, there was this weird didgeridoo sound. Woooooouuuu. It lasted about 14 seconds. “What was that?” I asked.
I just couldn’t believe it. I recorded from the orphans for several nights. I began to notice that when I had my earphones on, I was finding it difficult to differentiate between the sounds the elephants were making and the drone of the trucks on the Mombasa road three kilometers away. I thought, This is really weird. Are these elephants imitating trucks? gain, I thought, No, I can’t go and tell people elephants are imitating trucks. It’s too strange. No one would believe me. It was some years later, in 2004 or so, that Angela Stöeger, who also studies elephant communication, got in touch with me.
She was working at the Vienna Zoo, where an African male elephant was housed together with two Asian females. She wrote to tell me that it appeared that the male African elephant was imitating the chirping sounds that are distinct to Asian elephants. She sent recordings of the sounds they were making. The chirp made by Asian elephants is an ark-ark-ark sound, and this male African elephant was definitely chirping. It was lower in frequency, but it was definitely an attempt to copy these females.
Angela asked if I’d ever heard anything like that. I said, “Oh my God, I have all these recordings of elephants that I think are imitating trucks.” We approached Peter Tyack and Stephanie Watwood, who studied vocal imitation in dolphins. Together, we wrote a paper, which was published in Nature in 2005, showing that elephants are capable of vocal learning.
Mickey Pardo, who led the elephant names study, was aware of our earlier work and questioned why elephants have this ability to create or imitate sounds and how they might use this ability in their daily lives. That’s part of what prompted the study.
Bioneers: How do the “vocal labels” used by elephants differ from the imitative calls used by dolphins and parrots, and what does it indicate about their cognitive abilities?
Poole: Although elephants can imitate, we found no indication that they were imitating one another in these cases. We found the strongest evidence of vocal labels in contact rumbles and in the rumbles that mothers and allomothers give to infants. Considering that infants haven’t even learned how to rumble yet, the females couldn’t be imitating them. This ability to create and use names really expands elephants’ expressive power, because vocal labels are arbitrary, rather than imitations of the animal they’re calling. Most human words are arbitrary, and that arbitrariness is really crucial to language, because it enables communication about referents that are not dependent on imitating and could be more cognitively demanding. It requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound and a referent.
Bioneers: You’ve studied the importance of social learning and role models in elephant society and have documented that large adult males in musth can influence the occurrence of musth in younger males. Can you describe the destructive behavior that was being engaged in by a group of cull orphans and what changed after large males were introduced to the population?
Poole: In South Africa, it used to be common practice to cull elephant populations. For example, wildlife managers would decide that Kruger National Park should only have X number of elephants. Each year, they would do a count, and if there were “too many”, they would kill the excess. It’s pretty horrific. The practice involved rounding up families and shooting them from helicopters, often with scoline, a drug that immobilized them but left them cognizant. Then they would land the chopper and kill them. But they would leave calves between two to four years old alive. They then rounded up these youngsters and used them to repopulate, or as founders in new national parks or private game reserves. Basically, people could buy these baby elephants to start their own elephant population.
Fifty-one such babies were dumped in Pilanesberg National Park in the early 1980s and left there to fend for themselves without any older individuals. It was really a bad experiment. These young elephants ran around in a band together. When the males became teenagers, some started coming into musth early and became very aggressive. In a normal population, males come into musth when they are 25-30 years old, and each male is on his own sexual cycle. The older a male is, the higher his rank, the longer he stays in musth. Older males suppress musth in younger individuals. But in Pilanesberg, there were no older males.
Teenage males who had experienced extreme trauma as calves and had grown up without role models started coming into musth. They started mounting rhinoceroses and killing them. They began attacking vehicles. There were a lot of really aggressive incidents happening. In addition to the trauma and lack of role models, there were no older musth males to suppress musth in the younger individuals. The wildlife authorities contacted me and asked if I had any idea what to do. I suggested that they bring in a couple of older males from Kruger, and that solved the problem.
Bioneers: You’ve also been involved in studies that have shown the importance of older matriarchs in decision-making. What’s an example of how matriarchs influence the decisions of other elephants?
Poole: Elephant families are pretty democratic. Anyone can suggest a course of action using a “let’s go” rumble, pointing her body in the direction she wants to go and engaging in a series of other gestures indicating her wish to depart. While matriarchs and older adult females most often engage in this behavior, younger females, who play an important leadership role in the family, also try to influence where the family goes on a particular day. Often, though, the matriarch will just slap her ears very hard against her body, like, “Heads up, guys, I’m taking off,” and then she just heads off, and they’re expected to follow — if they want to stick with her.
Where you really see the importance of older matriarchs is when a family faces a threat. Then there is no doubt who the leader is as the family runs to her side and follows her lead. We saw this extraordinary teamwork on a daily basis in Gorongosa, Mozambique, where the elephants we studied still felt threatened by people a quarter of a century after the population had been decimated for their ivory during the civil war.
We have also found that elephant families with young matriarchs gravitate toward and join up with families with older matriarchs and follow their leadership. Likewise, Caitlin O’Connell has found that in groups of males, younger individuals follow the calls and leadership of older individuals.
In a study led by Graeme Shannon and Karen McComb, we used playbacks of contact rumbles recorded in Amboseli and Pilanesberg to look at the decision-making abilities of elephants in the two populations. Females in intact Amboseli families led by older matriarchs were much better at social discrimination than females in Pilanesburg, where families were led by young elephants who had been exposed to extreme trauma and orphaned by culling. Our work showed that key decision-making abilities that are fundamental to elephant societies can be significantly altered by the long-term exposure to severely disruptive events such as culling and translocation.
Bioneers: ElephantVoices maintains a database of elephant sounds and gestures, the Elephant Ethogram, which documents around 400 elephant behaviors including written descriptions, sounds, photographs and more than 2,400 video examples. What are the main goals of this initiative?
Poole: Since my early study of musth, I’ve been interested in how elephants signal to one another, both their vocal communication and their body language. I have published numerous papers describing many of these vocalizations and gestures and given them names — such as ear-folding, ear-waving, musth-rumble, let’s-go-rumble, ear-lifting, etc, but it is hard for other people to understand exactly what I am describing through just the written word or via a spectrogram. Likewise, other scientists have described elephant behavior using different terminology. I felt that there was a need to document elephant behavior with video so that we could use a common language to understand what we were observing.
My husband and ElephantVoices co-founder and CEO, Petter Granli, and I had long studied elephants in Amboseli and the Maasai Mara in Kenya, where elephants are very habituated to people. Then in 2012, we went to work in Gorongosa in Mozambique, where 90% of the elephant population had been killed for their ivory during the 1977-1992 Civil War. They were shot from helicopters, shot from vehicles — and they really didn’t like people. We witnessed an extraordinary array of defensive behaviors that we didn’t typically see in Amboseli and the Mara. How they were signaling to one another was extraordinary and complex.
In 2012-2013, we were involved in the making of a five-part series, Gorongosa Park: Rebirth of Paradise, that was filmed by my brother, Bob Poole. In an agreement with the producers, ElephantVoices was given permission to use the raw footage for science and education. Later, we made a similar arrangement with the footage my brother shot in the Mara about a family of elephants that we were studying, and Petter and I returned to Amboseli to document all the reproductive behavior with video. Armed with some 13 terabytes of footage, we began to make clips of all of the behaviors we’d named and documented over the years and to see what else we would find as we scrolled through the footage.
And why? Because here I am, I’m almost 70. I have this knowledge that I carry with me, and I love to share what I’ve learned. I’m happy for people to understand these extraordinary creatures with whom we share the planet. I think it is important. I don’t want someone else to have to start from scratch again. Also, when you read a scientific paper, there’s typically no video to demonstrate the behavior described, and usually the paper focuses on just a few behaviors. The communication that defines elephants is more than just a couple of sounds and a couple of behaviors. It’s incredibly complex, and we wanted to take a stab at documenting everything that we were aware of. In addition to the Elephant Ethogram, we also have a separate offline database that contains elephant vocalizations. At the moment, we’ve got around 11,000 records of individually known elephants giving calls in particular contexts.
Bioneers: What could a deeper understanding of elephants, including elephant communications and behaviors, mean for conservation and the protection of elephants?
Poole: In the years that I’ve been studying elephants, we’ve gone from people thinking that you can just hunt them as you like, or round them all up and kill them, or send them off to a zoo, or use them in the circus. Even moving them around in captivity or across the world, as if they’re furniture, without regard to their individual trauma, the impact on families, and the consequences for their survival. But based on the long-term studies of individually known elephants and their families, studies that have now been going on for 50 years, we’ve learned so much about elephants as individuals and about the devastating consequences of the ways we’ve treated them.
The more we learn, the more understanding we have of them. It wasn’t so long ago that people said to me, “What? Elephants communicate?” I think people thought, Well, humans communicate, but animals don’t talk to one another. They just make sounds that don’t have any kind of meaning. But now people have begun to realize that the sounds that elephants and other species make hold meaning. I hope that by understanding them, we will be better at seeing their perspective, better at sharing the little remaining space on this planet with them.
Regarding the recent study, I think the idea that elephants have names for one another really struck people quite deeply. It is a novel concept for us humans to imagine, but think of it — why shouldn’t they? Mothers and daughters live together for perhaps close to 50 years. They care about one another. They live in a fission-fusion society like ours — going their separate ways on the savannah, and to find one another, they call each other by name.
If they can create and use names for one another, what stops them from creating and using place names, object names, and names for predators? What stops them from creating words or sounds — whatever you want to call them — that help them to navigate their increasingly complex world? Now they are not just living with other wild species on the plains, but are having to navigate an increasingly complex environment in which there are humans.
We know from watching their behavior and also from satellite collar data that they are very finely tuned into our movement. They listen in. They know when people go to sleep. They know when it’s safe to leave the boundaries of the park. They learn really, really quickly. They’re also smart enough to cooperate on crop raiding expeditions, to short electric fences, to avoid the full moon when humans are more active.
In addition to their sizeable brains and complex social behavior, they’re endowed with some talents that we don’t have. For example, with their incredible sense of smell, they know when the onions underground are perfectly ripe. They use all their senses — their extraordinary sense of smell and hearing, and the ability to pick up vibrations through their feet — to monitor us and outsmart us. If we want to live together with them, side by side, it’s probably wise for us to try to understand them.
Beneath the surface of the ocean, a secret choreography unfolds—timed not by clocks or calendars, but by the silver light of the Moon. Coral reefs, sea worms, and even tiny sand-dwelling crustaceans all keep time with lunar precision, releasing eggs, changing color, and rising to mate in breathtaking synchrony. The Moon, it turns out, isn’t just a passive backdrop in the night sky—it’s a living metronome for life on Earth.
In “Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are,” science journalist Rebecca Boyle expands our view far beyond tides and phases. She explores the Moon’s role in everything from the evolution of complex life to ancient religion, scientific discovery, and even future space politics. The result is a sweeping, deeply researched, and utterly enchanting account of how our oldest companion has quietly shaped nearly every facet of life.
In the excerpt below, Boyle explores the Moon’s surprising influence on marine biology and animal behavior—where its light continues to guide the rhythms of reproduction, survival, and timekeeping, even in the absence of eyes.
On reefs around the world, from the Great Barrier Reef to the middle of the Red Sea, corals time their mating dance according to the full Moon’s appearance. Only after the full Moon has shone upon them will they release their pearlescent sperm and eggs, in a midnight phantasmagoria that biologist Oren Levy describes as “the greatest orgy on Earth.”
Levy is an Israeli coral researcher who grows corals in tanks in his lab at Bar-Ilan University to study their spawning behavior and how it changes in response to light pollution, which interferes with the Moon’s beacon. When he is not raising corals by hand, Levy snorkels to a reef in the Red Sea, near the Israeli resort town of Eilat on the Israel-Jordan border. It is the world’s northernmost tropical reef, and corals there have been exposed to development, pollution, and artificial light for millennia. And yet they still use the Moon as their guide.
“We are talking about an organism that doesn’t have any eyes. And it can still synchronize this behavior to the Moon’s cycles,” he told me.
The corals, which are tiny animals, produce parcels that wait like deliveries on a doorstep, near the threshold where their tiny bodies meet the sea. Then in an instant, in one of the most stunningly synchronous events on this planet, every coral releases its sperm and eggs. All at once, a pink blizzard of uncountable seeds floats up toward the light of the Moon. Many seeds will end their journeys as food for fish and other larger animals. But some coral sperm and eggs will combine, producing new coral larvae, which will bob with the tide until they can find a hard surface to anchor on and build a new city.
The seas’ temperature, wind, and sunlight intensity set the month of spawning. But the Moon and its light set the day and the hour. Corals must release their packets at the same time to have any chance of forming new corals. This Moon-mediated mating dance may be more important than ever as corals worldwide succumb to mass bleaching events and other ravages of a changing climate. New generations of corals will need the Moon to colonize the reefs built by their ancestors. The next time you walk outside under a full Moon, witnessing the milky glow it casts over the trees and the grass and the buildings, think about what is happening, that very night, within this planet’s oceans. How many organisms are being born, guided by the light of the silver pendulum in the sky.
For many organisms the Moon is a vital “zeitgeber” (a word borrowed from German because there was no English equivalent that means something like “time giver”) just as much as the Sun is. But only very recently have chronobiologists started to unravel how this works. The ability to tell time by the Moon has genetic underpinnings, which probably date to the origin of genes, which is to say the origin of life.
In 2013, chronobiologists found in a marine worm and a sea louse the first evidence for a genetic “Moon clock” as distinct from a circadian clock. The speckled sea louse, Eurydice pulchra, is a tiny crustacean one-third of an inch across and in the same taxon as crabs and lobsters. It lives in the intertidal zone and burrows into the sand when the tide goes out, turning itself black for protection against the Sun. It does this using chromatophores, a special type of cell that contains color; the same cells allow cephalopods like octopuses to produce camouflage. The sea lice can sense light, including the spectral illumination provided by the Moon, just as readily as your eyes can. The lice are known to have two types of internal schedules, one governed by the Sun and one that is apparently linked to the tide. But until recently, scientists were unsure whether the tidal clock was derived from the circadian clock—simply by cutting it in half, for instance, with a tidal timekeeper that runs every 12.4 hours. But it turns out the lice have a distinct tidal clock, which runs separately from any Sun-derived rhythm. It is far more complex than simply slicing the day in two.
Scientists in the United Kingdom collected lice from their home beach on a Welsh island, and measured their activity in a tank where they were exposed to either constant darkness or constant light. The researchers then focused on knocking out or suppressing genes known to play a role in the circadian rhythm. The creatures still swam every 12.4 hours, for several days in a row. Suppressing the circadian rhythm did not shut off the lunar rhythm, showing it is an independent system. In the next few years, marine biologists found similar molecular tidal clocks in animals like oysters, curly crustaceans called comma shrimp, and a mangrove cricket.
Using new sequencing techniques, biologists like Kristin Tessmar-Raible are beginning to understand how animals are pulling this off. Tessmar-Raible studies a marine bristle worm, Platynereis dumerilii, which might have one of the most advanced lunar clocks studied so far. The worms follow the Sun for their feeding rhythms, emerging at night to eat. But their spawning cycle follows the Moon alone. The worms use two methods to modulate this lunar clock. They have light-sensitive neurons in their brains, as well as a set of clock genes, related to the same genes found in vertebrates, including you. But the worms’ genetic clock also runs on Moon time.
“When we make an appointment, we don’t tell someone just what time it is; we also, hopefully, give them the date. We intermingle two timing systems, and that is basically what these organisms are also doing,” Tessmar-Raible told me. “There is no voodoo behind it. We have an inner circadian clock. Why shouldn’t animals, or other organisms, also have a calendar system?”
Early in her career, Tessmar-Raible read about previous German biologists who studied these biological rhythms and recalls being shocked that anyone could detect a lunar cadence to an animal’s daily life, and moreover, that it could be controlled in a lab. Then she attended a marine ecology conference and mentioned it to some marine biologists who just looked at her, she recalled. “They were like, ‘Yes, of course. You don’t know about the famous coral example? This happens everywhere.’”
Ancient people knew it, too, though for different reasons. Aristotle knew the sea urchins would swell with the Moon because fishermen had learned that mussels, urchins, and some crustaceans are larger—and worth more money—when their gonads are swollen, ready for reproduction. If you cut open a fresh-caught crab, its reproductive organs will be larger or smaller depending on the Moon’s phase.
The animals have their own practical reasons for this calendar keeping. A marine gnat called Clunio marinus lives along the Atlantic coast of Europe, where scientists have studied its chronobiology for many years. The gnats mate like other insects, with males fertilizing eggs the females laid previously. Because the gnats must wait for an extremely low tide to keep their eggs safe, they evolved the ability to notice the Moon’s phases so they could predict when the tide would flow and ebb. Females will lay their eggs in the lowest levels of the intertidal zone when the tide is at its feeblest, during new Moon or full Moon. Corals do this, too. Levy and his colleagues found that corals have light-sensing neurons that allow them to perceive moonlight on the water. They even have genes that activate in sync with the Moon’s cycles of waxing and waning.
AI is rapidly embedding itself into nearly every sector of society, from agriculture and education to health care, infrastructure, and national security. It’s often framed as an inevitable step forward, offering efficiency, insight, and even hope. But behind the headlines and marketing buzz lies a more troubling reality: the expansion of AI is deepening inequality, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching systems of surveillance and control.
This four-part series—adapted from a 2025 Bioneers Conference panel—dives into the lesser-told stories of AI’s rise. From the erosion of food sovereignty to the energy demands of data centers and the legal frameworks that prioritize corporate power, these essays challenge us to look more closely at what’s really being built in AI’s name and who gets left out.
You’ll hear from journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander, tech critic Paris Marx, environmental lawyer Claire Cummings, and anthropologist and farmer Soledad Vogliano. Each brings a distinct lens, from environmental law to food systems and digital rights, but they share a deep commitment to equity, accountability, and the protection of life in all its forms.
At Bioneers, our role isn’t to endorse a single viewpoint, but to open space for critical inquiry and diverse perspectives. The thinkers featured here are longtime activists and technology watchdogs who offer urgently needed context and critique. Their insights help illuminate not just what AI is, but what kind of future we’re allowing it to shape.
Whether you’re cautiously curious or deeply concerned, we hope this series offers new angles, sharper questions, and a deeper understanding of the stakes at hand.
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Part 1: Progress at Any Cost? The False Promises of AI
Far from a neutral tool, artificial intelligence is reinforcing the very systems it claims to disrupt. Journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander dismantles the narrative of AI as progress, revealing how it deepens inequality, fuels mass surveillance, and locks us deeper into extractive systems. From data centers powered by fossil fuels to algorithms used for political manipulation and drone warfare, she exposes AI as the latest frontier of late-stage capitalism and makes a powerful case for questioning the real price of so-called innovation.
Part 2: The True Cost of AI: Water, Energy, and a Warming Planet
In desert towns and rural communities, entire ecosystems are being reshaped to keep AI running. Tech critic Paris Marx turns our attention to the staggering environmental footprint of AI’s infrastructure—hyper-scale data centers that consume millions of gallons of water and enough electricity to rival entire nations. With urgency and clarity, he challenges the unchecked expansion of a technology whose benefits remain speculative while its harms grow increasingly tangible.
Part 3: The Illusion of Control: Deregulation, Legal Loopholes, and the Rise of AI
Drawing on decades of work at the intersection of law and activism, Claire Cummings traces a direct line from the deregulation of GMOs to today’s AI free-for-all. She reveals how artificial intelligence is advancing under familiar patterns: minimal oversight, voluntary compliance, and legal frameworks designed to serve private power. But she also makes space for possibility, calling on us to resist with clarity and care, and to recommit to community in the face of automation.
Part 4: Farming in the Dark: The Black Box of AI and the Erosion of Food Sovereignty
As AI becomes more embedded in global food systems, it’s not just changing how we farm; it’s redefining who holds power over knowledge, land, and livelihoods. Anthropologist and activist Soledad Vogliano reveals how corporate-built algorithms are displacing traditional ecological wisdom and tightening the grip of agribusiness. With vivid insight, she frames AI in agriculture not as a neutral tool but as a political force with far-reaching implications for communities, ecosystems, and food sovereignty.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing
Unlock your capacity for authentic, grounded leadership in From Reactivity to Resilience: Responsive Leadership and Fractals of Healing, a live online course with therapist and ReParentive® Therapy founder Pamela Rosin. Over six transformative Saturdays (Sept 13–Oct 18), you’ll explore how personal and collective trauma shape your patterns—and how to shift them. Through nervous system tools, embodied practices, and dynamic discussion, you’ll learn to move from reactive cycles into empowered presence. Ideal for therapists, activists, and changemakers ready to lead with clarity, compassion, and resilience.
As artificial intelligence rapidly embeds itself into nearly every sector of society, its unchecked expansion is triggering urgent questions about power, accountability, environmental cost, and the future of life on Earth. While some applications of AI may offer meaningful insights or tools, our new four-part series—adapted from the 2025 Bioneers Conference panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—focuses on the darker undercurrents: corporate overreach, surveillance, digital colonialism, environmental exploitation, and the erosion of sovereignty.
While Bioneers is not an advocacy organization with a singular platform, one of our core missions is to provide a dynamic forum for diverse, life-affirming ideas. The thinkers and changemakers we feature don’t always agree on every issue—and that’s by design. Because AI is such a complex and rapidly evolving topic, we want to be clear: the views expressed in this series are those of the authors, as is always the case with Bioneers content.
Some in our community see potential in AI’s selective use, such as its role in decoding whale communication, recently featured at our conference, and various other applications. But the broader context cannot be ignored. The explosive growth of AI, fueled by corporate ambition and massive investment, carries sweeping risks across every sphere of life. The four long-time activists and technology watchdogs featured in this series bring urgently needed perspectives to a conversation often dominated by hype. Their insights help us ask better questions about the world AI is shaping—and who it’s leaving behind.
The Series
Essay 1: Progress at Any Cost? The False Promises of AI By Koohan Paik-Mander
A sweeping critique of AI as a force multiplier for climate collapse, authoritarianism, and capitalist control. Paik-Mander draws connections between militarization, planetary destruction, and the seductive myth of techno-salvation.
Essay 2: The True Cost of AI: Water, Energy, and a Warming Planet By Paris Marx
A look under the hood of AI’s infrastructure, revealing the massive and often hidden environmental toll of data centers, energy use, and water consumption fueling the tech industry’s AI ambitions.
Essay 3: The Illusion of Control: Deregulation, Legal Loopholes, and the Rise of AI By Claire Cummings
Legal scholar Claire Cummings explores how weak regulatory frameworks, corporate lobbying, and familiar patterns of industry capture are shaping the AI frontier, often to the detriment of democracy and human rights.
Essay 4: Farming in the Dark: The Black Box of AI and the Erosion of Food Sovereignty By Soledad Vogliano
Anthropologist and agroecology educator Soledad Vogliano unpacks how AI is quietly infiltrating food and biodiversity systems. Her piece explores the dangers of opaque algorithms, digital colonialism, and corporate consolidation in agriculture, and makes a compelling case for bottom-up resistance.
Decades ago, prior to the Human Microbiome Project, the brilliant, iconoclastic, eco-farmer, Bob Cannard, stood up in public and made the seemingly outrageous announcement that the human body was, in fact, an amalgamation of microbes. The skepticism in the room was palpable and the derision was audible.
But now science has confirmed that microbes in and on our bodies outnumber human cells by estimates ranging from 3-1 to 10–1. And that microbial community, now known as the human microbiome, plays vital life-supporting roles in many of our bodily functions, including digestion, immunity, and hormone and blood sugar regulation.
As a farmer, Canard works diligently to optimize what he refers to as the “digestive capacity of the soil.” When I first heard him make that reference, I thought it was an enigmatic and imprecise metaphor for soil fertility, but, in fact, it’s an insightful and scientifically accurate way to describe the interactions within the soil food web, in which microscopic organisms play an outsized role in decomposition, nutrient cycling and plant health. Diverse species of microbes digest and break down organic matter making it more digestible for the next level of the soil food web, ultimately converting it into a form able to nourish plants. Microbes are also architects: they create soil structures that increase the water retention capacity of the soil and enhance carbon storage.
Whether it be fertility-enhancing activities in soil, or the critical functions of fighting disease and regulating metabolic functions in the bodies of humans, it turns out that our lives are highly reliant on the skillful, mutualistic activities of invisible organisms.
The Astonishing Microbes
Though invisible to the naked eye, microbes make up almost 25 % of the weight of all life on Earth. There are hundreds of millions to trillions of species of microorganisms (more than 99% of them undiscovered!) that perform vital functions sustaining life. The cyanobacteria that live on the oceans’ surfaces generate oxygen and help regulate atmospheric CO2. Several types of bacteria and fungi help control the nitrogen cycle in the atmosphere and in soil. As the oldest life forms, microorganisms have an astounding ability to adapt to most all of life’s extremes. Some actually have evolved to thrive in ponds of nuclear waste.
Their ubiquity is also impressive: they colonize virtually all natural surfaces, so it should come as no surprise that microorganisms have evolved symbiotically with humans and inhabit heathy soils in abundance. Microbiomes found in different ecosystems from land to sea, or on and in the bodies of people, animals and plants, could be considered sophisticated civilizations, without which much of life would be severely degraded, if not cease to exist.
The Human Gut Microbiome: An Ancient Community of Allies
Microorganisms, the oldest life forms on earth, have been around more than 3.5 billion years, and over the last 6 million years, they have used humans as an opportune host with which to establish a complex, symbiotic relationship in which each entity has grown to depend on the other to survive and thrive.
But it wasn’t until 350 years ago–a relatively fleeting interval of time compared to the billions of years of microbial life and the two or so million years since early humans first appeared–that the first crude microscope enabled the human eye to view these minute life forms.
150 years after the advent of the microscope, the 19th century French chemist Louis Pasteur discovered that microorganisms are the cause of infectious diseases. That discovery became known as the germ theory, and it ultimately led to the development of wonder drugs to fight infections. But the germ theory is only part of the story of the relationship between humans and microbes. It was not until relatively recently that the health-regulating functions of microorganisms in the human body became known, and the failure to understand the positive role of microbes and the critical importance of the microbiome as an essential aspect our immune system has led to some unintended consequences.
Unfortunately, it has become widespread practice to use antibiotics in livestock on a massive scale as a strategy to prevent disease rather than limiting them to the more judicious use for curing infections. Also, doctors, over the years, have overprescribed antibiotics in people when they were not necessary. Both these misguided practices have contributed to the dangerous crisis of rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as these dynamic organisms adapt and become immune to medications. Microbes are some of life’s most dynamic “shapeshifters.” They have an average lifespan of 12 hours, which gives them countless generations to evolve and become resistant to many of the formerly life-saving drugs.
Overprescription of antibiotics also leads to a reduction in both the number and the species of the beneficial microorganisms in the gut. Many antibiotics don’t differentiate between infectious and benign organisms. Those misguided practices arose out of an overemphasis of the germ theory and a lack of understanding of the microbiomes of humans and animals.
Good Health is Dependent on a Healthy Microbiome
Although there were some isolated discoveries of the healthful benefits of good bacteria going back to the late 1800s, those ideas were carried forward mainly on the fringes by traditional cultures and modern aficionados of probiotic health foods such as kimchi, miso, yogurt, kefir, etc. It wasn’t until the Human Microbiome Project in 2007 that science fully accepted the critically important role of the microbiome.
Before that, the colon was viewed as nothing more than a cesspool for housing undesirable microbes and temporarily storing metabolic waste. But more and more, science has been discovering how important a role the microbiota in our gastrointestinal tracts play in the regulation our health. The vast majority of our microbiome reside in the colon where a significant portion of our immune system is also located.
Two-way communication between microbes and our human cells and organs takes place via the immune, endocrine and nervous systems that form an intricate network that regulates our metabolic functions. The science is not exact, but of the trillions of microbes that make up the human biome, only about 1400 are considered potentially pathogenic, so wiping out good bacteria unnecessarily with antibiotics can take a serious toll on a person’s long-term health.
The relationship between our bodies and our microbiome is so intimate that bacteria even share genes with us in a process known as horizontal gene transfer, a kind of intercellular sex sometimes referred to as “jumping genes.” And that transfer is not trivial, it happens among millions of genes. The gut microbiome plays a crucial role in metabolism, immunity, maintaining a balance in our intestines between fighting pathogens while regulating inflammation, and even influences brain function and behavior.
A disruption of the makeup of the microbial community by poor diet, exposure to toxins, lack of exercise, etc. can lead to disease. One example is obesity, which creates a favorable environment in the gut for a specific strain of bacteria to flourish and produce endotoxins that leak into the bloodstream and trigger a chronic state of inflammation. Research has shown that chronic inflammation can result in a cascading suite of misery: diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and many other chronic degenerative diseases. Even some psychiatric disorders are now being linked to poor gut health. Approximately 60% of those who suffer from gastrointestinal disorders suffer from one of several psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety.
Perhaps Bob Canard’s assertion that we are essentially an amalgamation of microbes was a bit overstated, but not by much. It’s now well established that our bodies are an ecosystem rife with complex, mutualistic relationships with microorganisms that have co-evolved with humans to support robust health.
Another critical microbiome, not just for people, but also for animals, plants and ecosystems is the microbiome of the soil.
What Cannard refers to as “soil digestion” actually begins one level above the microbiome with the soil macro fauna–those organisms that can be seen–such as earthworms, sow bugs, beetles, ants, etc. Those two communities taken together are referred to as the “soil food web.”
The macro fauna, along with fungi–an important part of the microbiome–initiate the first cycle of decomposition breaking down carbonaceous material, leaving behind a metabolic biproduct (their waste) that microorganisms feed on. Bacteria and other microbes ultimately solubilize the nutrients, converting them into a form that plant roots can take in.
Plants uptake nutrients in a few different ways. To a limited extent, they reach out into the soil and intercept nutrients that have been solubilized by microorganisms. Nutrients can also be carried by water in the soil to the root zone known as the rhizosphere. And plants also get fed with the assistance of mycorrhizal fungi that attach to plant roots, extend out into the soil and harvest water and nutrients and deliver them to the plant.
Plants have the extraordinary ability to take carbon from the air, hydrogen from water molecules, and, by using sunlight as an energy source via photosynthesis, to produce food in the form of carbohydrates that feed not only themselves but also their microscopic allies in the root zone. About 30 % of that food is pushed out into the soil through their roots to feed beneficial soil microbes.
Recent research has revealed just how intimate a relationship plants have with their microbiome. Dr. James White of Rutgers University has discovered a process called the rhizophagy cycle, a fascinating process in which plants actually draw microbes into their roots and circulate them until they break down into nutritional components the plant can absorb. If the process stopped there it would seem a bit exploitive and ungrateful by the plant toward its crucial partners, but it doesn’t stop there. Not all of the microbes taken into the plant are broken down and consumed. The survivors are pushed back out into the rhizosphere to repopulate their community, and in a gesture of gratitude the plant sends a renewed supply of food to those microbes to ensure they can, in biblical terms, “Go forth and multiply” and renew the cycle. The drama of life, death and renewal even occurs at a microscopic level.
All of these ways in which plants get food are directly or indirectly associated with microbes. Photosynthesis provides plants with the macro nutrient of carbohydrates, but for the critical micronutrients that play an essential role in their health and immunity–and subsequently for the well-being of those who eat the plants–they rely on the services of the soil microbiome.
And, as in the human microbiome, those services are comprehensive: communication with cells, turning genes on and off, warding off pathogens by opposing them directly or by stimulating the plant’s innate immune response, etc. And that’s just a partial list, in fact, we still don’t have a complete understanding of all the interactions of plants and microbes. We haven’t even identified the majority of species in the soil microbiome. What we do have is a better understanding of the highly elegant and cooperative system that has stood the test of time to the tune of millions of years by refining its ability to create a steady-state fertility cycle.
As soil microbiologist Dr. Kris Nichols said in an interview that I conducted with her, “Mycorrhizal fungi have been associated with plants for over 400 million years, so they have been able to figure out how to optimize the system and are able to do it at the highest level of efficiency… Humans can’t do it better.”
Misguided Progress
In contrast, the Green Revolution, for which its founder Norman Borlaug won a Nobel Prize, is less than 100 years old. Its celebrated contribution was high-yielding seeds for food crops that came with a promise to feed the world, but the caveat is those hybrid seeds require high amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Most people are at least somewhat aware of pesticides’ profound “side-effects” on human and ecosystem health, but they’re generally not as aware of the negative impacts of chemical fertilizers.
The routine over use of high amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous causes those fertilizers to runoff off farms and leach into waterways that ultimately create “dead zones” in seas all over the world. As they runoff from farms when it rains, the fertilizers leach into waterways that make their way to rivers that drain into the oceans. The Mississippi River, for example, is estimated to carry 1.7 million tons of those chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico each year, resulting in giant dead zones in that body of water. That is a serious consequence at the macro level, but how do chemical fertilizers affect the soil microbiome?
Commercial chemical fertilizers contain abundant amounts of macro-nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but for the most part they lack the valuable micro-nutrients that are also essential for heathy plants, animals, and people. Once applied to the root zone those highly soluble fertilizers are readily taken up by the plant roots. Plants get bigger but often have lower nutrient density. The intervention of adding highly stimulating inputs disrupts a natural cycle and is damaging to the microbiome in two ways. First, the flush of nitrogen pushes the microbes into an overstimulated reproductive and feeding frenzy that ultimately causes the microbial community to crash. The second is a direct disruption of the millions of years of coevolution and symbiosis between plants and microbes. When plants are fed with chemical fertilizers, they turn their back on their traditional community and ultimately decide not to expend the energy to feed the soil microbiota, further degrading the highly efficient, mutualistic system of self-sustaining fertility. At that point, the only way to keep producing crops is to keep pumping them up with more overstimulating fertilizers that increasingly impoverish the soil, degrade the nutritional vitality of the plants, and toxify the global environment.
As David Montgomery and Anne Biklé wrote in their fascinating book The Hidden Half of Nature, on the topics of soil and human microbiomes,“The more farmers rely on synthetic inputs instead of beneficial soil life, the more they need the former and lose the latter.”
Regenerative agricultural is emerging as the response to the degradation of soil health caused by chemically-driven industrial agriculture. By farming in a way that mimics natural systems, regenerative farmers prioritize soil health rather than agrochemical inputs to create a thriving, productive farm for the long term. The first step in accomplishing that is by learning how best to work with the invisible microbial partners in the soil and learn to be a good ally rather than an antagonist. That is the prudent and most scientifically practical way to maintain agricultural soil health and productivity and ensure long-term food security.
The Relationship Between Soil and Human Microbiomes
Science is in the process of an ongoing exploration of the enormous importance of these two fascinating microbiomes. We now know that we are vitally dependent on healthy microbiomes for human and ecosystem health, but less is known about how, or if, these microbiomes are related.
Soil, for billions of years, has been the greatest reservoir of microbial richness while the human microbiome is at best a few million years old. Over those millions of years, humans evolved predominately in rural environments in which they were very much integrated in nature. It would seem logical, under those circumstances, that the soil microbiome would be a significant influence on the human microbiome, but even though functional parallels between the two microbiomes clearly exist, a direct relationship has not yet been determined.
How then does our microbiome develop in each of us? Not surprisingly, we receive our first microbial inoculation from our mothers as we pass through the birth canal, have skin-to-skin contact, and are breastfed. Lacking any one of those leaves a new born with a less vigorous microbiome to start life with. As children grow, the environment plays a big role in the further development of their microbiome. Locale, ecosystem, diet, lifestyle, etc. all have a direct influence in the makeup of our microbiota. In fact, each person’s microbiome is so individualized that it is sometimes compared to the distinctiveness of fingerprints.
Microbial life is highly dynamic and adaptable. In hunter gather cultures, for example, when a deer or other animal was hunted down, it was carried back to the village to share with family and community. Carrying, butchering, and cooking the meat all involved lots of physical contact with the animal. Some of the animal’s microbes were inevitably transferred to the people involved in those activities.
Conceivably, if the conditions were right, those microbes could become part of that person’s microbiome. Similarly, a transfer of microbes from nature to people could occur with early farmers and even small farmers today who have regular physical contact with their environment. That kind of contact, with our hypersensitivity to “germs,” could raise alarms of contracting disease from animals or soil, etc. But remember, the vast majority of microbes are not just harmless but are life-supporting and protective against disease.
Multiple studies in Europe and North America have shown that kids who grow up on farms or in rural areas and have regular contact with soil and animals have fewer allergies, asthma and auto immune diseases. Even in households with pets, kids have better immunity than those who don’t live with a four-legged companion.
As a research article from the University of British Columbia, “Linking the Gut Microbial Ecosystem with the Environment,” states: “Reduced exposure to pathogenic microorganisms, largely as a result of modern hygienic practices, can also result in defective immunoregulation.”
This speaks to the overuse of antibiotics when not necessary and the over-sterilization of non-medical environments. A microbiome rich in diversity can protect against disease, and when stimulated by pathogens, it can learn how to defend against that specific disease. Of course, there are times when medical interventions such as antibiotics are absolutely necessary, but our first line of defense is a strong immune system developed by interaction with nature and a healthy diet and lifestyle.
The analogy in regards to the soil is the disruption of the microbiome by chemical inputs that degenerate the health of the entire food chain from soil to plant to person or animal.
In The Hidden Half of Nature, Montgomery and Biklé wrote: “Pesticides and herbicides have also altered soil microbiota in ways we do not fully understand. Some studies, however, point to the effects that echo the basic problem with the Western diet–like overconsuming refined carbohydrates, excessive use of agrochemicals feeds the bad actors and starves the good ones.”
A highly diverse, well-balanced community of predominately beneficial microbes is the key to both personal and soil health. A core tenet in seeking to preserve an ecosystem’s biodiversity is to maintain, not only a large number of organisms, but a wide array of species. That combination is the foundation for establishing resilient health in the soil as well as the human microbiome.
Our connection to nature is often overlooked or undervalued. As we degrade biodiversity in nature, it could well come at a cost to human health. In the aforementioned article “Linking the Gut Microbial Ecosystem with the Environment,” the authors hypothesize that: “Urban development leading to the loss of local habitats and biodiversity may be detrimental to human health by depleting or otherwise altering the reservoirs of environmental microbes.”
Hopefully, we can now agree that the unintended and indiscriminate depletion and destruction of microorganisms is just not a good idea. We could be eliminating lifeforms that have been our indispensable allies for eons. Modern science is just scratching the surface of our understanding of these sophisticated, invisible civilizations that we have evolved with and depend on. And as Bob Cannard implied, those microscopic life forms are much more an intimate part of who we are than we previously could have imagined.
If you haven’t tuned in to the Young & Indigenous Podcast series, you’re in for a treat. Bioneers is honored to have collaborated with the team at YAI to record a remarkable series of 16 podcast interviews with visionary leaders and movement makers. These interviews were recorded at the 2025 Bioneers Conference with speakers from the Indigenous Forum as guests. Bioneers provided the space and opportunity, legendary recordist and producer Ray Day recorded the audio, and YAI provided the talent, vision, and people power. You can hear the first two episodes and subscribe below so you get alerts when the rest are released!
This special crossover episode marks the launch of our Young and Indigenous at Bioneers series and continues the ongoing conversations from Healing Women Heals Mother Earth. Co-hosts Haley and Santana speak with Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok attorney and activist, about the historic removal of the Klamath River dams. Recorded live at the 2025 Bioneers Conference, the conversation explores how restoring the river is inseparable from cultural survival and personal healing. Amy shares powerful reflections on health, justice, and what it means to fight for the future of your people — and the planet — one foot in front of the other.
In this mic drop of an episode, Raven and Santana sit down with Emmy-nominated host, writer and public speaker Baratunde Thurston. In this conversation they discuss healthy masculinity, storytelling as resistance, and maintaining Indigenous values in the age of AI. Together, they explore what it means to carry and protect information in an era of knowledge erasure, and how humor, creativity, and active participation can help us build pathways of resistance. This pivotal conversation dives deep into urgent questions: Is democracy dying? How do we keep knowledge alive? What does it mean to be a citizen? And how can men truly support women? Recorded live at the Bioneers Conference, this episode invites us to look inwards and outwards — at who we are, and how we can live in good relation with those around us. You’re going to want to listen to this more than once.
The Young & Indigenous Podcast amplifies the voices, stories, and experiences of Indigenous people in all walks of life, creating a platform that fosters empowerment and meaningful conversations. Through storytelling, they uplift the spirits of Native youth, strengthen community, and celebrate indigeneity.
In the race to digitize every aspect of life, artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining ground in agriculture, quietly reshaping how we grow food, manage ecosystems and make decisions about land and livelihoods. Framed as a tool for efficiency and sustainability, AI is increasingly embedded in systems that claim to address climate change and food insecurity, but beneath the promises lie deeper questions: Who controls these technologies? Whose knowledge do they prioritize? And what happens when decisions about nature are outsourced to opaque, corporate-built algorithms?
In this essay, Soledad Vogliano, an anthropologist, farmer, and Program Manager at the ETC Group, unpacks the expanding role of AI in food systems. Drawing on her work supporting Indigenous and peasant movements and her leadership on digitalization at ETC, Soledad makes the case that AI in agriculture is not just a technical issue, it’s a political one.
Adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, this piece is the fourth installment in our four-part series examining some of the hidden impacts of artificial intelligence. Read to the end to access the other essays in the series.
SOLEDAD VOGLIANO: Artificial intelligence is quietly but profoundly reshaping the way we grow food and manage biodiversity. While it’s often promoted as a high-tech fix for some of our biggest global challenges, from climate change to hunger, its growing presence in agriculture raises unsettling questions: Who’s really in control of these tools? And whose interests are they designed to serve?
Let’s start with what I consider the elephant in the room: the black box.
The “black box” refers to the opaque nature of many AI systems, especially those built using machine learning. These models can generate highly accurate predictions, but how they arrive at those decisions is often unclear, even to the experts who design them. We can observe what goes in and what comes out, but the inner workings remain hidden. That lack of transparency is one of AI’s most dangerous features—and one of its most overlooked.
Those mysterious algorithms making decisions about everything from crop protection to biodiversity conservation are, in practice, about as transparent as a brick wall.
Imagine a farmer—let’s call him John—standing in his field, facing a pest outbreak. He consults an AI system developed by a far-off tech company for guidance. The system gives him a recommendation. But here’s the problem: John has no idea how that decision was made. Was it based on the latest agronomic data? Was it tailored to his region’s climate or soil? Was it simply designed to push a product? He can’t tell, and there’s no way for him to find out.
That’s the danger of the black box. When AI systems operate without transparency, their decisions may be flawed, biased, or harmful, and users are left in the dark. If John applies a pesticide that degrades his soil or plants a crop unsuited to his land, he may not even know what went wrong, let alone how to fix it.
The black box doesn’t just obscure technical processes; it raises serious ethical questions. In high-stakes fields such as agriculture, healthcare, finance, and criminal justice, this opacity threatens fairness, accountability, and human agency.
This brings us to a second and equally urgent concern: accountability. What happens when decisions that shape lives and livelihoods are made by invisible algorithms that answer to no one? It may sound dystopian, but this is increasingly the world we live in as AI systems are integrated into the foundations of agriculture, health care, finance, and more.
Consider a scenario: an AI system recommends a pesticide that ends up destroying beneficial insects or encourages a crop choice that later crashes in value. Who is responsible? The farmer who followed the advice? The corporation that built the model? The algorithm itself—a piece of software with no awareness or agency?
This is where accountability breaks down. Without transparency, there’s no clear line of responsibility. Tech companies can shrug off failures, claiming the system, not the company, made the decision. Meanwhile, it’s the farmers, ecosystems, and communities who suffer the consequences. It’s like receiving a harmful medical diagnosis, only to be told afterward that “the AI said it was fine.” How can that possibly be acceptable?
The lack of accountability in black box AI isn’t just a technical oversight; it’s a systemic failure. One that protects corporate interests at the expense of human and environmental well-being.
So, who’s really in control of AI in agriculture? The answer probably won’t surprise you. Many of the same corporate giants that dominate agrochemicals and industrial farming—companies such as Bayer, Syngenta, and Corteva—are now at the forefront of AI integration, often in collaboration with major tech firms. Together, they are shaping the digital future of agriculture.
These companies are using AI to steer decisions about what gets planted, how crops are managed, and which inputs are used. Their systems are powered by data they often control, collected from farms across the globe. And they’re embedding themselves deeper into agriculture by layering digital decision-making on top of the same extractive models they’ve long promoted—models reliant on genetically modified seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides.
The result is a consolidation of power. AI becomes a tool not for democratizing knowledge or supporting sustainability, but for reinforcing the dominance of firms already shaping global food systems. The technologies remain opaque, their logic inaccessible to farmers and the public. What looks like innovation is often a digital power grab that risks locking farmers into systems they can neither fully understand nor easily escape.
And it doesn’t stop there.
When AI systems are built on appropriated data and biased assumptions, they don’t just miss the mark, they perpetuate inequality, erode sovereignty, and turn culture itself into a commodity.
Even when AI systems appear neutral, they are not. Algorithmic bias is a growing concern that we ignore at our peril. These systems are trained on data that reflects the values, assumptions, and interests of those who create and control them. In farming, this often means data drawn from industrial agricultural practices, leading to recommendations that prioritize yield and profit over soil health, biodiversity, or local needs, overlooking the ecological and cultural realities of small, diverse, or Indigenous-managed farms.
When corporate interests shape the data, they shape the outcomes, and when those outcomes are flawed or biased, it’s communities and ecosystems that pay the price.
This leads to harmful mismatches. AI may suggest fertilizers or pesticides based on monoculture norms, ignoring local soils, biodiversity, and traditional knowledge that has sustained communities for generations. Yet these outputs are often framed as objective, scientifically validated truths, despite being based on biased inputs.
Which brings us to another critical issue: data ownership, or more precisely, the lack of it. In the world of AI, whoever controls the data holds the power. And right now, that power lies almost exclusively with corporations. Data is often extracted from farmers, frequently without clear consent, and fed into AI models that go on to shape the tools, policies, and economic systems those very farmers must navigate.
This is a form of digital colonialism. Local and Indigenous communities that have long been the stewards of biodiversity and traditional ecological knowledge are seeing their insights extracted, repackaged, and monetized by distant actors. Their knowledge is treated not as a living inheritance, but as raw material to be mined for corporate gain. All of this is buried beneath layers of technical complexity, making it nearly impossible to recognize, let alone resist, the exploitation.
When AI systems are built on appropriated data and biased assumptions, they don’t just miss the mark, they perpetuate inequality, erode sovereignty, and turn culture itself into a commodity.
And then there’s the hype: the narrative that AI is the future, whether or not it actually works. One of the most troubling aspects of AI’s rapid rise is the overwhelming optimism surrounding it. The excitement—amplified by corporate marketing, media headlines, and government endorsements—has triggered a wave of massive investments, often based more on speculative promise than proven performance.
This rush to adopt AI has created artificial demand in sectors such as agriculture, even when the technologies in question remain opaque, unreliable, or misaligned with real-world needs. The more corporations can frame AI as revolutionary, the more funding, influence, and market share they can secure, even if the tools themselves haven’t delivered on their promises and rarely acknowledge their limitations.
Mainstream media often reinforces this narrative, presenting AI as an inevitable solution to pressing global challenges: climate change, food insecurity, and ecological collapse. In doing so, it pushes critical questions to the margins: How effective is AI really? What are its social and environmental consequences? Who benefits, and who bears the cost?
In this environment, the deployment of AI technologies often outpaces our understanding of their impacts, leaving little room for democratic oversight or ethical reflection. That’s why we need to shift the narrative from top-down innovation to bottom-up assessment.
Bottom-up technology assessments are essential if we want AI to serve the public good rather than corporate interests. These approaches center community voices, lived experience, and local knowledge. They prioritize inclusion and transparency and ensure that those most affected by new technologies have a meaningful say in how they are developed, implemented, and evaluated.
Corporate-led evaluations often sideline Indigenous and local communities, undermining their rights to self-determination. In contrast, bottom-up approaches center those voices, allowing assessments to reflect cultural values, ecological knowledge, and sustainability priorities.
But effective bottom-up assessments must go beyond surface-level consultation. They should support community organizing and help local groups build and share their own narratives. These communities offer essential insights into how technologies affect ecosystems, livelihoods, and futures. When they are empowered to define resources and benefits on their own terms, the resulting assessments are far more likely to align with shared values and aspirations.
To conclude, the growing reliance on AI in agriculture and beyond raises serious concerns about transparency, accountability, bias, and power. The opacity of these systems, often referred to as the “black box,” combined with corporate control over both the tools and the data, risks exacerbating inequality and displacing local knowledge.
What we need instead is clear: greater transparency, better data, and inclusive, bottom-up assessments that ensure AI technologies serve all communities, not just corporate interests.
This series—adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—offers critical perspectives on the systems driving the AI boom and the broader impacts of techno-solutionism.
The technologies shaping our future aren’t arriving in a vacuum—they’re following a well-worn path laid by industry influence, regulatory retreat, and legal systems designed to serve private power.
In this third installment of our series on AI’s hidden costs, environmental lawyer and longtime activist Claire Cummings traces the roots of today’s AI boom back to the biotech battles of the 1970s, the rise of deregulation under Reagan, and the legal frameworks that continue to prioritize profit over people. Drawing from decades of experience confronting unchecked corporate power, Cummings warns that the same forces that once enabled genetically engineered crops to flood the market are now steering the future of artificial intelligence—with consequences that go far beyond code.
Read to the end to access the other three essays in this series.
CLAIRE CUMMINGS: For more than 30 years, I’ve worked at the intersection of law, journalism, and activism, focused in large part on biotechnology and its growing influence on agriculture. That experience has shaped how I understand the deeper forces reshaping our legal systems, our environment, and our humanity.
Over the past five decades, the legal and regulatory systems meant to protect our privacy, health, and environment have been steadily dismantled. Rights we once took for granted have been quietly eroded, often in the name of innovation or efficiency.
Let me take you back to 1975, to a place called Asilomar. Asilomar is a conference center in Pacific Grove, California. That year, scientists developing recombinant DNA technology—using cancer cells and E. coli to cut and splice genes—recognized the risks. What if this technology got out into the world? So they held a conference, but in the end, they chose to self-regulate. They didn’t want government oversight. That decision still shapes our failures to adequately regulate technologies today.
As a result, this work has continued largely without external checks as scientific breakthroughs are rapidly deployed as technologies worldwide without meaningful safeguards. Many of these applications remain essentially uncontrolled experiments.
Just after Asilomar, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with the now-famous line: “Government is not the solution, government is the problem.” He ran on a platform of deregulation and won.
By 1986, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, invited four Monsanto executives to the White House. Together, they crafted a plan to support biotechnology with minimal interference. When Bush became president, that plan was formalized as the “Coordinated Framework.” It gave industry everything it wanted: no new laws, no new oversight, just a patchwork of existing regulations never meant to handle genetic engineering.
Sound familiar?
Today, we’re facing another wave of powerful, poorly regulated technology, AI, with the same pattern repeating. Scientific-sounding concepts are invented to make it all seem safe. The review process is largely voluntary, and the government only knows what the companies choose to share.
I did a little test recently. I asked Google, “Is artificial intelligence regulated in the United States?” And it said yes.
With AI, as with biotechnology, there are no new laws, no meaningful oversight. What Reagan started—dismantling the agencies meant to serve the public—is still happening, and what we’re seeing now is the result: regulatory agencies being gutted and businessmen with clear conflicts of interest being put in charge of public protections.
And even when regulatory agencies do exist and courts agree they have jurisdiction, what we usually get is risk assessment—a cost–benefit calculation, not a real safeguard. It’s not protection; it’s permission.
These technologies are inherently invasive. Think back to the debates around genetic engineering and GMOs. These were products that entered our bodies and ecosystems. They weren’t just ideas; they became part of us, often without our consent.
But the campaigns we ran around GMOs offer a model for how to respond. We didn’t just critique the technology; we organized across sectors and spoke directly to the public. Together, we demythologized the science. We cut through the industry hype and told people what was really going on. And it worked. We helped build public skepticism. Not cynicism, but healthy doubt. The kind of critical thinking we desperately need right now around AI.
And just as important, we offered an alternative. We didn’t stop at opposition. We promoted organic food, sustainable farming, and direct connections between farmers and consumers. People had something to say yes to. That combination—clear critique and offering tangible alternatives—is one of the most powerful tools we have.
Another critical point of intervention is intellectual property (IP). The lifeblood of both GMOs and AI is the ability to patent and profit from information. In the case of GMO patents, it’s life itself—genes, organisms, even biological processes. Over time, IP law has been reshaped to make this not only possible, but standard. This legal structure doesn’t just enable exploitation; it also hides it. Trade secrets and proprietary data make it nearly impossible to know what’s being done, let alone to stop it. That’s how these technologies continue to advance—out of view and without accountability.
Legal reform is one piece of the puzzle, but it won’t be enough on its own. We also need to rethink how we tell the story. Mainstream media tends to embrace whatever’s new and shiny, often without asking hard questions. That’s why it’s critical we create our own channels: spaces rooted in care, caution, and collective values. We did it during the GMO campaigns, and we can do it again.
But at the heart of this moment is a deeper question: How do we resist? How do we confront these technologies and the systems that enable them while staying grounded in our humanity? There’s no single answer, but I hope these stories spark ideas about where you can intervene, and how your voice might help shape what comes next.
We didn’t know what we were doing. We were figuring it out as we went. I hope you’re willing to do the same—to step into the unknown, because the stakes are high.
Most technologies, going all the way back to the plow, have been designed to replace human effort. That’s their core function. Today, doctors don’t have to conduct patient interviews because AI can do it. Farmers don’t have to weed because they rely on herbicide-resistant crops. These tools aren’t just making tasks easier—they’re replacing people.
This isn’t only a threat to jobs. It’s something much deeper. I want to invite you to consider: What does it mean to be human? What are we losing when we adopt these technologies so readily, without reflection?
I want to share a recent personal experience—something that happened just a couple of weeks ago.
My husband and I live in a senior living center up in Sonoma County, a community that was started by the San Francisco Zen Center. It’s very intentional, rooted in the idea of “beloved community.” We’re deeply committed to living by our principles, taking care of each other, and making decisions together using Quaker-style consensus tools.
Not long ago, two people came by promoting AI tools for senior care. One of the products they introduced was a surveillance system that watches you as you move around your apartment. It tracks how you walk, how steady you are, how active you are, supposedly to learn how you’re doing and, if something seems wrong, to alert someone if you fall or don’t “match” the behavioral data they’ve collected about you.
The second product they presented really broke my heart. It was an artificial intelligence “friend” for people who were lonely.
Of course, we rejected both proposals outright, but it also challenged us to really live according to our principles. If we believe in that concept of beloved community, then we have to ask: How do we truly take care of one another? How do we notice if someone is lonely, or struggling, or in need of support?
The reality is that many care communities will adopt these technologies because they’re underfunded, understaffed, and overburdened. On paper, AI looks like a practical solution. But I’m challenging all of us to go deeper, not just to oppose these tools in theory or try to tweak the legal system, but to call on our own humanity. Ask yourself: What can I do to replace what AI is promising everyone else?
In 1964, I was a student at UC Berkeley, part of the Free Speech Movement. We were young, idealistic, and determined to figure out how real change happens—how to challenge unjust systems while staying true to our deepest values.
The day Mario Savio gave his famous “Rage Against the Machine” speech, we were running a freedom school, kind of like the Occupy movement. We held classes and had conversations about how to create change, how to live in alignment with our deepest values. That’s what was happening in December 1964 on Sproul Plaza on the Berkeley campus.
We didn’t know what we were doing. We were figuring it out as we went. I hope you’re willing to do the same—to step into the unknown, because the stakes are high. We are in a moment of crisis. My generation did what we could. We made progress, but our time is passing.
So how will you rise to meet the challenge? How will you respond to what may be some of the most dangerous and dehumanizing technologies our society has ever seen?
This series—adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—offers critical perspectives on the systems driving the AI boom and the broader impacts of techno-solutionism.
AI doesn’t run on magic—it runs on energy, water, and massive physical infrastructure. As tech companies scale up generative AI, they’re building out hyper-scale data centers that consume millions of gallons of water per day and as much electricity as entire nations. These facilities are quietly reshaping local ecosystems and rapidly increasing global carbon emissions, all while companies promise a more “intelligent” future.
In this essay, tech critic Paris Marx unpacks the environmental footprint of AI’s infrastructure and asks: Is this the future we really want? Adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, this piece is the second in our four-part series exploring the unchecked impacts of artificial intelligence. Read to the end to access the other three essays.
PARIS MARX: Let’s go back to November 2022. You probably heard about an app called ChatGPT, released on November 30th. Almost overnight, generative AI was everywhere. It became the dominant topic of conversation, central to headlines, social media, and everyday discussions. The media couldn’t stop speculating about what ChatGPT might mean or how it could reshape society. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was tweeting about how fast it was growing, as if rapid adoption alone proved that a massive transformation was underway. And with everyone from tech outlets to your social feed buzzing about it, it felt almost obligatory to try it out just to see what the fuss was about.
That launch was accompanied by a sweeping narrative: this was going to change the world. Something bigger was emerging—something with the potential to be incredibly powerful, maybe even beneficial, but also deeply unsettling.
Proponents of generative AI framed it as a leap in collective human intelligence. They promised a wave of AI assistants, each specialized for different industries—an architecture bot, a science bot, and so on. These tools, they claimed, would revolutionize entire sectors and possibly replace human workers along the way. At the same time, they made sure to pitch a silver lining: AI would vastly expand access to education and healthcare. But let’s be honest: When they talked about people going to AI doctors, they didn’t mean themselves. That was clearly meant for everyone else.
These tech giants are channeling their capital into realizing their particular vision of the future—one that depends on expanding AI, increasing computational power, and rolling it all out at a global scale.
There may well be some positive outcomes from this technology, but there’s also the looming possibility of serious harm. The narrative goes something like this: We must develop AI, even though it might destroy the world. It could lead to the end of humanity. This mix of hype sprinkled with warnings of existential risk doesn’t just shape public perception; it influences how the media talks about AI and how organizations begin to position themselves in response to it.
The tech industry benefits from these grand, speculative conversations. They want us focused on how powerful AI might become someday, rather than examining how it’s already being used right now. It’s more convenient to keep eyes on the future than on the real impacts unfolding in the present.
That’s why it’s so important to understand the foundations of this technology—where it comes from, what it actually is, and why it feels like it’s suddenly everywhere.
So why, in November 2022, did a chatbot like ChatGPT emerge and suddenly dominate the tech conversation? I think there are three key reasons. The first is centralized computing power. Back in 2006, Amazon began building massive centralized cloud computing warehouses—what we now call data centers. Imagine an e-commerce warehouse, but instead of packages, it’s packed wall-to-wall with servers. These enormous facilities require a huge amount of energy and power. Over the past two decades, they’ve expanded rapidly and become essential to the infrastructure behind the internet and the digital platforms we use every day.
So why are we seeing this explosion of AI tools right now? Yes, they require centralized computing power, but they also need something else: massive amounts of data. Companies collect enormous quantities of information from the open web and beyond, feeding it into these models. The result? Tools that seem far more capable than previous versions, not because of magic, but because they’re powered by vastly more data and computing resources.
That’s why data collection is so central. It fuels not just generative AI but also targeted advertising and many other systems. To gather all that data, companies have built a vast surveillance infrastructure, quietly capturing information across nearly every corner of our digital lives.
But there’s a third ingredient here: money. Immense amounts of capital are required to build and scale this kind of infrastructure. Companies such as OpenAI are reportedly losing billions each year in the short term, betting that these tools will become profitable in the long run.
They can afford to take that risk because they’re backed by some of the largest, most valuable corporations in the world. These tech giants are channeling their capital into realizing their particular vision of the future—one that depends on expanding AI, increasing computational power, and rolling it all out at a global scale.
So what do these infrastructures actually look like?
We often talk about “the Cloud” as if it were something intangible—data floating in the ether. But in reality, all that data lives in massive physical facilities that require enormous amounts of power and water to operate.
Hyper-scale data centers are a step beyond the standard data centers that have existed for decades. These facilities are far more massive in both their size and their impact. And they’re growing fast.
In 2018, there were about 430 hyper-scale data centers worldwide. By 2020, that number had jumped to 597. By the end of 2024, it had nearly doubled to 1,136. According to Synergy Research Group, another 504 are currently under construction or in the planning stages, driven largely by the surge in demand for generative AI infrastructure.
Roughly 40 to 50 percent of these centers are located in the U.S., though international growth is accelerating, especially in China. The three biggest players—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—own about half of them.
As these facilities multiply, so do concerns from the communities where they’re built. One data center requires significant resources, but build five or ten in the same area, and the strain on local power and water systems becomes hard to ignore.
Around the world, more and more communities are beginning to push back, and for good reason. Hyper-scale data centers such as Google’s use an average of 550,000 gallons of water per day, or about 200 million gallons per year, primarily for cooling. Just as a laptop heats up under heavy use, these massive facilities, housing tens of thousands of constantly running servers, generate an enormous amount of heat. That heat has to go somewhere, so water and air conditioning systems are used to keep things cool.
Just between 2022 and 2023, Google’s water use across its data centers rose by 20 percent. At Microsoft, it jumped 34 percent. And that was before the generative AI boom really gained momentum, so it’s safe to say those numbers have only gone up since.
In pursuit of lower costs, many companies are building hyper-scale data centers in more remote or arid regions such as Arizona or parts of Spain—where water is already scarce. These areas often offer more access to renewable energy, which allows companies to market the facilities as “green,” but in reality, this shift puts even greater stress on already fragile water supplies.
Next, of course, is energy use. Globally, data centers currently account for about 2–3% of total energy consumption. In the U.S., that number is closer to 5%, since, as mentioned earlier, a disproportionate number of data centers are located here, and that energy demand is only set to grow. In 2022, data centers, along with crypto and AI infrastructure, consumed about 460 terawatt hours of electricity worldwide—roughly equivalent to the total energy use of France. By 2026, the International Energy Agency projects that number will more than double to 1,050 terawatt hours—about the same as Japan’s total annual energy use. That’s a massive escalation in just a few years.
Ireland is on the frontlines of this issue. Right now, 21% of all metered electricity used in Ireland goes to data centers. In winter, this creates serious strain on the grid, sometimes triggering public alerts that warn residents to reduce energy use or risk outages. As a result, there’s growing pressure to expand what has been a temporary moratorium on new data centers in Dublin. But Ireland’s struggle is just the tip of the iceberg; similar tensions are emerging in communities around the world.
How much computation do we actually need? Do we really need to build out endless data centers to support a flood of AI tools with questionable uses—tools that often serve tech companies’ bottom lines more than the public good?
So, where are we headed? Generative AI really began taking off at the end of 2022, and the momentum hasn’t slowed. In late 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum: “We need way more energy in the world than I think we thought we needed before. We still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” He went on to say that the world may soon have to embrace geoengineering as a stopgap for climate impacts, unless, of course, we have a breakthrough in nuclear energy. In other words, we’re pushing forward with AI, no matter the energy cost, and if it overwhelms the planet, we’ll just have to engineer our way out of it.
More recently, we’ve seen a major shake-up coming out of China. You might have heard about DeepSeek, a company that’s doing what American AI companies are doing, but far more efficiently. Its emergence rattled the industry, causing U.S. tech stock prices to dip as investors began to question whether this AI boom is really all it’s cracked up to be, and whether the massive buildout by U.S. companies was truly justified? But of course, they’re not backing down.
Not long after DeepSeek’s debut, Sam Altman, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son went to the White House to announce a $500 billion investment—code-named Stargate—aimed at building even more massive, nuclear-powered data centers. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to DeepSeek’s efficiency by saying that greater efficiency will only drive greater demand, ultimately requiring 100 times more computing capacity. In his view, more efficient models don’t reduce resource use, they multiply it.
But is that actually what’s happening?
We’re starting to see some serious cracks in the foundation. Microsoft has recently canceled a number of data center leases, raising red flags for investors. Even leaders such as Alibaba’s Chairman Joe Tsai have warned that we may be in the middle of an AI data center build-out bubble..
So I’ll leave you with two final questions.
First: Who gets to decide what kinds of technology we build? Should those decisions be left to people such as Sam Altman or Microsoft’s Satya Nadella? Or should we be making these choices democratically, asking whether it really makes sense to invest staggering amounts of water, energy, and materials into technologies whose benefits are still unclear?
And second: How much computation do we actually need? Do we really need to build out endless data centers to support a flood of AI tools with questionable uses—tools that often serve tech companies’ bottom lines more than the public good? These companies rely on constantly growing demand for Cloud services to keep profits up, but that doesn’t mean we have to go along with it. It’s worth asking: how much computing capacity do we truly need? I’d argue it’s probably a lot less than what they want us to believe.
This series—adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley—offers critical perspectives on the systems driving the AI boom and the broader impacts of techno-solutionism.
In the wake of ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, artificial intelligence quickly became a global obsession—and a corporate gold rush. But behind the promises of productivity, convenience, and innovation lies a far more sobering reality: AI is accelerating energy consumption, fueling inequality, and embedding mass surveillance deeper into the foundations of society.
This article is the first in a four-part series adapted from the Bioneers 2025 panel AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley, featuring leading voices who challenge the dominant narratives about AI and call for deeper scrutiny of its impacts. Read to the end to access the next three essays.
Here, journalist and activist Koohan Paik-Mander delivers a sweeping critique of AI as the latest frontier of late-stage capitalism. A co-founder of the Tech Critics Network and board member of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Paik-Mander draws a clear line from data centers to autocracy, and makes the case that the surveillance economy isn’t just dystopian. It’s already here.
KOOHAN PAIK-MANDER: Artificial intelligence—AI—is attracting truly enormous amounts of investment these days. In the two years since the introduction of ChatGPT, hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into AI, all chasing the kinds of returns that Silicon Valley has traditionally seen. That’s why AI is being pushed down our throats at every turn.
At climate conferences like COP, you’ll see corporate banners claiming AI will cure climate change. At biological diversity conferences, fossil fuel companies tout AI as the solution to species extinction. And politicians across party lines, from Trump to Biden, celebrate AI as the path to U.S. dominance. Techno-utopianism is a bipartisan fever dream.
The entire globalized economy is racing to saturate civilization with AI, no matter the cost. If it means building data centers from sea to shining sea, so be it. If those data centers use so much energy that they foreclose the possibility of ever reaching climate solutions, hey, we’ll just open Three Mile Island and use nuclear power. And if those nuclear power plants take decades to come online? Fossil fuels will suffice in the meantime, because you can’t stop the wheels of progress, right?
This is late-stage capitalism, and AI is the poster child. It’s capitalism eating itself and everything else.
Now, I’m not saying that AI doesn’t have good, useful applications. But we need to start examining the real costs of an AI-driven society. That’s why I’m excited to introduce three incredible thinkers who are helping us do just that: Paris Marx from Canada, Soledad Vogliano from Argentina, and, from the exotic land of Healdsburg, California, Claire Cummings.
Before we get to them, let’s take a moment to demystify AI. It’s not intelligent. It doesn’t think. It’s basically a very sophisticated classification machine that makes predictions based on large volumes of data. Building an AI system typically involves scraping the entire internet, or collecting as much genetic or biometric data as possible, and training the model to recognize patterns. What you get is a fancy machine that makes educated guesses.
And because they’re just guesses, they’re often wrong. The industry doesn’t call them mistakes; it calls them “hallucinations,” a term that conveniently anthropomorphizes the machine. And these errors are baked into the system—you can’t eliminate them. Worse, you often can’t even trace how the mistake occurred. That’s the “black box phenomenon”: millions of calculations happening at once, totally opaque, with no audit trail.
When you think about the fact that Elon Musk has used AI to determine which people and programs are getting cut from the federal budget, it’s infuriating.
The enormous power asymmetry created by the AI economy can’t be overstated. In the past 30 years, digital technology has basically been the most effective means of accelerating inequity and centralizing control, maybe since slavery. Think about it: Of the ten richest people in the world, eight are Silicon Valley tech magnates. This isn’t a coincidence. There’s something inherent in this technology that drives inequality.
AI is what’s known as a “force multiplier.” It amplifies this dynamic of inequity and locks it in. It does this by embedding itself in society’s infrastructure: massive data centers, yes, but also the vast surveillance web of the “Internet of Things”—smart appliances, connected cars, facial recognition cameras, biometric sensors. These aren’t conveniences. They’re surveillance tools. And surveillance, as we know, is a cornerstone of autocracy and fascism.
At the same time, investors are frothing at the mouth to pour billions of dollars into AI. A few years ago, The Economist ran a cover that said, “Data is the new oil.” If that’s true, then AI is the refinery, processing raw data into pure power for a small group of oligarchs.
This is late-stage capitalism, and AI is the poster child. It’s capitalism eating itself and everything else.
The AI surveillance infrastructure entrenches a profound power asymmetry in our society. This is nothing to sneeze at. The corporate state knows everything about us, and we don’t know anything about it. These are the conditions for fascism.And the persecution has already begun.
This data surveillance infrastructure serves three main purposes. First, it continually trains AI by harvesting new data. It’s never done learning, and it needs constant input. Second, it builds detailed personal profiles for every one of us—profiles that can be used to control us. Third, those profiles are monetized. You become the product.
Let’s take a look at how that plays out. Say you miss a payment on your car insurance. Your insurance company can remotely deactivate your engine. Say you live in a smart home, and someone who remodeled your kitchen visits you regularly. If that person later commits a crime, it could be associated with your profile, potentially impacting your ability to get a job or a loan.
This isn’t science fiction. It’s the same proximity-based technology used by Lavender AI to determine kill list targets. Tens of thousands of people have been assassinated using this system, simply for being near someone labeled a terrorist.
The poster child for all this? Cambridge Analytica. Remember them? The cyber warfare firm that worked with Steve Bannon to manipulate 230 million Americans in 2016 using AI tools to identify and target persuadable voters. That manipulation helped elect Trump and later passed Brexit. Airbnb now uses similar methods to shut down local legislation aimed at regulating short-term rentals.
And still, people tell me, “This isn’t my problem—I’m not even on social media.” But it is everyone’s problem. If enough people are persuaded by this propaganda, it shapes policy that affects us all.
Sure, AI can be fun. You can make weird videos. But that doesn’t address the core issue: the staggering power imbalance created by embedding surveillance into the very fabric of our civilization just to prop up the AI economy. For me, that’s a deal breaker.
To continue unpacking the global consequences of artificial intelligence, we’re sharing a series of essays adapted from the Bioneers 2025 session AI and the Ecocidal Hubris of Silicon Valley. Each contributor brings a unique lens to the broader critique of techno-solutionism and the systems that support it.
Our industrial, agricultural and land-use practices have set off a cascade of disruptions to the environment, increasing air and ocean temperatures faster than at any time in our human history. Rainfall patterns are shifting, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, permafrost is thawing, sea levels are rising, and severe weather is becoming more violent and frequent. All of these impacts cause specific harms, but they also have the potential to compound each other and lead to the collapse of ecosystems and the human systems that rely on them. To head off such devastating scenarios, there must not only be widespread global change but also targeted local action.
The biosphere is made up of hundreds of distinct ecosystems that support highly diverse societies, cultures and local communities, and each one faces its own specific series of threats, from deforestation to drought to flooding to dangerous pollution levels to plummeting biodiversity. To prevail in protecting our diverse planet, our greatest assets are often the local people who best know their ecosystems and communities. In this newsletter, we hear from several exemplary local leaders, including: Doria Robinson, among many other achievements, the longtime Director of Urban Tilth, a renowned urban food project building a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system; Abby Reyes, a lawyer, environmental organizer, and Director of Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine; and four other inspiring climate action leaders working on building bioregional alliances.
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Doria Robinson – Empowering Community from the Grassroots: The Richmond, CA Model
The city of Richmond, California, has provided an impressive example of highly effective progressive grassroots organizing that has included the building of groundbreaking citizens’ organizations, local institutions and co-operatives, and successful electoral campaigns, as well as a major Environmental Justice victory in a decades-long struggle with Chevron, whose massive facilities have long polluted the region. One of the most important figures in this exemplary community is Doria Robinson, whose multi-faceted activism has been a key element in its successes. Since 2007, she’s been the Executive Director of Urban Tilth, a renowned urban food project building a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system, and has helped nurture the birth of many local initiatives, from bicycle co-ops to urban “greening” projects. Now serving on Richmond’s city council, Doria shares some of what she has learned in her decades of building people’s power from the ground up.
The Struggle for Justice in Colombia’s Oil Wars: Climate Organizer Abby Reyes on Love, Loss and Resilience
In 1999, three land rights defenders were kidnapped after they left Indigenous U’wa territory in Colombia. Multinational oil interests seeking the massive reserves beneath the region were attacking U’wa lifeways — and those who accompanied them in resistance. The bodies of Terence Freitas, Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian) were eventually found bound and bullet-riddled in a cow pasture. The murders were part of a struggle that would continue for decades, bringing about both setbacks and victories for the U’wa.
Twenty years after the murders, Terence’s partner, Abby Reyes, found herself a party in Case 001 of Colombia’s truth and recognition process, set up to investigate the causes and consequences of that nation’s decades-long internal armed conflicts. In “Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice,” Reyes navigates her own grief and the fight for accountability for the murders of Terence and his colleagues. In this conversation, Reyes, a lawyer, environmental organizer, and Director of Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine, discusses land rights advocacy, entrenched oil interests, resistance and resilience, and what she hopes her book can offer climate activists.
As climate breakdown escalates, communities are increasingly realizing that climate action and resilience have as much to do with actual ecological boundaries as with political boundaries on a map. The fundamental principle of bioregionalism is that communities are to a large extent defined by their watersheds, foodsheds, and energy sheds and that basing their local organizing around these ecological realities can lead to meaningful strategic collective action. But how exactly can bioregional perspectives translate into effective political action? This visionary group of leading-edge climate action organizers illuminates multiple pathways for addressing both practical climate actions and emerging forms of eco-governance that center equity and justice.
In this presentation, we hear from global Indigenous climate leader Eriel Deranger; leading “Rights of Nature” attorney Thomas Linzey; climate justice organizer and attorney Colette Pichon Battle, whose Taproot Earth nonprofit works in the Gulf South and Appalachia; and OneEarth founder Justin Winters, whose science-based climate solutions framework focuses on Renewable Energy, Regenerative Agriculture, and Land and Biodiversity Conservation.
Bioneers Learning Course Spotlight — Sacred Activism: Meeting our Challenges as Gateways for Cultivating Relational Leadership
What if our greatest challenges are invitations to become more whole? In an era of accelerating change and deepening divides, we’re being called to meet the moment—not only with action but with presence, compassion, and a reimagined sense of leadership. This course is not about striving harder — it’s about showing up more fully, guided by love, connection, and a deepened sense of relational leadership. Led by Nina Simons and Deborah Eden Tull, this four-week online course runs from November 13 to December 11, 2025.
