Our house sits just 5 miles south (as the crow flies) from the big Oracle data center being built in Saline township.

We’re far enough away that the 24/7 lighting doesn’t bother us. And the hundreds of gravel trucks a day that rumble down Michigan Avenue don’t bother us much.

But what is the added stress on the electrical grid going to do to our rates? And what will the millions of gallons of water per day that they will pump from the ground do to our water table?

The legal and economic power held by large corporations simply roll over local and mostly rural jurisdictions.

The 900+ acres of prime farm land will never be reclaimed. After being graded, and covered with gravel and concrete, the land will never again produce anything but bits and bytes…… and with the over-leveraged and indebted corporations building these monstrosities, even the bits and bytes produced may be short-term.

“Progress” is increasingly being defined by the techno-masters of the universe who have their own vision of “progress”.

And that definition takes no account of the number of lives jobs, and land that it increasingly destroys.

Money talks. The rest of us walk. And “the rest of us” is pretty much “all of us”, except for the tiny fraction of 1% who assume they have the right to run the world.