Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

Data centers are well known to cause horrible problems with the noise and heat they release for the people who live very close to them, but the ripples of genuine harm go well beyond that. Their enormous water and energy consumption cause water shortages, raise water and energy costs for people in the city, county, and even state where they are located, and their outsized carbon footprints are a major contributor to climate change.

Yet in my own neck of the woods, in Hermantown, Minnesota, right outside Duluth, where Google plans to build an enormous data center, the city councilors and other people involved in rezoning the land for the project all signed NDAs so no one outside their inner circle had a clue that Google was even involved—even as the city held hearings to approve the project. Apparently these elected officials cherish their feeling of belonging in a small circle of power brokers more than their belonging to the community that elected them, despite the fact that this community will be facing all the damages that data centers always cause.

A few years ago, Duluth closed a vast, 27-hole public golf course on my side of town—property that is zoned as public parkland. It has stunning views, valuable habitat, and a huge bird migration. And those migrant birds don’t just pass overhead–a great many of them use this valuable open space to feed and rest. And beyond migration, this land provides plenty of nesting habitat as well. And it’s a wonderful place to find wintering owls such as Great Grays and Long-ears. But now a developer wants to take over the entire vast property to put in upscale housing and a pricey private golf course.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Chicago which, well over a century ago, set aside a huge swath of city land as forest preserves and protected almost its entire lakeshore as public land that I see squandering public land here in Duluth as a mortal sin. Not only would we be losing some of the most scenic property in the city—we’d be increasing pesticide runoff into the Lester River and Lake Superior, sacrificing valuable bird habitat, putting in yet more huge bird-killing windows right along our migration pathway, and for what?

Our secretive mayor and the secretive developer with a sketchy record aren’t quite saying, and the inner circle of power brokers, from our City Council to the Chamber of Commerce, have a horrible track record of protecting and promoting developers who don’t live up to their promises. The City has been very secretive about this project, even suppressing a poll that showed that public sentiment was strongly opposed to developing public land including this specific tract.

It used to be that I’d pick one important issue and monomaniacally throw my heart and soul into it. I spent two years fighting construction of a 300-foot guyed, lighted tower proposed on Moose Mountain precisely along our migration flyway. We won—the corporation finally put in a 99-foot structure cemented in the ground, just below the height at which the FAA requires the lights that lure nocturnal migrants to their deaths.

I worked for much longer to get the City to adopt a cat leash ordinance—they finally passed it in 1999 not because of anything I said about the huge numbers of birds killed by domestic cats but because the county health department testified to the danger toxoplasmosis poses, especially for small children and the elderly. Those cats that eat or toy with birds are the ones most likely to release the disease organisms in their droppings, and outdoor cats selectively choose soft garden beds and children’s sandboxes for depositing those droppings.

Although my side won both battles, the larger issues are worse now. Communications tower developers now hire a particular ornithologist who always testifies that bird deaths at towers are insignificant. The tower project on Moose Mountain remains the ONLY one in the country that was modified specifically because of the danger to migrating birds. And huge, well-funded projects to neuter feral cats and release them continue, even as we’ve seen that they absolutely do not reduce the number of feral cats killing birds, and even though they endanger human beings, exposing them to toxoplasmosis and rabies.

It takes so much time and energy to fight these local battles while meanwhile, even more scary state and federal issues loom. We individual citizens, each one of us supposedly an equal participant in our democracy, can’t help but feel hopeless and helpless facing the lies, secrets, and power of those making the decisions that hurt all of us. And whether looking at little local matters or the vast issues affecting everyone worldwide, this mess we face today is so big and so deep and so tall, it seems there really is no way to fix it, no way at all—especially without a Seussian Cat in the Hat to magically put things right. But “We the People” managed to win independence from the huge British Empire and to win a Civil War waged to end the horrifying moral outrage of slavery. Margaret Mead wrote, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I started producing “For the Birds” forty years ago because something deep inside me needed to make sure people understood how wonderful and valuable the birds in our world are. Because I do the program entirely as an unpaid volunteer, money and political arm-pulling don’t influence what I say even as billionaires, corporations, and the government are now strongly influencing most of the news organizations we trust. As the Washington Post once seemed to believe, democracy really does die in darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant against these forces of darkness.