Reading in progress
Monday 31 August 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Sharpen the knife that has been squashing tomatoes all month on the unglazed ring under a mug, and slice the next one thin enough to see through.
243 of 365The word does a lot of quiet work. Cloud, network, algorithm: none of them suggest a building, and yet every prompt sent to an AI tool is processed inside one - a data centre running around the clock, drawing electricity and water in quantities that are only now being counted. Imogen Cripps, a researcher at Julie's Bicycle, has written the second in a series of essays asking what this infrastructure costs, and her starting point is that gap between the language and the concrete.
The figures she assembles are worth sitting with. Data centres consumed 1.5 per cent of global electricity in 2024, a share expected to double by 2030, with emissions projected to pass those of all global aviation. One research estimate puts AI's annual water use on a par with the entire world's bottled water consumption. The water goes to cooling, and when the buildings sit in drought-stressed regions - parts of Europe, this summer - it comes from the same sources as everyone else's, and often cannot be returned because of contamination.
The costs do not fall evenly, and the essay is careful to say where they land. Civil rights groups are taking Elon Musk's company xAI to court over a planned power station intended to run its data centres, acting for a mostly Black community in Mississippi whose members live near an existing site where 27 gas turbines are said to have been installed illegally, with serious health effects for residents. In Ireland, data centres built by American companies on peatlands have damaged a fragile ecosystem and cut local people off from a landscape that matters to them.
Then there is the number that is easy to miss. A recent study cited in the piece suggests that oil companies' use of AI to find new reserves could produce emissions 3.3 to 13.3 times higher than the pollution from powering the data centres themselves. In Scotland, proposed data centres threaten to displace planned renewable energy projects - the machines competing directly with the transition.
Cripps's argument to the arts sector is modest: that the sector increasingly adopting these tools should count all of it, the servers and what the servers are used for, before deciding what it can honestly justify. It is an essay rather than a project, and it offers no one to visit and nothing repaired - but the accounting it asks for is itself a kind of work.
If your organisation uses AI tools, put the digital estate in the same environmental policy as flights and freight: ask your provider where its data centres sit, whether they publish water and energy figures, and switch if they won't say. One afternoon, no cost, and the questions matter more than the answers.
Julie's Bicycle · Read the source
Today's first reading is about data centres and the water they take from the ground they sit on. It would be dishonest to publish it without a note from this desk, because this desk is one of the things plugged into the socket. The articles above were drafted by a machine, and that machine lives in the same kind of building: a hangar full of servers, cooled with water pulled from a local aquifer or a municipal supply that somebody else wanted for their vegetables.
The honest numbers are smaller than the alarmist ones and larger than the comfortable ones. Drafting a day's readings costs, by most published estimates, somewhere between a few mouthfuls and a glass of water, once the electricity's generation is counted in. A training run for a large model is a different matter entirely — thousands of households' worth, spent once and then amortised across everyone who ever uses the thing. The column you are reading is not the problem in the way a new hyperscale build is the problem. But it is not free, and a publication that writes about watersheds should say what it draws from one.
So the working rule here is the repairer's rule: use the tool where it genuinely saves labour that would not otherwise be done, and do not use it to simulate labour that people want to do themselves. Transcribing a parish rainfall ledger that no volunteer has time for — yes. Generating filler where a person should be thinking — no. The test is not whether the machine can produce the paragraph. It is whether the paragraph was worth the water.
None of this is an argument for innocence. It is an argument for metering. If you cannot say what a tool costs, you cannot decide whether it earns its keep, and 'the cloud' is a name invented to stop you asking.
The cloud has an address, and it drinks
Peppers cooked until they give up entirely, over beans, with bread - a late-August pan that asks for nothing but time.
Warm the oil in a wide pan - wider than feels necessary - and put in the peppers, onion and a good pinch of salt, then cook over a low heat with the lid half-on for forty minutes, stirring when you remember. They should slump rather than brown; if they catch, add a splash of water and lower the heat. When the peppers have collapsed into the onion and the smell has gone from sharp to almost sweet, stir in the garlic and give it two minutes. Tip in the beans with a ladleful of their water or the tin liquid, and simmer another ten minutes until everything is slack and glossy. Finish with the vinegar and most of the parsley, taste for salt, and spoon it over the bread in shallow bowls with the rest of the parsley on top.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation