KeShaun Pearson is the leader of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), based in Memphis, Tennessee, which is focused on fighting for environmental and climate justice in the predominantly Black community of southwest Memphis that’s most impacted by the concentrated pollution from nearby toxic release facilities. MCAP is currently campaigning against Elon Musk’s polluting xAI Colossus supercomputer. Tricia Boehlke is an organizer with No Data Center in DeForest, which recently succeeded in halting a proposed data center that was pushed by a private equity-owned company in a small town outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Lee Ziesche organizes with the Tucson Democratic Socialists of America and the No Desert Data Center Coalition, which has been taking on Project Blue, a huge data center proposed in the Tucson, Arizona, area. The campaign against Project Blue won a victory when Amazon recently pulled out of the project, but its developers are again trying to advance it.
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Activate your community as quickly as you possibly can and inform as many people as possible. These projects move with an urgency and speed by developers that we haven’t seen before. They’re steamrolling our communities and our elected officials. Also, if they’re talking about one data center, remember that it’ll likely be two or three. That’s something I wish Memphis Community Against Pollution knew earlier, because now there are three sites for the xAI project here.
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Once we realized that the big ‘public meetings’ about the data center were propaganda sessions, we held our own events to expose the disinformation and present the truth and discuss next action steps.
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Make resistance to the data center part of local culture.
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The community resistance on both sides of the aisle is so enormous. This feels like the one thing that is connecting everybody together.
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