It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:
A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU).
Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .
• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri:
... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.
And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.
I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?
... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.
My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow...
Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice.
Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:
On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws.
The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....
... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects.
“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...
The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:
... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit.
Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years. ...
The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."
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