Eric: [00:00:00] Welcome to Let’s Hear It. Let’s Hear It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications, produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. No relation.

Kirk: Well said, Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric: And I’m Eric. The podcast is sponsored by the College Futures Foundation, which envisions a California where post-secondary education advances equity and unlocks upward mobility now and for generations to come. To learn more, visit collegefutures.org.

Kirk: You can find Let’s Hear It on any podcast subscription—

Eric: —platform.

Eric: You can find us online at letshearitcast.com. You can find us on LinkedIn and yes—

Kirk: —even on Instagram. And if you like the show, please, please, please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us.

Eric: Let’s get onto the show.

Kirk: You’re causing me to lose sleep about how to get into this, damn it, you know? ‘Cause I know I need to say “welcome in,” it needs to be really peppy, but I just don’t know.

Eric: You don’t know peppy anymore.

Kirk: It’s true. Well, you know what, actually, we should pep this thing up because—okay. We’ve had some good conversations lately. There’s good progress happening in the world. There’s optimism and hope. We are gonna persevere. We’re gonna keep on keeping on.

So welcome in, everybody. This is Let’s Hear It. How’s that?

Eric: Okay, that’s pretty good.

Kirk: How’s that?

Eric: I’m proud of you.

Kirk: So we’ve been covering some really interesting—and by “we,” I mean you, and I want to say thank you. Thank you again for doing all the work—

Eric: You’re welcome.

Kirk: —in this podcast and then bringing me along for the ride.

Eric: Anytime.

Kirk: But we’ve been covering some very interesting terrain recently, and I think this is very applied, what we’re about to go into here. This is very brass tacks. And I have to say, knowing that folks like Sacoby are out there doing this work is just so inspiring and gratifying and reassuring.

So tell people about what they’re about to hear, and then we’re gonna have to come back and discuss a billion different things related to this topic.

Eric: I had a conversation with a guy who was taking on Elon Musk’s data center in Memphis.

Kirk: Let’s do it.

Eric: His name is Dr. Sacoby Wilson. He’s a professor at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health at the University of Maryland in College Park. He runs a center on community engagement, environmental justice, and health. They call it Siege, which is interesting— to advocate on behalf of people who are the victims of environmental injustice.

And by taking on these data centers, he’s not only on the front page of the New York Times, in a sense, but he is reminding me, and I think a lot of others, of the impacts of our rampant technology right now. I know that sounds crazy. But it’s true.

Kirk: And of his many assets, characteristics, attributes, Sacoby is a powerful science communicator. And of all the things that are gonna happen in this conversation, just Sacoby showing us what effective science communication looks like was a super exciting part of this conversation.

So this is Sacoby, the director of the Health, Environmental, and Economic Justice Lab, professor of Global Health, Environmental Health, and Occupational Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. So let’s listen to Dr. Sacoby Wilson on Let’s Hear It. We’ll come back.

Eric: Welcome to Let’s Hear It. My guest today is Dr. Sacoby Wilson, a national leader in environmental health science, and a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Wilson just received the Heinz Award for the Environment, and he is leading groundbreaking science to challenge one of the country’s most troubling new environmental justice threats: pollution from AI data centers in communities of color.

Dr. Wilson, thank you so much for coming on Let’s Hear It.

Sacoby: Thanks for having me today.

Eric: We were talking before the show. We’re gonna start the movie in the middle of the car chase. We’re gonna just dive right into the deep end of the pool.

You are working right now to fight Elon Musk’s data center in the Boxtown community in Memphis.

Sacoby: Yes, sir.

Eric: Can you tell me about that?

Sacoby: So if you think about the xAI facility in Memphis, it is one of the largest polluters in southwest Memphis. If you know anything about Boxtown in southwest Memphis, Boxtown is a prominent Black community. They already have a lot of industrial polluters who are emitting to the air already.

But this particular operation basically has 35 turbines burning gas. When you burn gas, you’re combusting, right? You’re creating combustion byproducts. Some of those byproducts may be particulate matter—that’s dust in the air.

For those of you who may live near a major highway, think about all the cars that go through your neighborhoods, right? You’re inhaling that pollution. Part of that is particulate matter. It can cause asthma, asthma attacks, strokes, heart disease, contribute to Alzheimer’s, diabetes, infant mortality, low birth weight. It can contribute to cancer. It can also lead to premature mortality, right? So that’s one pollutant.

You also have nitrogen oxide—you remember the term NOx, “knocks,” like knock on the door? And also sulfur oxide—so SOx. So knock on the door—NOx—and pull up your socks—SOx. Those are chemicals you’ve heard about in terms of acid rain, but they can also have some of the same kinds of respiratory and cardiopulmonary effects that can impact your lung function and your heart.

Also, in this part of Memphis, there are already other environmental justice concerns. They’re already disproportionately impacted by other hazards. And one big issue: when you think about the emissions from this facility, it will contribute to smog and also contribute to ozone. Ozone is a major secondary pollutant that can impact human health as well.

And so the fact that they built this facility with really no permits, no real regulations, in a community of color that’s already impacted—it’s a sacrifice zone—and this facility is going to make the pollution worse and make the health impacts worse for Boxtown residents and other residents who live in southwest Memphis.

Eric: You know, and we don’t think about this—that it sounds to me like they just basically put up their own power plant—

Sacoby: Basically.

Eric: —in the middle of a community. Whereas usually, if you build a power plant in a community, it goes through all sorts of regulatory things. You’ve gotta go through all kinds of permits and things like that.

Sacoby: Yes, sir.

Eric: They didn’t have to do any of that.

Sacoby: They didn’t do any of that. I don’t understand how in 2024, 2025—you know, the EPA was started in 1970. So think how old the EPA is. We’ve had the Clean Air Act, right, which is the law that should directly apply, including the Clean Water Act as well, because there are some issues and potential impacts on water quality from this operation. But one of the biggest threats is on air quality.

So under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, things like particulate matter are regulated. Things like sulfur oxides are regulated. Things like nitrogen oxides are regulated. Regulators should be permitting this facility. And this is part of the problem with the EPA. The EPA, or the state agency or the county agency—Shelby County Health Department—would be permitting the facility to pollute. It’s pollution management, but you do have a system for pollution management, and they are not in compliance with our current system.

This facility, and data centers in general, are sort of a blind spot when it comes to regulatory processes.

Eric: And you’re not just an activist. You’re a scientist yourself. You conduct research, and you have a lab and students and all that kind of stuff. Can you talk about your own scientific work, your background, and how you ended up coming into this work?

Sacoby: Yeah, thanks for that question. So I’m an environmental health scientist. I just was at a conference in North Carolina—the North Carolina BREATHE Conference. I was a keynote speaker on Tuesday. I’m a proud Carolina grad, so I went to UNC Chapel Hill.

I do a lot of work measuring air pollution. We do a lot of what we call community science. There may be a community that’s impacted by local stationary sources of pollution—it could be an incinerator, it could be a coal-fired power plant—or it could be mobile pollution sources: heavily trafficked roadways with cars, trucks, buses.

And in many cases, there’s not EPA monitoring at that local level. So what we do is we build hyperlocal air quality monitoring networks to help communities find out what types of pollutants are in the air and what they’re being exposed to, and in many ways ground-truth what they already know: that they’ve been exposed to pollution, that their kid is having asthma attacks because of the local facility or because of the traffic.

We’ve been doing these types of community–university partnerships with organizations with air quality issues around the country. We work in Newark, New Jersey, with South Ward Environmental. We’ve been doing work with folks in North Charleston in the past with the Lowcountry Alliance for Model Communities.

We do monitoring at high schools in Prince George’s County. We do monitoring in Cheverly, Maryland. We work with South Baltimore Community Land Trust and folks at Johns Hopkins to do monitoring around Curtis Bay—another community that has a similar concentration of environmental hazards like what you see in southwest Memphis.

So we were invited by Justin Pearson and MCAP to provide some technical assistance support—to do some monitoring—because there are not enough monitors in southwest Memphis to really capture the air pollution burden that people are experiencing in that community.

Eric: You must be very well organized, ’cause you have a lot of work going on in a lot of places. How are you using these various stories and bringing them together to tell a bigger story about existing environmental challenges, but now these new ones as well?

It feels like every time you turn, there’s a new challenge that you have to deal with. How are you pulling this together into a larger—if you want to call it—a narrative around environmental justice?

Sacoby: Yeah, if you think about—oh, great question. If you think about environmental justice, and particularly air quality issues, many classic environmental justice issues are really energy justice issues.

So you think about dirty fossil fuel infrastructure—from extraction of oil and gas. Whose communities are disproportionately impacted? Low-income communities, communities of color.

You think about transport—pipelines, fossil fuels by rail. Whose communities are disproportionately impacted on average? Right.

We think about refineries—whether it be in Cancer Alley, the Houston Ship Channel, Richmond, California, Newark, New Jersey. Whose communities disproportionately host refineries and petrochemical operations?

And then you think about combustion of fossil fuels—whether it be coal-fired power plants, gas-fired power plants, incinerators; whether it be in our cars, trucks, buses, 18-wheelers. Whose communities disproportionately host those highways and byways? Communities of color, low-income communities.

That’s legacy pollution sources, right?

Now you have these emerging issues—big data, AI, and these emerging technologies—where you may have the same communities who are experiencing disproportionate impacts or who are living in sacrifice zones, who are experiencing toxic trauma due to the legacy hazards, who may experience similar environmental burdens and health impacts because of the burning of fossil fuels at these operations, at these data centers.

In addition, these data centers may have a strain on the grid. And what does that mean for low-income consumers when you have this huge facility that’s using up a lot of the power?

Also, there are concerns about water quality impacts—there are multimedia impacts for these data centers. So yes, there’s a benefit because we are in a digital age, but I think our regulations are not keeping up with the environmental landscape—the burden of these operations on communities that have already been dumped on, who’ve already, for generations upon generations, been impacted by health hazards.

So it’s an opportunity to take the lessons learned from our work on legacy hazards and dirty fossil fuel infrastructure and apply those lessons learned, apply those best practices—the environmental monitoring approaches, the health impact assessments, the community engagement, the community organizing, the advocacy and policy work—and apply that to data centers.

Eric: Obviously Washington is a really, really challenging place to do this kind of advocacy these days. You’re not getting any help out of Washington. So my guess is that you spend more time in those communities and in those states and regions trying to move toward better monitoring, better legislation, better remediation, and things like that.

How does your kind of regional approach work? I believe you’ve already been able to stop certain data centers from being built or expanded. Can you talk about what kind of strategies you can employ given, frankly, the lack of help you’re going to get from Washington anytime soon?

Sacoby: It’s a really interesting time. Of course, as we know, in Washington right now there’s a huge anti–environmental justice sentiment within the administration. There’s been a dismantling of the federal environmental justice infrastructure—from the Office of Environmental Justice to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the WHEJAC, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, mapping tools like the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool.

The work has always been where the rubber hits the road. Where we can get more done is at the state level. Environmental justice is local. Environmental justice is about zoning, it’s about planning, working with state agencies.

So I think there’s been a lot of opportunity. One of the things I like to say is we’ve gotta get back to fundamentals in this moment. I’m a Steelers fan, so you’ve gotta have good offense and good defense. Now, my Steelers lost five games last year—hopefully with the new quarterback—

Eric: And let’s just not talk about the environmental effects of making steel. But go ahead.

Sacoby: Exactly, exactly. But defense, right? In this moment, defense is getting back to fundamentals: working at the state level, working with agencies, trying to pass bills.

One of the things that we’ve seen emerge over the last decade or so is a major focus on cumulative impacts. We’ve seen legislation passed in places like New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota. The City of Chicago has an ordinance on cumulative impacts. California, too.

That is a really good place to build our policy—around understanding the negative cumulative impacts of legacy pollution sources and emerging pollution sources like data centers.

So you’ve seen some fights and some victories. NAACP worked with folks in Alabama—I think they stopped that data center. Some data center projects have been pulled because now people are not being caught off guard by them.

In the state of Maryland, right now in Prince George’s County—actually my county, where I live—there’s a fight against a data center that’s going to be placed in an old mall. That community is primarily Black, lower-wealth, right? And so we are working actively to engage local residents and provide technical assistance in that fight.

Now, the governor, Wes Moore—governor of Maryland—I think he’s done some great stuff so far on environmental justice. He just signed an executive order on environmental justice a couple of months ago. But he also vetoed a data centers bill to study data centers.

So I think we need to have more studies on data centers, but I think the way that we can push back is the same way the City of Chicago passed a cumulative impacts ordinance: we can pass local-level ordinances that can really stop data centers in their tracks. Putting that into place—a local-level ordinance—because it really is about planning at that county and town/municipal level. That’s something we can do.

Bringing in more monitoring is something we can do. Trying to make sure they get permits in the first place, right? Making sure that they comply with the Clean Air Act or making sure they comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, or your state-level equivalent to NEPA.

Making sure they comply with that—requiring them to have greater permit restrictions: where the facilities can go, what type of fuels they can burn, how many turbines they can use at one time, the monitoring that they should have at the facility, and then what type of mitigation they should be required to do.

These facilities—let me say this, then I’m gonna pass the mic back to you, it’s your show—digital age, right? They should be zero-emission facilities. With AI and all this technology, why on God’s green earth would we even allow this type of supposedly best, cutting-edge technology to actually pollute? They should be cutting-edge and leading-edge when it comes to being zero-emissions facilities.

Eric: Yeah. It’s kind of like having your electric car, except that you have a little coal power plant in the back that you plug it into.

Sacoby: You have an electric car being powered by “clean coal.” Yeah, exactly. And there’s no such thing as clean coal.

Eric: Exactly. Well, we’re gonna take a very quick break, and we’re back with Dr. Sacoby Wilson right after this.

Eric: You’re listening to Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and nonprofit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown.

If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Tune into Break Fake Rules, a new limited series podcast with Glenn Galaich, CEO of the Stupski Foundation. Hear from leaders in philanthropy, nonprofits, government, media, and more to learn about challenges they’ve overcome by breaking fake rules—and which rules we should commit to breaking together. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts.

Eric: And welcome back. We’re back with Dr. Sacoby Wilson, who’s a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. You are also the co-founder of the Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health—Empowering Communities—and you run it as well.

So you’re a scientist and you’re an activist and you’re an advocate. I mean, if anyone who spent the last 15 minutes listening to you talk didn’t understand that you’re an advocate, maybe first and foremost, they’re not listening too closely.

Can you talk about the center and how you are taking your scientific background and your work at the university and marrying that with advocacy?

Sacoby: Yeah, I think it’s really important—it’s always been important—for science to have impact. I do science of the people, for the people, and by the people. My philosophy is doing science that serves people. Science is not an end; it’s a means to an end.

Now, in academia, a lot of scientists see science itself—research—as the end. To me, publishing in a journal doesn’t really have a huge impact. If you really want to have an impact, it’s about science communication and science education.

In the great words of Master Yoda: “Peer-reviewed publications, science communication make not.” I know I said that fast. Yoda never said it, but y’all get my point. That’s the lowest form of science communication in terms of having impact on changing policy.

So for me, I brought some of my infrastructure out of the University of Maryland so I could be able to do more authentic, community-engaged environmental justice work—what I like to call empowerment science and liberation science.

How do we empower? So Siege, Inc.—that’s the acronym. Siege, Inc. is about doing empowerment science. So how do you help people use science to grow their capacity, give them tools so they can impact change? It’s like teaching them—not fishing for them—teaching them how to fish. Not doing the science for them, teaching them how to do their own.

And remember this, everybody: you don’t have to have a PhD to be a scientist. Anybody can be a scientist. It’s just using the scientific method. So, making sure that everybody can have access to scientific tools like the air quality sensors that we use in our hyperlocal air quality monitoring networks—that’s important.

And then we also do what we call liberation science. I talked about how some communities—some folks—live in sacrifice zones, right? They’re dealing with toxic trauma. They’re experiencing oppression because of the environmental hazards that are impacting them, and it’s impacting them across generations. They’re stuck in this cycle of pollution and negative public health outcomes. So we want to use science to liberate folks from that.

So it’s important to bring in advocacy to translate that science to action. To move from science that’s extractive, that’s colonial, to science that’s more action-oriented, that’s more solutions-focused, that’s more community-centered, that’s more about justice science, that’s more about change science. That’s what we do.

Eric: It’s really interesting. How did—so how did you first get interested in science, on the science side?

Sacoby: Oh yeah, so just a little bit about me. I’m from Vicksburg, Mississippi, not that far from the Mississippi River. So I grew up loving Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, whole river stuff, going through the woods, that kind of thing.

I lived near a sewage treatment plant—a landfill. My mom always reminded me, “Son, don’t forget the landfill.” As a kid, my dad was a pipefitter and he actually worked at some of these nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants.

I also have alopecia. Alopecia is an autoimmune condition I’ve had since I was seven. So I wanted to understand why I lost my hair. Psychosocial stress can lead to that, right?

So all those things combined—me having a strong interest in science. Actually, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist as a 5-year-old, not an environmental scientist. But I always thought I was gonna be in science. Science was an escape for me as a kid.

Then, as I got older and really wanted to understand more about my alopecia, I was able to do internships in high school, and then I went to Alabama A&M University. I’m actually at homecoming right now. And I was able to get training in biology, ecotoxicology, and environmental science, and it was great—doing research as a freshman in college.

I was an intern at the EPA in Region 4. I was an intern at TVA—maybe that wasn’t a good thing, but an intern at TVA, you know the history of TVA, the Tennessee Valley Authority. And I also worked at Yucca Mountain, which is another interesting place. I worked at Yucca Mountain, and that was my first exposure to paleoclimatology and also geographic information systems—mapping tools. I do a lot of mapping now. So even though Yucca Mountain is problematic, I got a lot out of that experience.

At the same time, I was also a Udall Scholar. I was a 1997 Udall Scholar. So all of that came together really to get me interested in the field of environmental health.

And then, at a conference in 1995, I met Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis, who coined the term “environmental racism” in the fight against the PCB landfill in Warren County, and I also met Dr. Robert Bullard, who is known by many as the father of the environmental justice movement. I knew from that day I was doing environmental justice work.

So that’s how I got into the environmental justice movement. That’s how I got into environmental science. That’s how I got into environmental justice science.

Eric: Where do you see this field going? Obviously, as you have noted before, I think many folks know about Cancer Alley, they understand the last generation of environmental justice, environmental racism. But you are, I think, opening folks’ eyes to the current generation of environmental justice, environmental racism.

Where do you see this movement going?

Sacoby: We just had our 11th annual symposium on environmental justice and environmental health disparities, September 10–13, and we talked about some of these emerging concerns around environmental justice.

We talked about data centers. We talked about climate change and climate resilience, and how, as we recover from hurricanes, floods, other climate hazards—fires—how we recover in a way that doesn’t leave anybody behind, like what happened after Hurricane Katrina, right? Some people were never able to come back home.

And then you have what we call climate redlining, where the haves and the have-nots—some folks are able to get the benefits and infrastructure, and because of economic and other reasons, other folks are not able to get those climate-resilient infrastructure and benefits. So you have those issues. I think that’s an emerging front.

You also have the issue of how we can use technology better. There are growing sensor technologies out there for air quality monitoring, growing sensors for water quality monitoring, the use of mapping tools and apps.

We’re building an app which will allow folks to collect data at the block level so you can really know: is that policy working? Because you can get very granular data to track air pollution, to track the built environment, to track green space.

Another frontier, which I think is very important for the audience, is food. Why is food important? Food connects everything. Everybody has to eat. But also how we grow our food—sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture.

Think about how we build our buildings: biophilic buildings, green infrastructure. Those are also environmental justice issues. You think about access to nature and the benefits of nature and how some communities have it and some communities don’t.

But then how can we bring in innovation in the food space? One of our first carbon capture tools is having healthy soils, right? I’m from Mississippi, so “soil” may not come out the right way—old “sorl.” Y’all heard what I said, right?

So how can we do agriculture that’s innovative, that gets at our broken food system, but at the same time gets at the food–energy–water nexus where people have healthy foods, they have clean water? Food sovereignty.

We’re basically asking: how can we build ecotopia? The good “ought to”—what’s our vision for the future where everybody benefits, and food is at the heart? Food forests, urban ag, regenerative ag. That, to me, is one of the major frontiers for the movement as well.

Eric: It also sounds like this is a movement of coalitions—of coalitions—because your work crosses so many different kinds of disciplines and different kinds of organizations, funders. Lots of folks can create this web of advocacy and support. Are you seeing those kinds of networks forming?

Sacoby: I get excited, I talk fast. I’m from Mississippi. The more excited I get, the faster I talk, so just remind me to slow down.

Eric: I’m from New York, so we could duel.

Sacoby: Okay, exactly, exactly.

What’s exciting is environmental justice is a social movement. A movement is not one person, it’s people. And that’s the thing about what’s happened at the federal level with the Trump administration. I said at a recent meeting: what can be disassembled can be reassembled, but you can’t stop the movement, because the movement is people. You can take the funding, but the movement is still going to be there.

One of the things that I’ve done in my career—I’ve been co-founder of the Mid-Atlantic Justice Coalition. We have a coalition of grassroots environmental justice and environmental health organizations in Delaware, Maryland, D.C., and Virginia. We’re trying to reset some of the state tables. Our strongest state table is the Maryland state table. Now we’re trying to expand, reset the Virginia, D.C., and Delaware tables, and also expand to Pennsylvania. We’re working on that right now.

I also have something called the Mid-Atlantic Climate Action Hub—MATCH. It was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and also by the Waverley Street Foundation—so thank you, Waverley Street and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The idea is we have community partners who act as hubs. So the Overbrook Center is an EJ group and is a hub in Philadelphia. Familias en Acción is a hub in Prince George’s County, also engaging the Latinx population across the Mid-Atlantic. Empower D.C. is a hub for D.C. United Parents Against Lead is the hub for Virginia. Eastern Shore Health and the Delaware Healthy Communities Coalition are the hubs on the Eastern Shore and southern Delaware—they’re dealing with a lot of industrial chicken farms. South Baltimore Community Land Trust is the hub for Baltimore.

So we have a hub model where they’re doing community engagement and technical assistance. We provide support. We bring that empowerment science and that technical assistance framework to support frontline and fenceline groups that are fighting climate injustices.

That, to me, is a model similar to the TCTACs—that’s an acronym for Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers. It’s having these technical assistance hubs that are made of organizations on the front line and fence line, and we provide support to those organizations.

I think MATCH has been very successful and we’re looking forward to, hopefully, expanding MATCH in the future.

Eric: Well, you talked a little bit about how philanthropy is supporting this, and you are the recipient of the Heinz Award for the Environment, so congratulations. What does that kind of recognition mean for you personally, professionally, and what does it mean for the work?

Sacoby: I was really surprised when I got the announcement. It’s been embargoed, so I’ve known for a few months, but when they called me and told me, I literally cried. Because it’s hard doing this work.

Just for the audience: environmental justice—it’s a science and a social movement in many ways. It is the democracy. We’ve got people fighting to make our democracy work for everybody, right? And to make a democracy work, it takes work. You have to be on the ground. You have to organize.

So to get this recognition—it recognizes my hard work and how I’ve overcome challenges. Some of the challenges I talked about in my early childhood, and also the challenges I’ve had in academia when you’re doing work that is not the traditional research. I don’t do helicopter, colonial, extractive science or just studying problems. I’m trying to do real action, solution science.

So that was great. It was affirming for me, but it’s also validation for our community science approach. And it’s also verification that communities can do good science. It’s really not just an award for me—it’s an award for all the frontline and fenceline groups that I work with, I partner with.

So my name is on it, but it’s also a recognition for the environmental justice movement: that it’s alive and well, it’s going to continue to fight, it’s going to be here, and we’re going to continue to fight and try to create that beloved community like Dr. King talked about. As Dr. King talked about bending that arc—the moral arc—we’re going to keep doing that work.

So it’s a recognition of all that hard work. And it’s also, I think, a nod to the movement: keep going, keep moving. We’re behind you. We support you.

Eric: Well, just in the minute or two that we have left—what’s next for your work and for the communities that you’re partnering with?

Sacoby: I am really excited to continue working with MCAP and with Justin Pearson and his group. I think Justin just announced he’s running for Congress or something, so I’m excited for him.

We’re going to be doing more work on data centers. I’m also really excited about the agricultural work that I talked about. Reverend William Barber II was a keynote speaker at our symposium, and he talked about these ag innovation hubs, and it blew my mind because—I like to say I’m like a Renaissance man, Booker T. Washington meets Little House on the Prairie.

So I’ve got my garden at my house. I’ve been canning—doing fig preserves and blackberry jam, applesauce. And I think food, for me—I want to get a new podcast going. I’m doing a new podcast with one of my colleagues, Mustafa Ali. I think everybody may know Mustafa. We’re going to call it The Shack and Mo Show. I think that’s the name of it.

We did a practice podcast at the symposium, but we’re going to be talking about these issues around food and around justice, and trying to answer questions of the people and bring solutions to them.

So we’ll be doing that. And I’m also planning to write some books. I’ve got a lot of information. Like Dr. Bullard said—he has like 19 books, but every book is like one chapter of the same book. I want to do books about all these issues: on industrial animal operations, on climate change, on communication work, on mapping tools, on air quality—and get that out to the people so we can bring EJ to everybody.

So my job in the next phase of my career is bringing EJ to everybody and making sure everybody’s part of the EJ movement.

Eric: I think some of these data centers could run off the energy that you put off just talking about the work.

You’re an inspiration to me and to others, I know, and I really, really appreciate what you’re doing. Congratulations on the Heinz Award. Congratulations for all your incredible work. We’ll certainly link to everything that you’re doing on our website.

Dr. Sacoby Wilson, I can’t thank you enough.

Sacoby: Thank you, Eric. It’s been great to be here.

Kirk: Okay, and we’re back. So, of the many great glimpses we got in this conversation, I loved the framing around environmental justice issues being inherently energy justice issues.

And that walking through all of the ways that this historic and systemic process really puts our vulnerable communities, our communities of color, closest to the areas where this fossil fuel is combusted that we just desperately need—or thought we needed until recently—to fuel every aspect of our life, to sustain this lifestyle, to support economic growth.

And what a perfect literal illustration and metaphor for how this goes. Our economic engine is fueled so often by exposing so many of our most vulnerable communities to the negative consequences of what it takes to make that economic engine go.

And I just loved that. As a longtime energy nerd, that notion that really, at the heart of it, environmental justice issues are so often basically energy justice issues.

Eric: That’s for sure. And I mean, it is just a reminder that when we talk about the great progress that we’re making and the extraordinary advantages that technology will provide, we have to remind ourselves that these things have costs—and that you cannot provide these kinds of benefits without understanding and mitigating the costs.

And the fact that—surprise, surprise—the effects of all of this rampant energy production and data smashing, the negative effects of it are felt by the people who are least able to fight back, and historically have been almost targeted for siting these projects, and who are not receiving the benefits of them.

Everything old is new again here, except that now, with the phenomenal amounts of energy that artificial intelligence is using—and water, by the way—the problems will now be exacerbated. It’s like the turn of the century on crack, people.

Kirk: The scale of this is just unbelievable. So this data center thing—we’ll talk about the specific issue that Sacoby is working with in Memphis—but the scale of this data center transition? Two hundred billion dollars a year. It’s as big as the U.S. airline industry.

And this is what I love about our field: the audacity and the commitment of people to stand up from the local level against trends like this, these macro trends that just seem so—like a tsunami being driven by the push and pull of global economic dynamics.

And yet, in the midst of it, we have folks like Sacoby and so many others that are saying, “You know what? Actually, you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to come into our communities without permits, without disclosure, without transparency, and plop down some of the oldest tech—energy technology possible—in our midst and just expect us to not say a word about it.”

Eric: So they’re hiding a power plant inside a data center. Thirty-five gas-powered turbines are gonna be spinning around and spewing out their nonsense in the Boxtown community in Memphis.

By the way, I didn’t mention that Dr. Wilson won the Heinz Award for the Environment, which was an unrestricted cash award of $250,000 in honor of—and to celebrate—his work doing this. So the work of environmental justice is being seen by philanthropy, and this is, I think, an incredible way of showing how important what Dr. Wilson is doing is, and how we need to start thinking about this problem.

Kirk: Doesn’t it feel like what’s happening with these data centers just feels like it’s a mirror of what’s happening with data in general? This data thing is being harnessed behind the scenes. It’s in front of us but invisible. It’s creating all these outcomes and all these effects in our society—they’re everywhere we can see—yet we can’t really see the fingerprints of what’s happening behind it, because all of the algorithms and all the ways that that’s shaping communication is so hidden to us.

Which is why I want you to indulge my tinfoil hat series that’s coming about what’s actually going on.

But at the same time, the engine that’s propelling that around AI are these data centers that are literally showing up in every state across the country. They are the preferred form of economic development engine for many of our largest utilities in the country. Why? Because they consume enormous amounts of energy. Oh yes, water too. But they’re on all the time. You just get to manage one. You don’t have to manage all these different crazy people.

And then you get to work with people like Elon Musk, who are clearly willing to do, say, and bend every rule possible so that they get what they want as far as this stuff is concerned.

Eric: By the way, I picked up the news—I picked up my newspaper, which lands on my front door every morning. Here it is—this is the sound of the newspaper, the New York Times. And the headline today—now, we do these shows kind of in advance, so this might come out a little later, but—“Power-Thirsty AI Frenzy Incites Fury Across the Globe.”

Eric: “From Mexico to Ireland, activists cry foul as data centers deplete resources.” So we’re not making this up.

And so here’s an interesting piece for you, Kirk: nearly 60% of the 1,244 largest data centers in the world were outside the United States as of the end of June. Now, by the end of July, who knows, that might have changed. But these are things that people are feeling across the globe.

And again, we have to decide: what are we gonna do about this? How are we gonna stop it? How do we talk about it? How do we figure out ways to make sure that the benefits of our economy are widely shared?

Kirk: And this project in Memphis, the Boxtown area where Sacoby and all of his colleagues are working so hard to fight this—it’s just like we’re being trolled. It’s called Colossus, right? It’s gonna be the largest of its kind in the world, and it’s gonna house the engine for the AI machine that Elon Musk has created called Grok.

It’s like: this is actually happening. What is going on? How did we end up in this timeline? Like, what happened? What pill did we swallow? It’s crazy what’s going on here.

Eric: Yeah. They might as well call it the “Screw You” data center.

Kirk: Right. Right.

So the other thing that I think is so interesting—what Sacoby is doing here. He’s helping mobilize critical place-based opposition to these crazy projects that are just everything we don’t want: lack of transparency, imposing this pollution on communities without any consideration for what’s really right, viable, etc.

And what is Sacoby bringing to that conversation regarding how we create more constraints around this data proliferation? Science. He’s bringing empowerment science. He’s bringing the tools—the scientific tools you need to engage public policy—because he’s going to help people measure what’s happening locally.

And I love that part of this. It’s all the things we love. It’s transparency, it’s getting the right information out, but it’s also delivering it in a way where the communications aspect of this pops forward. It’s like: we want to know what’s happening. Well, this is how we do it. We put these tools in the hands of people that wouldn’t otherwise get them.

So it’s this interesting conflict between this data center concept, which feels like it’s pulling away all of our rights, all of our transparency, even though it’s kind of being presented as the opposite—while Sacoby is saying: no, actually, what you really need to do is you need to put the information in the hands of the people that are most affected so they can tell their own stories for why this is not what should be happening here.

Eric: And they’re being successful. So this is not just yelling into the wind. This isn’t Don Quixote tilting at windmills—at, you know, gas-fired turbines.

NAACP got a data center halted in the South—I think it was Alabama, it might’ve been Mississippi. They are stopping a build in Prince George’s County, in the area around Washington, D.C. They’re working on protecting, especially in these unincorporated areas that don’t have the kind of legislative organization that, you know, cities do—because these are kind of these gray areas.

But they’re fighting back, and they’re using this data that gets provided through very, very simple mechanical systems that give them the information they need to push back.

And as you say, Dr. Wilson—he’s a phenomenal communicator. You kind of feel like you’re in church a little bit, right? It’s empowering. It’s inspiring. He doesn’t sound like your run-of-the-mill academic.

Kirk: This is top-notch science communication. It’s so awesome.

Eric: It’s so great. And he quotes Yoda. So what could be better?

Kirk: What more could you want? Nothing.

Eric: But, you know, it’s such a good example for people who are interested in using science and data to advance a cause. I mean, it doesn’t just have to be this issue. It doesn’t have to be environmental racism. It doesn’t have to be AI. It can be anything in which you need to use science to advance your ideas, but to do it in a way that is engaging, that brings people together.

As we heard, he’s working on coalitions of coalitions of coalitions. He’s bringing people together across all sorts of disciplines who understand that they have something very important and powerful in common, and he’s engaging them in this really great way to push back against these behemoths—against, what is it, colossi?—and Grok.

Kirk: Yeah. And I love how the science becomes the organizing principle around which people can come forward and then actually activate their voices. It’s so cool. It’s so necessary.

You know, you talked a little bit about—there’s so much here, so we’re not gonna get to all of it—but just this concept of the future. What’s ahead? What are the things that Dr. Wilson’s thinking about?

And it really struck me, this notion of climate redlining. This idea that different communities are being affected differently by the impacts that are playing out every day, every month, every week. We see the headlines, we see the feeds about what’s happening across the board in so many different places as the weather becomes more extreme and the consequences become more felt.

And this notion that underserved communities, which are already bearing the brunt of all of these issues—so many of these issues locally—now when it comes to climate disaster, climate recovery, they’re the ones that are actually feeling left behind because the recovery dollars or the recovery process is slowest to reach those communities.

So not only do they feel the impacts first, but to the extent they’re receiving support at all, they’re receiving the support on recovery last. And I just thought that was another really crucial aspect of Dr. Wilson’s work. And I loved—even though I hate the topic, I hate that it’s happening—I loved that he’s thinking about that and that he raised that in the context of your conversation.

Eric: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s so exciting when somebody comes along who kind of gets you to tilt your head a little sideways—like, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I hadn’t realized. It makes perfect sense and I should have been thinking about AI and data and energy in the context of environmental justice, and I hadn’t been.

And that he is able to take these ideas and make them understandable, relatable, powerful, and bring people along the way he does. And I can’t imagine when he sleeps, because he’s running all of these projects, he runs a nonprofit, he’s on faculty, he teaches. Folks like that just really, really excite me and inspire me, and I’m thrilled that Heinz recognized him for that.

By the way, I don’t think the fact that he’s a Steelers fan influenced the Heinz Endowments, but it probably couldn’t hurt—or at least it’s good for them to know that.

Kirk: We’re not gonna look that close.

Eric: We’re not gonna look that close into that.

Kirk: Yeah, and I love too—you know, of course science touches everything. And so Dr. Wilson is focusing on the topics that touch everything. Energy touches everything. Energy justice touches everything.

And then you talked a little bit about, at the end, how food connects everything. And how regenerative agriculture, and then again your notion of coalitions and coalitions—like, he’s clearly so deeply invested in bringing people together and bringing them forward.

And coming back to the science communication piece—science is so often the stopping point. It’s like, we don’t know how to do it. It’s the special province of a very select few. It doesn’t have relevance for the rest of us.

And this notion of empowerment science and deploying these tools—it is interesting, I hadn’t really thought about that part. We’re all used to now, any one of us could, just with our little smartphone, create our own big-budget movie, ’cause we’ve got a video camera in there that’s as good as anything that was being used 30, 40, 50 years ago, even more recently than that.

Well, this notion about the upscaling and how sensor data—these sensing tools around collecting air quality information—are getting so much better too, and they’re becoming so much less expensive. That is just a really powerful concept, to think about how you could get that technology in the hands of so many people so that we can start, in a very democratic way, understanding the impacts of all this stuff that’s happening around us. It’s just—it’s so exciting.

Eric: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s fun. This is a show about communications, and every so often we even get to talk about communications, so that’s kind of cool too.

Kirk: That’s great. Well, my goodness, Dr. Sacoby Wilson doing the good work, fighting the good fight. We wish you the best for Boxtown. We wish you the best for reining in Colossus.

And you know, it is just—I don’t understand. I mean, we have huge tech companies that are able to report legitimately that they are real-time matching their energy needs with renewable resources on the grid, and they can document that. Why that’s not being done in this case—why there’s something else going on—it’s…the short answer is because these data centers create so much local impact for the grid that you have to have a local energy source that’s 24/7 and dispatchable. And that’s why you end up with the natural gas that they’re talking about.

And it is interesting, this collision between the energy justice and environmental justice considerations and then the framing around those data centers, that they bring all this economic benefit, which is actually provably false.

Eric: This is—

Kirk: Eight people—eight people who work there.

Eric: Right. That’s right.

Kirk: So this is the work. Eric, man, thank you. I’m so inspired by Sacoby and all this work, and thank you for surfacing this conversation for all of us.

Eric: Always a pleasure.

Kirk: Okay, everybody. Well, thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time on Let’s Hear It. And we’ll even start with the peppy intro, ’cause Mr. Brown’s asking for it.

Okay, everybody. That’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today, or people we should have on this show—and that definitely includes yourself.

And we’d like to thank John Allee, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music,

Eric: Our sponsor—

Kirk: —the Lumina Foundation. And please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent. You can find that at luminafoundation.org.

Eric: We certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all of you.

Kirk: And most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh, no, no, no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody. Till next time.