The Green Divas

13/07/2026

This would be so nice!!!!

Walk into some supermarkets in Thailand and you will not find your vegetables shrink wrapped in plastic. Instead they are bundled in glossy green banana leaves, tied with a little strip of natural twine, and it looks better than plastic ever did.

The idea is beautifully simple. Banana leaves are large, flexible, naturally waterproof, and completely biodegradable. Across Southeast Asia they have been used to wrap food for centuries, so stores are really just reaching back to an old, proven solution to fix a very modern problem. Plastic packaging is used for minutes but lingers in the environment for hundreds of years.

When supermarkets began trialing this, the photos spread around the world and struck a nerve. People loved seeing a real, tangible alternative to the mountains of plastic film that vegetables usually come drowned in. The leaves hold bundles of herbs, greens, and produce together perfectly well, then simply break down and return to the soil when you are done.

It is worth being clear eyed about the scale. This works best for fresh produce, not everything in the store, and banana leaves are far more available in tropical climates than in colder countries. It is not a magic fix for the entire global plastic crisis on its own. But it is a genuine, meaningful step, and it sparked similar experiments in other countries.

The deeper lesson is what makes it powerful. Sometimes the smartest solution is not a brand new invention but a piece of old wisdom we abandoned in the rush toward convenience. Nature had a packaging system long before we wrapped everything in plastic.

Would you switch to banana leaf packaging over plastic if your local store offered it?

03/04/2026

Guys. We need farms more than data centers…

Delsia Bare and her 82-year-old mother Ida Huddleston turned down a $26 million offer from an unnamed Fortune 100 AI company to sell roughly half of their 1,200-acre family farm outside Maysville, Kentucky for a data center. The offer was ten times the going rate for farmland in Mason County. "There is no price on earth enough for what they are getting ready to do," Bare said. "There's no replacing what they're getting ready to destroy."

Her family has worked this land for generations. "My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it," Bare told WKRC. "Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn't have anything else." As for the money: "Stay and hold and feed a nation. $26 million doesn't mean anything."

Their story is one of countless fights now playing out across rural America as tech giants including OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft are racing to buy up massive tracts of farmland for the sprawling data centers that power artificial intelligence. They're offering staggering sums -- and making bold promises to communities about jobs and economic investment.

In reality, what these communities get in return is almost nothing. A typical data center only employs roughly 30 permanent workers. Meta's Kansas City facility drew 1,500 construction workers. It now runs with about 100. Researchers who studied data center openings across Texas found zero net employment effects on local economies.

As Huddleston put it: "I say they're a liar, and the truth isn't in them. That's what I say. It's a scam."

What data centers do consume is a different story. A single large facility can drink up to 5 million gallons of water per day -- as much as a town of 50,000 people. Roughly 80% of that water evaporates. It doesn't return to the water table. It's gone. In rural Georgia, communities near Meta's data centers report contaminated or depleted water supplies. In Arizona, data centers compete directly with farmers for water.

Residential electricity prices rose 11.5% in 2025 and are projected to climb another 40% by 2030. Data centers were responsible for 63% of the capacity price spike in the Mid-Atlantic power grid -- $9.3 billion in costs passed directly to household ratepayers in a single year. Thousands of diesel backup generators the size of rail cars spew particulate matter and nitrogen oxides into surrounding communities, worsening asthma in children and heart disease in the elderly.

"They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not," Huddleston said. "We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don't have any water -- and that poison. Well, we know we've had it."

Across the country, communities have been fighting back against new resource-depleting data centers -- and winning. At least 25 data center projects were canceled in 2025 due to local opposition, up from just two in 2023. More than $64 billion in developments have been blocked or delayed across 24 states. More than 100 local communities have enacted their own moratoriums on data centers, and 12 states are pushing forward with statewide moratorium proposals.

In Warrenton, Virginia, residents voted out every single town council member who had supported Amazon's proposed data center. In Arizona, a $14 billion project was withdrawn after residents organized against rezoning. Nearly 190 activist groups are now working to stop or regulate data center construction. Their tools: local zoning laws, environmental reviews, state regulations.

Trump -- who has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI industry campaign donations in American political history -- wants to take every one of those tools away. The Trump administration's AI policy framework, released this month, calls on Congress to preempt state AI laws, streamline permitting for data centers, and exempt them from environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act and potentially the Clean Water Act. Trump's goal is a country where states and local communities don't even have the option to say no to new data centers.

A new dark-money nonprofit called Innovation Council Action -- led by former Trump deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich and blessed by White House AI adviser David Sacks -- announced this week it will spend at least $100 million on the 2026 midterms to push this agenda. The group has built a scorecard ranking lawmakers on their loyalty to Trump's AI priorities and plans to "hold accountable" anyone who stands in the way. Its donors will never be disclosed.

This comes on top of the more than $100 million already pledged by the industry-backed Leading the Future PAC, and tens of millions more from AI executives -- including OpenAI's Greg Brockman, who poured $25 million into pro-Trump political operations. Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI's CEO all donated to Trump's record-shattering $245 million inaugural fund. The same companies offering farmers ten times the value of their land are spending hundreds of millions to make sure those farmers' communities can't say no.

On a federal level, there is one bill pushing back. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation that would pause new data center construction until federal safeguards are in place to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. The bill has virtually no chance of advancing under Republican control of Congress -- but it lays down a marker for what could become law if the midterms shift the balance of power.

For families like the Huddlestons, it can't come soon enough. Ida Huddleston described the relentless offers as "mind harassment." She said she intends to die on the land her late husband built their home on and pass it to the next generation -- exactly as she believes God told her to do. Her daughter put it more bluntly: "The quietness and the beauty of nature, of the trees, and everything that's there, it's all going to be destroyed completely."

The party that once claimed to champion states' rights and local control is now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to strip communities across the country of every tool they have to push back -- so that AI companies can pave over farmland, drain local water supplies, drive up electricity bills for millions of Americans, and call it progress.

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Communities -- not AI companies -- should decide what happens to their land, their water, and their future. Here's how to take action:

--> Call your senators and representative through the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Tell them to support the AI Data Center Moratorium Act and oppose any effort to preempt state and local protections against data center harms.

--> To read the full text and summary of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez AI Data Center Moratorium Act, visit https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-ocasio-cortez-announce-ai-data-center-moratorium-act/

--> To learn about data center opposition efforts in your community and connect with local activist groups, visit https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report

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To introduce kids to the importance of protecting farmland and the environment, we recommend "Seeds of Change: Wangari's Gift to the World" (https://www.amightygirl.com/seeds-of-change) and "Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai" (https://www.amightygirl.com/planting-the-trees), both for ages 4 to 8

For an uplifting story about the power of community action, check out "City Green" about a girl who transforms a vacant lot into a neighborhood garden, for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/city-green

For more books about girls and women protecting the environment, visit our blog post "Women Saving the Planet: 25 Kids' Books About Female Environmentalists" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14831

For more books about girls who love the outdoors and the natural world, visit our blog post "Mighty Girls Go Green: 30 Girl-Empowering Books for Earth Month" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11850

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For more on the Huddleston family's fight to save their farm, visit https://www.lex18.com/news/covering-kentucky/mason-county-mother-daughter-reject-millions-as-data-center-land-dispute-continues

For a deep dive into how data centers are draining water supplies across the country, visit https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute's report on how data center power demands are driving up electricity bills can be found at https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-center-power-demands-are-contributing-to-higher-energy-bills

To learn more about the $64 billion in data center projects blocked or delayed by community opposition, visit https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report

Fox News' report on Innovation Council Action's $100 million midterm spending plan can be found at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-pro-ai-group-backed-trump-allies-plans-100m-midterm-spending-push

Roll Call's coverage of the White House AI framework calling for preemption of state laws is at https://rollcall.com/2026/03/20/white-house-ai-framework-calls-for-preemption-of-state-laws/

The Brennan Center's analysis of unprecedented big money flowing to Trump-aligned super PACs from tech donors can be found at https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/unprecedented-big-money-surge-super-pac-tied-trump

17/02/2026

Microplastics gush out of our taps and flake off cookware. They find their way into the yolks of eggs, and into meat and vegetables. But there are things we can do to eat less of them.