"Pennsylvanian Wolf" by Elizabeth Cunningham

Pennsylvanian Wolf

Before giving up on my parents’ dreams of me walking out of college with a BS degree in Environmental Science, my final for conservation biology was a 3-minute presentation on a proposal (created by you) submitted to the government.  Turning away from the windows at the words “sleepy deer” and breaking too hard to stop a fawn from ending up under the tires of my dad’s car, I proposed how to introduce wolves back into the state.  White-tailed deer need humans to control their population because there are no natural predators left in Pennsylvania.  The control of the population helps reduce deer-car incidents, limit Lyme disease’s spread through deer ticks, and manage native plants.  My proposal: bring back the wolf.

The one study my lazy, undergrad self looked at was, of course, Yellowstone.  The National Fish and Wildlife Service laid out a 400-page plan and followed up with their struggles, outreach to the community, and further studies of the wolves.  My fifty pages were boiled down to four words: can’t do it here.  Not enough continuous land.  Gamelands would be taken away from hunters who need to eat and feed their kids.  Too much time would be needed to convince communities to live alongside wolves.  One of the biggest hurdles with environmentalism is working with the community.  Environmentalists and contractors working to create green initiatives need to understand why the community may agree or disagree with their ideas and goals for their home and bridging the divide to meet a common goal.  For example, with my proposal, I imagined there would be pushback against the wolves because of house pets.  I thought of the PetSmart housewives and their mini golden doodles stacking up against a pack of wolves.  Not the ancestral family reunion you want to hear in the middle of the night.  

Fast forward three years, and a different species is trying to make PA its home: data centers.  As of writing this, at least fifty new centers (plus the fifty-two already in the state) are planned to be built in PA.  Corporations have already fertilized our farmland with FOR SALE signs.  Neighborhoods pollinate and sprawl through our fields. New homes grow faster than the corn and the calves.  Adding data centers will deteriorate our land, water, and air.  As the Snack Basket of America, our land is naturally irrigated from the Susquehanna Water Basin, making it one of the best nutrient-rich soils to grow food.  Planting houses is one thing, but growing a hundred-acre data center that sucks our lands dry and pumps out mud in its place.  Governor Josh Shapiro doted on Threads that Pennsylvania will have the strictest guidelines that data centers must abide by.  This holds the centers accountable in theory, but we have seen corporations pay the fines from the Environmental Protection Agency and have had no accountability in the environmental clean-up.  Just pay another fine.  Also, what happens if the next governor strips these guidelines? The data centers will have no restrictions and run wild in our state.  Already, other states’ communities shoulder the burden of the increased need for the electric grid and the mud-filled water.  One veto from a governor down the line opens the muddy floodgates.  Sooner or later, Maryland and Delaware will knock on our doors to clean the Chesapeake of databytes, nodes, and servers.

The “sleepy deer” will no longer die on highways, but choke on polluted air or water, dying in the riverbed.  Poisoned just like our communities, and spreading to those who rely on the deer meat to live.  We already let a wolf into PA, just not one who benefits us.

Elizabeth Cunningham