Dana Milbank: Data Centers Are Destroying Virginia’s Countryside — Even in Places That Have No Data Centers
Why won’t Spanberger stop the madness?
The editors sent me on a hardship assignment this week. I went paddling on the James River in central Virginia.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. I had to visit a particularly beautiful section called Seven Islands, in rural Fluvanna County, much of it protected by private conservation easements and a nearby state wildlife management area.
The water rippled around rocks and under the branches of towering sycamores. Smallmouth bass scattered when my canoe approached — this was likely a favorite fishing ground of the Monacan people for thousands of years — and a red fox flushed from the tall grass. An American goldfinch called, and a spicebush swallowtail butterfly alighted on its eponymous plant, now bursting with fragrant, red berries. Pawpaws drooped under the weight of their ripening fruit.
“You’re floating down the river and it’s forest in every direction,” said Vic Sorrell, a retired school principal who, with his friends, bought 390 acres here over the years. “This area is as far away from people as you can get in Fluvanna County, and we considered ourselves safe.”
After a pause, he added, bitterly: “Nowhere is safe.”
This slice of God’s country could soon be destroyed because of data centers — a story often told in Virginia, home to the greatest data-center concentration in the world. But here’s the twist: Fluvanna County doesn’t even have a data center, nor does it have plans for one. Neither does Buckingham County, across the river. And yet residents in both counties are set to have their land, and their scenic vistas, taken from them against their will by eminent domain to make way for monstrous new power lines: 12 story-tall towers carrying the highest voltage lines that exist in the United States to bring electricity to data centers in Northern Virginia, some 100 miles away. The likeliest path for that line goes right through Seven Islands.
The rampant destruction of the state’s natural beauty, and the obvious unfairness to its residents, have set off a bipartisan clamor in the state for a moratorium on new data-center projects. The movement against data centers has caught fire nationally. But Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, insists on saying the matter is “a local choice.”
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