‘The Groundwater Crisis Isn’t Coming, It’s Here’

 

One of the positive outcomes of the AI data center coming to Richland Parish has been the attention drawn once again to the woeful state of some of Louisiana’s underground aquifers, which many homes, industries, farmers, and others rely on as their primary water sources.  The Sparta Aquifer, as we mentioned in a past essay, continues to be depleted, and this has been confirmed again very recently by Kaitlin Maness in The Ouachita Citizen.

But this problem extends beyond Louisiana into other Southern States.  Arkansas has recently acknowledged the dire straits some of their counties are in, specifically those served by the Sparta and the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifers:

‘The general trend in Arkansas’s long-term water level change is that the groundwater levels are declining in response to continued withdrawals at rates which are not sustainable. Based on 2015 water use data, only approximately 44.2 percent of the current alluvial aquifer withdrawal of 7,636.08 million gallons per day, and approximately 55 percent of the Sparta aquifer withdrawal of 160 million gallons per day is sustainable. At these pumping rates, water level declines and the adverse impacts on the state’s groundwater system will continue to be observed’ (Arkansas Dept of Agriculture, ‘2022 Arkansas Groundwater Protection and Management Report’, p. i, agriculture.arkansas.gov).

Miss Maness clarified in her article linked above that it is this same Mississippi River Alluvial Aquifer that will feed the Meta data center in Richland Parish rather than the Sparta Aquifer.  This is good news for folks depending on the Sparta, but it is likely the beginning of a nightmare for the folks who depend on the MS River Alluvial Aquifer in Richland.  Thus far, aquifer levels have held steady there, thanks to sparser population levels and a lack of heavy industrial demand.  If the Meta center and the adjoining power plant become operational, residents will have to monitor those levels diligently.  The experience of parishes and counties in north Louisiana and south Arkansas are clear evidence that sustained use without any plan to replenish the aquifers will damage the long-term viability of them.

But let’s turn our attention to another Southern State, one where things usually work fairly smoothly:  Texas.  Yet even here, groundwater depletion has become a major issue:

‘Texas cities and suburbs are growing rapidly: The state now boasts six of the 10 fastest growing counties in the U.S., and it gained more residents than any other state in 2023.

‘However, that growth puts the state’s population centers on a collision course with looming shortages in water and, potentially, electricity. Texas’s agriculture commissioner has warned that large swaths of the state are “out of water,” and grid managers have warned that a 2021-style freeze would lead to blackouts like those that left millions of homes and businesses without power that year and contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Texans.

‘The rapid rise in demand for water and electricity coupled with straitened supplies is perhaps the biggest long-term problem facing Texas’s infrastructure and governance, and it’s likely to be of prime importance when the state’s 2025 legislative session begins next month.

‘When it comes to water, all eyes are on forthcoming legislation from Lubbock-area state Sen. Charles Perry (R), who has warned that the state is short about 10 to 11 million acre-feet of water — about twice the amount currently used by its cities — and proposed the creation of a state “water grid” modeled on the electric grid’ (Saul Elbein , ‘What’s next for Texas? 4 major questions looming for the divided state in 2025’, thehill.com).

Other regions are also threatened by the loss of groundwater resources.  The Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains has been under strain for decades now:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2025/01/garlington-the-groundwater-crisis-isnt-coming-its-here/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

Remembrances for November – 2025

 

Dear friends, if you have time, please pray for these members of the Southern family on the day they reposed.  Many thanks.

But one may ask:  ‘What good does it do to pray for the departed?’  An answer is offered here:  https://orthochristian.com/130608.html

Along with prayers and hymns for the departed:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6je5axPodI

4^th – Gabriel Manigault, an influential architect in South Carolina.

https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/manigault-gabriel/

Examples of his designs may be viewed at these sites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Manigault

http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/charleston/S10817710069/

5^th – Carrie Tuggle.  ‘Mrs. Tuggle was a person of unique strengths. She excelled in the areas of education, social work, and religion.’

http://www.awhf.org/tuggle.html

9^th – Pierre Laffite, the gentlemanly, rascally pirate of Barataria Bay, Louisiana.  He and his brother Jean are well-known for their role in the Battle of New Orleans and other acts of mischief.  Quintessential lovable rogues.  New Orleans’s Grace King gives details of their life:

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Louisiana/New_Orleans/_Texts/KINPAP/10*.html

10^th – Lott Carey, Colin Teague:  Both were slaves in Virginia who purchased their freedom and then became missionaries in West Africa.

https://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/1701-1800/lott-carey-11630295.html

https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/taylor/taylor.html

https://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/t-u-v/teague-colin-collin-teage-c-1780-1839/

12^th – Synaxis of the 12 Southerners of I’ll Take My Stand.  In celebration of the original publication of this noteworthy book on Nov. 12^th, 1930, we remember and pray for the contributors to it:  Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Stark Young, Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, John Donald Wade, and Robert Penn Warren.  The opening Statement of Principles from the book may be read here:

https://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology/agrarian.html

14^th – Booker T. Washington, a prominent leader in the postbellum South.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/booker-washingtons-bucket/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1073/booker-taliaferro-washington

15^th – Ambrose D. Mann, a colorful character who worked in the Confederacy’s diplomatic corps.

http://www.chab-belgium.com/pdf/english/Mann.pdf

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74906039/ambrose-dudley-mann

15^th – Roy Clark, a talented musician and comedian, perhaps best known for his work on the TV show Hee Haw.

https://countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/roy-clark/

20^th – John Lejeune, a Cajun fellow who had a big impact on the uS Marine Corps.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-greatest-of-all-leathernecks/

22^nd – Mary Boykin Chesnut, a valuable author and historian of the South.

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnut/bio.html

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8574/mary-boykin-chesnut

23^rd – Louisa McCord and Marion Montgomery, a couple of very versatile and talented writers.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/a-lady-champion-of-free-trade/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9685397/louisa-susanna-mccord

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/marion-montgomery-1925-2011

24^th – John William Corrington, another notable recent Southern author, hailing from NW Louisiana, one who unapologetically loved his Southern roots.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/john-william-corrington-and-southern-conservatism/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-better-men/

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/are-southerners-different/

Also, to celebrate some of the saints of November from the South’s Christian inheritance of various lands, visit these web pages:

https://southernorthodox.org/orthodox-saints-for-dixie-november/

https://confiterijournal.blogspot.com/2019/12/happy-feast-for-saints-of-november.html

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘Today’

 

Today the Savior is born

In a cave of the earth

From the womb of a virgin,

And She lays Him in a manger

Made for feeding

The unreasoning beasts.

Today the angels praise Him

With their celestial voices,

The shepherds with their rustic notes.

Today a star appears

In the firmament

 . . .

The rest is at https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/today.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

‘What Kind of Society Do We Want to Build?’

 

There are really only two answers to that question:  the traditional/heavenly kind and the untraditional/hellish kind.  A good representative of each has recently appeared in the news in mother and daughter countries, the first being the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France (the mother country), after five years of renovation, the second being the announcement of an artificial intelligence data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana (the daughter country).

The cheers celebrating the data center have been loud and have emanated from nearly every corner – from government officials to journalists to teachers.  But there are dissenting voices that ought to be heard.  Paul Kingsnorth, whom Rod Dreher calls a ‘prophet of our times’ along with Jonathan Pageau and Martin Shaw, is one of those voices.  In an essay he wrote in 2023, Mr Kingsnorth revealed what these data centers and the AI they feed represent:

‘Today, we can combine this claim with Marshall McLuhan’s notion that digital technology provides the ‘central nervous system’ of some new consciousness, or Kevin Kelly’s belief in a self-organising technium with ‘systematic tendencies’. We can add them to the feeling of those AI developers that they are ‘ushering a new consciousness into the world’. What do we see? From all these different angles, the same story. That these machines … are not just machines. That they are something else: a body. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life.

‘Scoff if you like, but as I’ve pointed out already, many of the visionaries who are designing our digital future have a theology cored around this precise notion. Ray Kurzweil, for example, thinks that everything is proceeding as he has foreseen. Kurzweil believes that a machine will match human levels of intelligence by 2029 and that the ‘Singularity’ - the point at which humans and machines will begin to merge to create a giant super-intelligence - will occur in 2045. At this point, says Kurzweil, humanity will no longer be either the most intelligent nor the dominant species on the planet. We will enter what he calls the age of spiritual machines.

‘ . . . Imagine, for a moment, that Steiner was onto something: something that, in their own way, all these others can see as well. Imagine that some being of pure materiality, some being opposed to the good, some ice-cold intelligence from an ice-cold realm were trying to manifest itself here. How would it appear? Not, surely, as clumsy, messy flesh. Better to inhabit - to become - a network of wires and cobalt, of billions of tiny silicon brains, each of them connected to a human brain whose energy and power and information and impulses and thoughts and feelings could all be harvested to form the substrate of an entirely new being.

‘ . . . Whatever is quite happening, it seems obvious to me that something is indeed being ‘ushered in’. Through our efforts and our absent-minded passions, something is crawling towards the throne. The ruction that is shaping and reshaping everything now, the earthquake born through the wires and towers of the web, through the electric pulses and the touchscreens and the headsets: these are its birth pangs. The Internet is its nervous system. Its body is coalescing in the cobalt and the silicon and in the great glass towers of the creeping yellow cities. Its mind is being built through the steady, 24-hour pouring-forth of your mind and mine and your children’s minds and your countrymen. Nobody has to consent. Nobody has to even know. It happens anyway. The great mind is being built. The world is being readied.

‘Something is coming’ (‘The Universal’, paulkingsnorth.substack.com).

What is coming?  Mr Kingsnorth answers:

‘Raskin and Harris call these things ‘Gollem-class AIs’, after the mythical being from Jewish folklore which can be moulded from clay and sent out to do its creator’s bidding. The Gollem was one inspiration for Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s tale, and the name is probably well-chosen, for Gollems often run riot and disobey their masters. Gollem-class AIs have developed what Harris gingerly calls ‘certain emergent capabilities’ which have come about independently of any human planning or intervention. Nobody knows how this has happened.  . . .

‘This is why the digital revolution feels so different: because it is. This thing - this technological nervous system, this technium, this gollem, this Machine - has a life of its own. In an attempt to explain what is happening using the language of the culture, people like Harris and Raskin say things like ‘this is what it feels like to live in the double exponential.’ Perhaps the language of maths is supposed to be comforting. Yet at the same time, they can’t help using the language of myth. They still refer to this thing that they cannot quite grasp as a ‘gollem’ or a ‘monster.’ They even show slides of Lovecraftian tentacled beings devouring innocent screen-gazers. They talk about aliens, and make references to ‘emergence’ and ‘colonisation’. They can feel something, but they can’t quite name it. Or they won’t.

‘This is how a rationalist, materialist culture works, and this is why it is, in the end, inadequate. There are whole dimensions of reality it will not allow itself to see. I find I can understand this story better by stepping outside the limiting prism of modern materialism and reverting to pre-modern (sometimes called ‘religious’ or even ‘superstitious’) patterns of thinking. Once we do that - once we start to think like our ancestors - we begin to see what those dimensions may be, and why our ancestors told so many stories about them.

‘Out there, said all the old tales from all the old cultures, is another realm. It is the realm of the demonic, the ungodly and the unseen: the ‘supernatural.’ Every religion and culture has its own names for this place. It lies under the barrows and behind the veil, it emerges in the thin places where its world meets ours. And the forbidden question on all of our lips, the one which everyone knows they mustn’t ask, is this: what if this is where these things are coming from?

‘What if we don’t understand these new ‘intelligences’ because we didn’t create them at all?’ (Ibid.).

We are summoning something evil, Mr Kingsnorth is saying, through all this computer connectedness that is feeding upon our thoughts, pictures, videos, etc., and it will take its place as ruler, for we have overthrown our old one, the God of the Christians:

‘For the last two years, I have found myself writing a lot here about God; more than I had intended. I have claimed several times that there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and that someone is always going to sit on it. Humans are fundamentally religious animals. We are drawn towards transcendence whether we like it or not. But here in the West, we have dethroned our old god, and now we can barely look at him.

‘So, who sits on our throne now?’  (Ibid.)

Technology would seem to be the answer.

This is not how it was supposed to be for mankind.  The Holy Trinity created the physical world, matter, the cosmos, as a revelation, a sign guiding us to Him:

 . . .

The rest is at https://thehayride.com/2024/12/garlington-what-kind-of-society-do-we-want-to-build/.

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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!