Is there an environmental argument for, if not getting off the internet, curtailing photo uploads and avoiding unnecessary uses of search engines, especially if they use AI?

This morning’s Dispatch newsletter on “Preparing for an AI Energy Boom” reminded me of something I read back in July, from Arthur Holland Michel:

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off. This points to an uncomfortable, and eminently modern, question. “Everyone says it’s really bad to fly,” Tom Jackson, a professor at Loughborough University, in England, who studies the environmental impact of data, told me. “But also we’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”

[M]aybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

I have not picked this book up, but the title gives me a smile every time I see it at the bookstore.

They probably average 1.3 articles/week that catch my eye. But 4 is a treat.

Though of course, I mainly read it for cartoons 🤓

Currently waiting to dive into: The Uses of Idolatry by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

I’m waiting because a) I have a few projects around the house that require the attention I’d prefer to give to reading, and b) Cavanaugh’s gracious voice in his attitude toward politics and culture is one that I have a feeling I’m going to need a lot more of after November 5th.

But I couldn’t resist reading the intro a couple weeks ago.

I want, in a way, to present idolatry in a sympathetic light. As St. Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, their proclivity to worship is evidence that they are groping for God, and may still find God. Idolatry critique helps to overcome the binary of believers/nonbelievers by showing that we all believe in something; we are spontaneously worshiping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful. Following an invisible God is hard for material creatures, so we fixate on things that are closer to hand. Idolatry critique applies equally to those who profess belief in God and those who don’t. We all worship, and we all worship badly, to greater and lesser degrees. Idolatry critique is therefore best understood first and foremost as self-critique, an exercise in cultivating the virtue of humility. I am not so much interested in “idolatry” as a stable and univocal master category by which we can critique others and get our own worship in order; the only remedy for idolatry is ultimately an unmanageable encounter with the living God, one that throws all of our lives into question.

Liz Cheney:

Or will we be so blinded by political partisanship that we throw away the miracle of America? Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country and revere our Constitution? I pray that that is not the case. I pray that we all remember [that] our children are watching. As we carry out this solemn and sacred duty entrusted to us, our children will know who stood for truth. And they will inherit the nation we hand to them: a Republic — if we can keep it.

That is something worth thinking about in the next couple weeks.

And this whole thing is something worth revisiting and sharing, even for just the first 30-40 minutes.

Damned if I know.

”It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy…”

Yet another Richard Wilbur poem I simply cannot move past. Must have read it 50 times now.

The reconstructed Virginia on the Kennebec River in Bath, ME, sitting about seven miles north of her namesake’s origin in Phippsburg in 1608. It was the first English ship built in the Americas. Behind me and over the bridge at BIW, today sit two Navy Destroyers in mid-build.

Two things come to mind, one much lighter than the other, but not unrelated.

First the light one. Whenever I’ve seen this ship, usually while driving over the Sagadahoc Bridge, I think of Sam Bush’s “Same Ol’ River”:

I wish that I could be a Pirate
I’d sail the ocean blue
Way before the big liners
Started sailing them too
I’d bury most of my treasures
So I would leave a big hole
And the only real sense of pleasure that I’d get
Is that I’d sail free in my soul

The second thing is a “paragraph” from W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. (If you’ve read Sebald, you understand the scare quotes 🙂.) Sebald is sitting in the English town of Southwold and reflecting on the history of naval warefare. It’s a haunting reflection. I put most of the paragraph up on the other blog, but here’s the clinching line:

The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required — from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth — to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone.

Here’s an image of Willem van de Velde‘s The Burning of the Royal James at the Battle of Solebay, which Sebald included in black and white in the book: