2026-03-22 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the spring of 2024, when Cy Tongate visited Shelby Park on the eastern bank of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, the area looked more like a warzone than a riverside park in need of weed control. Humvees and pickup trucks crowded the newly cut access roads; patrol boats planed across the river; large beige tents rose from the soccer fields, shielding National Guard troops from the searing Texas sun. Checkpoints blocked the park’s entrances, and along the riverbank an ad hoc wall of shipping containers and razor wire marked the boundary of the United States. Standing on top of the fortification, lookouts peered into Mexico over tufts of Tongate’s ultimate target: Arundo donax, a tall, bamboo-like invasive plant that sprouted at the water’s edge.
The military buildup was part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star,” a multi-pronged deployment of the state’s National Guard and Department of Public Safety personnel that had begun in 2021 and ramped up in subsequent years, eventually overtaking Shelby Park in January of 2024. Abbott, displeased with then-president Joe Biden’s border policies and determined to stem what, in his telling, had become an “invasion” of migrants, banned federal Border Patrol officers from entering the park, considering them too lenient. The move sparked tensions between state and federal authorities, and Shelby Park—named for a pro-slavery activist and Confederate general—became a flashpoint in the national immigration debate.
Into this tangle slipped Tongate, a young, mid-level bureaucrat with the Rio Grande Vegetative Management Program, a project run by an obscure state agency called the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board. He had visited the park sporadically since 2022, pursuing his own inconspicuous piece of the governor’s wider border vision: the reduction of Arundo donax, known locally as giant reed or carrizo cane, which had aggressively colonized not only Shelby Park but nearly everywhere else in the Rio Grande Basin as well. The plant grew so expansively that it was impeding border operations—migrants could hide in the dense thickets—and authorities wanted it gone.
Working in the park, however, proved challenging. Tongate was frequently ensnared in the bureaucracy of the military command structure, with flummoxed National Guard troops calling up and down the chain of command to verify his clearance. The confusion, he said, sometimes led to troops mistaking his team’s herbicide-spraying drones for drug-smuggling tools. Once, he recalled, a particularly paranoid National Guardsman accused him of spraying Agent Orange. Most consequentially, however, the jurisdictional turf war produced such a flurry of activity, with new roads and fences going up everywhere, that it activated the underground network of Arundo stems, causing the plant to grow more vigorously. It took Tongate five re-treatments to beat back the plant, and though most of it is gone now, upriver Arundo stands threaten to re-infest the area. “That’s any government work,” said Tongate. “There’s a lot of futility.”
The futility Tongate sometimes feels is perhaps commensurate with the enormity of the task before him. For thousands of years, Arundo donax has spread across the globe, wreaking havoc on the riparian ecosystems it invades. The plant’s kaleidoscopic utility—it has been used by humans for everything from construction materials to musical instruments—ensured its rapid territorial expansion as it followed human migrations, and infestations can now be found on every continent in the world except Antarctica.
Likely arriving in North America alongside Spanish colonizers in the 17th and 18th centuries, Arundo now bedevils waterways in at least 25 states, vigorously spreading through a form of asexual reproduction that results in vast thickets of genetic clones. In the areas it overtakes, Arundo often outcompetes nearly every native species, forming robust monocultures that destroy habitat, consume huge amounts of water, and pose increased risk of fires and floods. In California, where the plant was first rigorously studied in the 1990s, one scientist labeled it the “greatest threat” to that state’s riverside ecosystems. And in Texas, along the Rio Grande, the plant now covers tens of thousands of acres.
In embarking on his multi-year battle with Arundo, Tongate joined a long line of scientists, land managers, environmentalists, government officials, nonprofit workers, and others who have gone up against Arundo—and mostly lost. At first, the failures had to do with the plant’s remarkable tenacity and a poor understanding of how to kill it; efforts to mow, uproot, or burn it, for example, rarely worked. After scientists eventually developed an effective technique for eliminating Arundo in the early 1990s, however, attempts to control it continued to fail, not because of the plant’s vigor or biological cunning, but rather because of humankind’s myriad foibles.
Tangles of bureaucracy, ineffective coordination, underfunding, divisive science, two separate corruption scandals, and at least one ambush by semi-automatic gunfire have stymied attempts to address North America’s Arundo infestations, leading to a sort of forever war. Borders—between landholdings, counties, states, and nations—often prove catastrophic for Arundo removal efforts, as jurisdictional squabbling, territorialism, and bureaucratic inertia foreclose on the possibility of keeping apace with a plant that pays no mind to lines on a map. A large-scale biological control program in Texas, which released similarly heedless predatory insects to attack the plant, may have surmounted some of those issues, but it has generated its own problems, as doubts have emerged over its efficacy and the quality of its science.
Despite the difficulties, Tongate maintains faith that those fighting against Arundo’s spread will emerge victorious—someday. “I might be dead,” he said, adding: “On a long enough timeline, what is it? Give me a long enough lever and I can move the world.”
In the here and now, however, Tongate is humbled by the forces arrayed against him: “Federal agencies. State agencies. Multiple different federal and state agencies, all fighting with each other. And our own internal corruption issue,” he said. “The crooked timber of humanity.”
For a long time, Arundo’s obdurate spread was thought to have begun in the Mediterranean Basin. Carl Linnaeus, known as the father of modern taxonomy, first described the plant from samples collected in Spain and France, naming it in his landmark “Species Plantarum” in 1753. Modern genetics, however, has traced Arundo’s provenance to the Indus Valley, which stretches across modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and to the southern edge of the Caspian Sea, in Iran. One group of scientists wrote that the species “may represent one of the oldest and most persistent biological invasions.” Sometime in antiquity, then, Arundo invaded the Mediterranean region, just as it later would the Americas.
The plant’s success can partially be explained by its biology. A remarkably high capacity for photosynthesis allows Arundo to grow up to four inches a day and reach heights of more than 25 feet in a single year. Its height blocks sunlight from reaching other plants, and it reproduces through thick mats of underground stems, called rhizomes, that crowd out other species in the soil. The rhizomes, which look like webs of interconnected ginger, can sprout new shoots at each junction in the web, or node, leading to stands of Arundo so dense that visibility within them is reduced to mere feet. Moreover, if the rhizomes break apart, many of the separate pieces have the ability to form a new colony.
Arundo withstands droughts, relishes floods, and flourishes without regard to soil type or groundwater salinity. Its underground rhizomic labyrinth easily survives both frost and fire, and it is often the first plant to resprout following a blaze. Since its aboveground biomass fuels “firestorms,” according to one scientist, this creates a feedback loop, further entrenching the plant’s dominance. “We’ve done a bunch of competition studies, where we manipulate light, water, nutrients, and it’s always the winner,” said Tom Dudley, a University of California, Santa Barbara ecologist who has studied Arundo for more than 30 years. “No matter what the mechanism of competition is, Arundo, it just outcompetes basically anything else.”
Beyond its own impressive suite of abilities, however, Arundo long ago found an accomplice in its global spread—human beings. Throughout history, people have used the reed to make weapons and fishing poles, furniture and toys, primitive pipe organs and flutes, baskets and mats. It has been employed as material for roofing, fencing, insulation, and adobe construction. Various medicinal traditions have claimed its efficacy as an anti-inflammatory, a diuretic, a blood-clotting agent, and a treatment for herpes. As far back as 5,000 years, the Marsh Arabs of ancient Mesopotamia built elaborate ceremonial buildings, called mudhif, from Arundo. Egyptian mummies have been found wrapped in Arundo leaves, while more recently, psychonauts have investigated Arundo as a source of the powerful psychoactive molecule dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. (The plant contains a small amount, but not at concentrations high enough to make it a worthwhile source.) And the natural reeds in instruments like saxophones and bassoons, as well as in clarinets like the one Dudley has played since childhood, are made exclusively from Arundo. Where humans have gone, so too has Arundo, ingratiating itself with its protean utility.
The plant likely arrived in the Americas alongside Spanish colonizers, and by the early 1800s it was being cultivated intentionally around Los Angeles for use as a building material and to stabilize ditches. From there, it quickly spread. By 1852, it had been observed in Texas watersheds, and by 1890, according to the US Geological Survey, it had reached as far east as New Jersey. The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Soil Conservation Service, a precursor to the modern-day Natural Resources Conservation Service, likely planted Arundo as an erosion control measure, oblivious to the damage it would cause. Valerie Vartanian, a former project manager with The Nature Conservancy in California who managed efforts to eradicate Arundo in the 1990s, said that their blunder allowed the plant to spread rapidly. “It had the opportunity then to really just take over,” said Vartanian. “And that’s what it seemed to do.”
By the late 20th century, it had proliferated dramatically, choking waterways from the East Coast to the West Coast. Rivers in Southern California like the Santa Clara, the Santa Ana, the Santa Margarita, the Salinas, and many others fell victim to particularly egregious infestations. Scientists in that state began to take notice, observing the plant’s excessive water use, the increased fire risk it posed, and the havoc it wreaked on habitat used by endangered species like the least Bell’s vireo and the Arroyo Toad. “There’s something for everyone to hate about Arundo donax,” wrote one ecologist.
In an effort to unite the burgeoning research, a scientist with The Nature Conservancy named Gary Bell co-founded an initiative dubbed “Team Arundo” in the early 1990s. Team Arundo began connecting scientists and stakeholders, and organizing conferences to discuss the threat of Arundo invasion. With increased scrutiny, the severity of the problem began to crystallize. “By far the greatest threat to the dwindling riparian resources of coastal Southern California,” Bell wrote in a 1997 paper, “is the alien grass species known as Arundo donax.”
But a problem soon emerged: Nobody knew how to kill it.
In California in January of 1993, following days of intense rainfall, an engorged Santa Margarita River breached a levee on the sprawling Camp Pendleton Marine base, sending a wall of water crashing through the airfield. The flood nearly killed a marine, who had to be rescued, unconscious, by his comrades, and damaged some 70 aircraft and other pieces of equipment. General Walter E. Boomer, touring the base in the wake of the deluge, told a reporter that “we probably have more damage here as a result of the flood than we did during Desert Storm.” Bridges, roads, and a historic chapel were wiped out by the torrent, and damages were estimated to top $100 million.
According to Jason Giessow, an environmental consultant who worked extensively on the base in the aftermath of the flood, the models used to design the levee contained a crucial omission: They did not account for the presence of Arundo donax. “It’s not acting like vegetation, where water’s passing through it,” said Giessow. “It’s acting like it’s poured concrete, so you have to raise the bed form like 6 feet, 9 feet.”
The devastation was not contained to the military base. Bridges and roads in other watersheds were damaged too, often by massive clumps of Arundo becoming ensnared in bridge piers, causing water to back up and eventually overcome the structures. For those who had been paying attention to Arundo—and to many who hadn’t—the 1993 flooding was a wake-up call. The Department of Defense, which was responsible for Camp Pendleton, committed significant resources to Arundo removal on the Santa Margarita, as did other agencies and organizations.
By the time Valerie Vartanian inherited the reins of Team Arundo, just before the flood, a sort of panicked mythology had taken hold around the plant. It couldn’t be mowed; it couldn’t be pulled up; areas cleared of Arundo were immediately re-infested. It was even rumored that the plant could be run through a chipper and each chip could resprout. Collaborating with other scientists, including Tom Dudley, who had co-founded a northern chapter of the initiative called Team Arundo del Norte, Vartanian set about investigating these rumors. Soon, a more evidence-based understanding of the plant emerged.
Each chip could not sprout, the scientists found. Only the underground rhizome junctions, or nodes, could sprout year round, while aboveground leaf nodes could also sprout, but only in the springtime when they often develop a rooting hormone. The plant could be treated with herbicides like glyphosate, especially during the fall when it would enter a period of dormancy. Although mowing didn’t work on its own, the researchers found that the chemical could greatly facilitate access to the innermost portions of dense stands, and freshly cut Arundo was especially vulnerable to herbicide if applied within a two-minute window. What emerged from these experiments was a different picture of the plant—one that showed that, at least with strict protocol, Arundo was not invincible. “We dispelled a lot of myths,” said Vartanian.
Biologically speaking, in fact, the problem wasn’t particularly complicated. To eradicate Arundo, teams simply had to start at the very top of the watershed and work their way down systematically. By doing this, they removed the possibility of re-infestation by vegetative fragments floating down from upriver. The Arundo had to be cut back enough to allow adequate coverage with the herbicide, and it usually required several treatments. Treatments worked better in the fall, and treating after flood and fire events greatly improved efficiency and reduced cost. Using this method, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Arundo was mostly cleared in the Santa Margarita watershed, which includes Camp Pendleton, and in several other small to medium-sized watersheds in southern California.
In other watersheds, however, a troubling reality emerged. While Arundo treatment was simple enough in theory, in practice it proved dizzyingly complex. A thicket of bureaucratic and legal hurdles, often as dense and impenetrable as the plant itself, confounded Vartanian’s efforts. In the Santa Ana watershed, for example, there were dozens of legal entities that had to unite behind the effort: landowners, regulatory agencies, water districts, land managers, businesses, non-governmental organizations, resource conservation districts, public works agencies. There were federal, state, county, municipal, and individual interests, each with their own mission and funding picture. A successful eradication program would need near-universal buy-in—any holdouts would threaten the success of everything downstream. “It was so complicated,” Vartanian said. “There were so many entities.”
At first, regulatory agencies like the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers felt that removal of Arundo would trigger costly mitigation requirements such as habitat restoration, a perspective Vartanian fought hard to shift, arguing that Arundo removal was, in fact, itself a form of habitat restoration. She succeeded in bringing those agencies around to her viewpoint, but the permitting process for individual landowners remained daunting. Some landowners even felt they were being asked to act against their own interests. In removing Arundo, for example, they could be inviting the return of endangered species, which in turn would impose stricter regulations on their land use through the Endangered Species Act.
Other hurdles involved siloed interests: the mosquito control district that liked Arundo because it used up so much water it kept the mosquito population in check; the musical instrument reed industry that wanted to cultivate the plant; the Fish and Wildlife Service concerns over treating Arundo in the fall because the work might interfere with the breeding habits of the spadefoot toad. Alone, each of these hurdles could be overcome, but together they amounted to a herculean feat of bureaucratic juggling. The work had to be carefully coordinated and executed—mapping the infestations, securing funds, obtaining landowner permission, advancing through the permitting process, conducting the work—and if any element faltered it would threaten the entire endeavor.
Vartanian and her partners responded to these challenges by developing creative solutions. Beyond the regulatory agencies coming to accept Arundo removal as a form of environmental mitigation, programs were also established to incentivize landowners: an Arundo exchange initiative, where landowners could swap their Arundo for free willows; or a mitigation bank, where development projects could simply pay for mitigation work that had taken place elsewhere in lieu of having to do it themselves. Still, poor watershed-wide coordination and incessant funding woes stymied the work.
To help overcome this, Vartanian considered the possibility of establishing a watershed-wide endowment that Arundo removal projects could draw upon to sustain their work. This too, however, proved complicated. Such an endowment would require donors, a board, a financial adviser, and an administrative body—it too would require money and coordination. The idea never moved forward.
Vartanian left her position at The Nature Conservancy in 1998, moving out of California for 11 years. When she returned to the state in 2009, she was dismayed by the lack of progress. In 2011, Giessow co-authored a report that surveyed 23 watersheds with Arundo infestations. Of those 23, only two had achieved an initial reduction of 90 percent or above. Six watersheds had achieved initial reductions of between 30 and 70 percent. The rest had not managed to reduce their infestations more than 30 percent, and several, including the Santa Clara River, had not been able to reduce Arundo at all. “We just don’t learn,” said Vartanian, adding: “It’s just hard for us to work together these days. And it’s getting harder.”
Ensconced in a protective legal and bureaucratic web, Arundo donax proved a far more formidable foe than its biology would have suggested. Discouragingly, too, the infestations that led to such consternation and disillusionment in California were, relatively speaking, quite small—most contained fewer than 1,000 acres of infestation. Arundo donax in the Rio Grande Basin, by comparison, covered tens of thousands of acres. And there, the watershed flowed through not just counties but entire states, and formed an international border with Mexico. The scale of the problem was staggering.
For some scientists, biological control—the use of natural enemies such as predators, parasites, and pathogens to reduce the population of an unwanted species—seemed to offer a solution. These agents paid no mind to borders, jurisdictions, or land ownership. Perhaps, some thought, they could simply fly above the crooked timber of humanity.
The history of using one species to control another dates back at least 4,000 years, with some major success stories as well as some catastrophic failures. (The cane toad, released in Australia to control a beetle pest, continues to wreak havoc on that country’s ecosystem.) Today, though, most countries, including the US, require rigorous processes to ensure the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated. For a control agent to be deemed suitable, it must be shown to be host-specific—capable of surviving on only the target species.
“Host specificity testing has become really, really important,” said Mark Hoddle, a biological control specialist who directs University of California, Riverside’s Center for Invasive Species Research. “You want a natural enemy that’s going to be really focused on the target.” So when USDA scientists moved forward with a biological control program for Arundo donax in the early 2000s, the first step was to try to identify such a host-specific natural enemy.
The search was far ranging, taking teams of scientists to Spain, Cyprus, Greece, India, and Nepal in search of suitable insects or pathogens. Eventually, consensus began to build around two species in particular: Tetramesa romana, a type of non-stinging wasp native to the Mediterranean region, and Rhizaspidiotus donacis, a scale insect. The wasp damages Arundo by laying eggs inside its stems, which causes the plant to develop abnormal growths, or galls, that can stunt and perhaps kill the shoots; the scale, meanwhile, feeds on the vascular tissue at the base of the shoots and the underground rhizomes, causing damage and weakening the plant over time.
In evaluating these organisms, the USDA team was concerned with two central questions. First, were they host specific (meaning, they would not affect other plants)? In both cases, it was clear that they were. Second, would they do enough damage to Arundo to be effective biological control agents? Here, the answers were less clear. “What is that impact going to be under, you know, released conditions?” said Tim Widmer, a scientist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service who was involved in the early biological control effort. “Sometimes it’s hard to judge, but we were pretty confident.”
Around that time, in 2005, a USDA-ARS entomologist and biological control researcher named John Goolsby returned to his native Texas after a six-year overseas assignment in Australia. He had heard about the Arundo program through colleagues, and felt that the Rio Grande Valley would be an ideal location to implement the research. His superiors agreed, and Goolsby began to lead the Texas initiative.
The program that Goolsby inherited, however, was still small, hobbled by inadequate funding and insufficient personnel. The researchers before him had made headway in identifying suitable agents, but deploying those agents over such a large area would be a technically challenging and costly endeavor. Local stakeholders—mostly agricultural interests concerned about Arundo’s water usage—supported the program but could contribute little to it. Fortunately for Goolsby, however, another interested party, one with deep pockets, had also taken an interest in the work. “As I started to work on this project,” said Goolsby, “about a year later, you know, the national security angle popped up.”
By the mid-2000s, increasing border militarization policies and the strategy of “prevention through deterrence,” which sought to funnel migrants away from urban crossing points and into more remote and dangerous areas, using the desert’s lethality as a deterrent, had largely succeeded in their aims. Border Patrol personnel now pursued migrants along vast lengths of the Rio Grande, where the agents were frequently hampered by impervious tangles of Arundo. In a 2007 statement, the Department of Homeland Security, of which Border Patrol is a component, said that Arundo was “overrunning border access roads, reducing visibility, and hiding illegal activities.” Eager for a solution, DHS decided to pour roughly a million dollars a year, according to Goolsby, into the biological control program. That was, he said, “the tipping point.”
Within the biological control community, the ethics of such a funding source remains a point of debate. Goolsby, for his part, was proud of the collaboration with DHS, and said that “any kind of initial controversy just sort of melted away.” Others like Hoddle, the UC Riverside biological control expert, viewed the funding as a shrewd way to accomplish noble goals, a sort of trojan horse for the benefit of the ecosystem. Scientists like Dudley, however, were critical of DHS’s motives. “I honestly do think it’s patently racist,” he said, adding: “DHS doesn’t like brown people. Sorry to put it that bluntly.” Despite the differing viewpoints on DHS’s intentions, however, the agency’s involvement was seen by some in the field as perhaps a case where the interests of Border Patrol and those of ecologists happened to overlap.
The program accelerated rapidly. A 2009 analysis by Goolsby and other researchers predicted that biological control would produce a 67 percent reduction in Arundo within two years, which, because of the plant’s excessive water consumption, would lead to a return of $4.4 in savings for crop irrigation water for every $1 of public investment. In Washington, DC, the effort found a champion in Congressman Henry Cuellar from Texas’s 28th district, who raised awareness of the issue and spearheaded fundraising. Goolsby, for his part, began taking measurements of Arundo biomass every 50 miles or so along 558 miles of the Rio Grande, from Del Rio to Brownsville, to establish a baseline. In a lab at the Moore Air Base, a deactivated Air Force facility in Edinburg, Texas, the scientists began mass rearing the wasps and scale insects, which had been imported from Europe.
Despite the forward momentum, however, an unexpected discovery occurred in 2008. Before they had a chance to release the insects, while surveying Arundo near Laredo and Eagle Pass, Goolsby found that a population of the wasp, Tetramesa romana, was already present. Other surveys revealed populations in multiple locations around Texas, from Austin to San Antonio, to several points along the Rio Grande. A few years earlier, Adam Lambert, then a postdoc in Tom Dudley’s lab in California, had made a similar discovery in Arundo stands there. It was unknown where the wasps came from or how long they had been in North America. It was also poorly understood why they didn’t seem to be damaging the plant—perhaps they were a different genetic strain, or had not achieved sufficient numbers. But in neither California nor Texas did the insects seem to be having an impact on the plant’s abundance.
Nevertheless, the biological control program forged ahead. Between 2009 and 2012, some 1.2 million wasps and 600,000 scale insects were unleashed upon the Rio Grande’s Arundo infestation. To achieve sufficient dispersal, the wasps were placed under cold storage, put by the dozens into hundreds of paper boxes, and dropped from the hatch of a low-flying Cessna 206. As they fell, the wasps would thaw, exit the boxes, and enter the Arundo thickets. The planes flew three days a week, year round, for nearly four years. The scale insects, which could not be dropped from planes, were released at various points by ground teams. “It really welled up inside of you to realize you were having an impact,” said Goolsby.
That impact seemed to be noteworthy, at least according to Goolsby’s team.
In November of 2014, evaluating the same sites that had been measured for a baseline, the team found an average of 22 percent reduction of above ground Arundo biomass. The results were published in a 2015 paper that concluded that “the Arundo wasp is having a significant impact as a biological control agent.” A subsequent paper, co-authored by Goolsby and others, including another USDA-ARS scientist named Patrick Moran, looked at five of the original 10 sample areas and found an additional 32 percent reduction, for a total of 54 percent at those sites. When other locations were taken into account, the team arrived at a slightly different number, an estimated 45 percent reduction of overall biomass by the spring of 2016. A third paper found an additional 55 percent reduction in areas where the scale insect had been established versus sites where only the wasp had been released.
Based on those results, Goolsby deemed the program a success. In a 2022 publication, he and Moran, once again asserting a 54 percent reduction, estimated that the biological control program was saving up to $10.8 million per year in conserved water. Furthermore, the scientists noted, the program had increased visibility and improved access for law enforcement. In an interview last year, Goolsby said that the effort had also broken new ground scientifically. “A lot of people were skeptical that a plant this aggressive and fast growing, and also a grass, you know, could be a suitable target for bio-control,” he said. “But I think we proved that it could be.”
But not everyone was convinced. In 2018, another scientist with the USDA named Allan Showler co-published a paper that disputed the biological control program. Bluntly titled “The arundo wasp, Tetramesa romana, does not control giant river reed, Arundo donax, in Texas, USA,” the paper showed that after five years of study, Arundo stands in Kerr County, Texas, did not seem to be impacted significantly by infestation with the wasp. The plant was still able to propagate, even from offshoots that had been damaged by the wasp, and the established shoots of Arundo were not killed by the wasp. “T. romana is a parasite that is well-adapted to A. donax by not killing stalks, reducing stand density, and hindering propagation,” wrote Showler’s team. “Hence, the exotic wasp is ineffective as a biological control agent against A. donax.”
The paper went on to directly address what it viewed as flaws in Goolsby’s methodology. First, changing hydrological conditions in the region could produce fluctuations in biomass, Showler noted, and hydrological data was not provided in the published results. Goolsby had briefly preempted this concern in the 2015 paper, stating that “hydrological conditions on the Rio Grande are fairly stable for giant reed,” but he did not provide evidence for this claim. In a recent email, Showler, who retired from USDA-ARS in November of last year, wrote that the Arundo biomass reductions Goolsby’s team observed “may have been more due to water availability than to the wasp.” Additionally, Showler questioned Goolsby’s method of evaluating biomass, and noted that the high variation in Goolsby’s results from site to site meant that the purported decline was “not substantiated statistically.”
Despite repeated requests, Goolsby declined to respond to these or any other criticisms of the biological control program.
Skepticism of the program, however, is not limited to Showler. Bernd Blossey, a widely cited biological control expert at Cornell University, said in an interview in September that it was impossible to determine whether the wasp caused a decline in Arundo biomass. “We have no idea whether that was a result of Tetramesa or some other associated factor,” he said, later adding: “There’s no evidence that suggests that this is a giant success.” Adam Lambert, Dudley’s former postdoc who had discovered and studied populations of the wasp in California, said he also had doubts: “I think a lot of us sort of found it a little bit questionable having such huge reductions when we’re not seeing that in California.” Lambert pointed to the lack of ongoing monitoring — essential to evaluate the long-term success of biological control — as a major flaw in the program. Dudley, for his part, was even harsher in his criticism. “In my mind,” he said, “it was a total waste of money.”
Today along the Rio Grande, although there is no ongoing monitoring of the impact of the insects, USDA and Border Patrol are still committed to the biological control program. In Fiscal Year 2025, the federal government spent at least $4 million to treat Arundo, including funding work to “top” the cane—mow it at about one meter of height using enormous sawblades mounted on tractors. In addition to providing greater visibility for Border Patrol, the topping is intended to cause the Arundo to produce more sideshoots, which the wasps prefer. But according to Cy Tongate, the project coordinator with the Rio Grande Vegetative Management Program, even the Border Patrol agents ostensibly working to support the biological control program have lost faith in its efficacy. “Our human eyes can’t tell the difference,” he said.
“The insects, I think, had a lot of cooperation from Border Patrol, a lot of support from Border Patrol and DPS at first,” Tongate said. “And just the lack of immediate results that could, you know, were obviously different to the human eye, kind of led to them losing some of that support.”
The loss of faith, however, has not been accompanied by a shift in approach. “My guess would be it’s a typical, classic bureaucratic case where something gets started and it’s very hard to stop it, right?” said Tongate. “You know, it becomes something that is somebody’s job.”
He put it another way: “Nothing’s so permanent as a temporary government program.”
Over the course of the 2010s, despite the differing viewpoints on the Texas program, Patrick Moran, Goolsby’s main collaborator, attempted to initiate a similar program in California. He transferred to a unit specializing in biological control at a USDA facility in Albany, in the Bay Area, and began collecting and shipping thousands of wasps from established sites in Texas to his new lab. In early 2017, he hired a postdoc named Ellyn Bitume to collaborate on the project, and they began searching for locations to release the wasps.
The effort in California proceeded on a much smaller scale than the Texas program. DHS, whose funding had allowed the Texas scientists to scale up their operation rapidly, had no involvement in California—Arundo didn’t pose problems for Border Patrol in that state—leaving Moran’s team reliant on a much smaller allocation from USDA. Bitume, who was tasked with finding suitable release sites, encountered many of the same problems that had bedeviled Arundo control teams for decades—the labyrinthine patchwork of landownership, for example, and the sundry attitudes of the landowners. As she put it: “You can imagine a female alone, showing up to an almond farm in Fresno in a government truck, asking this old guy if I can release wasps next to his almond farm. Wasn’t always a very pleasant conversation, but I did eventually succeed.”
The team secured nine sites across central and Northern California. Establishing the wasps, however, proved difficult. Northern California’s climate was much dryer than Texas, and even that of Southern California where the wasps were also established, and Bitume suspected that the new climate caused the insects to struggle. At one point, she resorted to misting the stands of Arundo with a spray bottle in an attempt to replicate the more humid conditions of Texas. The team did eventually manage to establish populations at the majority of the sites, but the insects never thrived as they had in Texas, and their population density remained disappointingly low. Nevertheless, the scientists were keen to evaluate the effects of the wasps on the Arundo. “We were at the threshold to look at impact,” Moran said.
But it was never meant to be. In January of 2025, the Trump administration took power, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative started a cascade of funding cuts, layoffs, and agency restructuring. “We, as federal scientists, were under attack,” said Bitume in an interview last August. “That’s really what it felt like, every day. It was psychological warfare.”
In the name of downsizing for the sake of efficiency, federal scientists were offered early resignation programs, and many, including Bitume and Moran, took them. “All of our long-term entomologists who have all the expertise and wisdom, and all of our younger scientists who had motivation and ambition, they’re all gone,” Bitume said, adding: “It’s been devastating.” Moran, who believes the jury is still out on whether biological control on its own can be effective in California, said that the research, at least for now, appears to have shifted to the academic realm.
Within academia, however, support for biological control of Arundo—at least with the wasp and scale insect—has waned. Dudley, initially an enthusiastic supporter of the approach, has changed his stance. “I kind of evolved quite a while ago to thinking that insects weren’t going to do it,” he said. Similarly, his former postdoc, Adam Lambert, has also become skeptical, at least of the insects tried thus far. They both, along with other scientists, have expressed interest in exploring other biological control agents—not only other insects, but perhaps even fungal or bacterial pathogens—but that research has not progressed meaningfully. “We’re hoping that we find that silver bullet in an insect,” said Lambert. “But in the meantime, we still are deferring to the sort of traditional, high intensity methods of removing Arundo in the river.”
But those methods—the mechanical and chemical approach developed by Vartanian and others more than 30 years ago—remain mired in the same dysfunction they always have. On the Santa Clara River, where Dudley and Lambert focus much of their research, no organization, agency, or individual has emerged to direct a coordinated Arundo removal campaign. Although some work has taken place, Arundo control in that watershed has mostly been small-scale, scattershot, and ultimately ineffective, hindered in no small part by the river flowing through two counties and countless private landholdings. “Too many cooks in the kitchen,” said Jason Giessow, the Arundo removal consultant. “It’s sad, I mean really, ultimately, the river and the habitat are paying the price.”
A few miles to the north of the Santa Clara River, however, a different watershed seems to be offering a glimmer of hope. The Ventura River, much smaller and far less complex, has managed to make progress on a whole-watershed, top-down Arundo removal strategy. Led by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy and bolstered by a multimillion-dollar grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the Ventura River is on the cusp of securing permits that would allow work year-round in the entire watershed—as opposed to individual parts of it. The approach, part of California’s “cutting the green tape” initiative, is a “first of its kind,” according to Tom Maloney, the OVLC’s executive director.
Early one morning in September, a group of young scientists working on the project descended into the Ventura riverbottom. In one section of the channel where Arundo removal had taken place previously, the team set to work counting and classifying native species that had returned to the area. “There’s so much life in this section, you can just feel it,” said Martin Schenker, OVLC’s restoration field manager. Farther down the riverbed, in an area that had not been treated, a solid wall of Arundo reached from one bank to the other. “You go in there and it’s just stagnant,” said Schenker.
The team hopes that the cleared area is a vision of the future. With the permitting process nearing completion, Arundo removal has already begun, with 36 acres cleared so far. And though he is eager to see it gone, Schenker concedes a certain grudging esteem for the plant. “As much as I hate Arundo, it always impresses me,” he said. “Its vigor and its willingness to live, you got to give it the respect it deserves. You know, it’s not it’s fault it’s here. So admire it where it is. And then remove it.”
In Texas, when Cy Tongate joined what was then called the Rio Grande Carrizo Cane Eradication Program in 2019, the effort was already struggling. The program had been created in 2015 to “help meet the Governor’s border security priorities,” according to its website, but it was left mostly unfunded until 2017, when it began receiving $1.5 million per year. Administration of the program fell to the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board, which in turn delegated most of the field work to the Pecan Bayou Soil and Water Conservation District, located hundreds of miles away from the Rio Grande itself—“nobody else wanted to do it,” said Tongate. Fresh out of college, Tongate was excited for the challenge, viewing it as “an opportunity for us to kind of take some big swings.”
The bureaucratic headaches began at once. The Department of Public Safety had urged the program to focus on certain “priority areas,” but the majority of those sites were located on land owned by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. When Tongate and his supervisor met with USFWS officials, it was a disaster. The officials said that for any work to take place on their land, the program would have to conduct an environmental impact assessment. The cost was estimated to be between $5 million and $10 million, many times the annual budget of the entire program. The officials also expressed concerns about the program’s herbicide, Imazapyr, though it turned out, according to Tongate, they themselves also used the chemical. “It was pretty clear it was more of a turf fight than actual concern,” Tongate said.
At Amistad National Recreation Area, near Del Rio, officials expressed interest in allowing the program to work on their land, but by the time a formal proposal was put together by officials at Amistad, Tongate’s program had run out of funding for the year. When the new fiscal year began, the proposal had expired and the official who had spearheaded it had retired. The effort collapsed.
In Big Bend National Park, Tongate and his colleagues managed to establish a memorandum of understanding with park officials, an encouraging first step toward treating Arundo there. But when Tongate sent the document to superiors at his own agency, they refused to sign, unsure whether state agencies could enter into MOUs with federal agencies. The MOU was kicked to the attorney general for input, kicked back to Tongate’s team for revisions, re-submitted to the National Park Service to approve the revisions, and finally, after many months, signed. But that was just a memorandum of understanding—any formal plans to do work would have to undergo their own byzantine approval processes. “A lot of Texans would be offended to think that their bureaucracy is as slow and incompetent as California’s,” Tongate said. “But it is.”
When the work did manage to proceed, it encountered difficulties. Spraying herbicide from helicopters, which until 2022 was the program’s favored approach, did not seem to achieve the desired results. An assessment conducted by the US Geological Survey in collaboration with the carrizo cane program in 2020 and 2021 found that the aerial spraying only reduced the plant’s coverage by 14 percent, far from the 85 percent reduction stipulated in the program’s request for proposals—the job description that contractors bid on. To make matters worse, the work could also be dangerous.
Once, while one of Tongate’s contractors was surveying Fronton Island, a large landmass in the Rio Grande used by cartels, border officials came upon an unexploded hand grenade in an abandoned backpack. Another time, a contractor applying herbicide from his boat came under fire, an unseen gunman spraying dozens of rounds into the side of his aluminum boat. “The contractor after the incident told us that he wasn’t going to come back until he had built an armored boat,” said Tongate. “He never did come back.”
Following the failure of the helicopter spraying, the program shifted its focus to drones. The drones, Tongate said, could get lower, penetrating the Arundo canopy and achieving better coverage with the herbicide. Although a formal assessment hasn’t been conducted, Tongate said that the drone method appears to be achieving a much higher rate of reduction, knocking back the thick monocultural stands like the ones near Shelby Park. But early on, the drone work encountered a problem of its own.
According to an interim report issued by the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board in February of 2024, Barry Mahler, one of the board’s members, may have participated in votes that benefited a company where his son, Matt Mahler, was either an employee or a subcontractor. The conflict was not disclosed in board meeting minutes, as required by Texas law. Barry Mahler did not respond to requests for comment. When the younger Mahler was eventually fired from that company, he allegedly launched a harassment campaign against the carrizo cane program, calling in spurious complaints about the use of “unpermitted” chemicals to state officials. The debacle delayed the drone spraying program for months, and it remains unresolved—Tongate believes a DPS investigation is ongoing. Meanwhile, Tongate said that a proposed $29 million funding increase for the program was shelved in the wake of the turmoil.
As those events were unfolding, a second corruption scandal erupted that could have bearing on the future of Arundo control efforts. In May of 2024, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, who had been the chief advocate for Arundo removal in Washington D.C, was indicted along with his wife by a federal grand jury on bribery charges. The pair allegedly accepted some $600,000 from an Azerbaijani oil and gas company and a Mexican bank in return for agreeing to exert beneficial legislative influence. The congressman’s website claims that he had secured $5 million by 2022 for Arundo removal, and he was likely behind a $50 million provision for the treatment of Arundo and other invasive species that appeared in the House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (The provision was absent from the final version of the bill.) Cuellar was pardoned by Trump in early December 2025, but quickly drew the president’s ire for a perceived “lack of loyalty” after refusing to switch parties, a move that would have bolstered the slim Republican majority in the House. Now, Cuellar is facing a tough reelection battle in November.
“Corruption, it’s like an invasive species,” said Tongate. “It spreads really fast, it’s hard to get rid of, and it forms a kind of a monoculture.”
Further complicating matters, the carrizo cane program, which changed its name in 2025 to the Rio Grande Vegetative Management Program (“eradication is a high bar,” said Tongate) often finds itself at odds with the other two actors involved in Arundo control along the Rio Grande: Border Patrol and USDA. Both of those agencies have funded work that has helped the biological control wasps flourish.
“If anything, I’d say our programs are competitive,” said Tongate. “Land that’s signed up for the carrizo wasps or the Arundo scale are not willing to participate in our stuff, because the idea is that if we kill the cane with our chemical, they don’t have anything to eat.”
But Tongate views mechanical control like mowing, dozing, or mulching as detrimental. “In most cases, it’s going to be counterproductive,” he said. “The cane, whenever you disturb it, it tends to activate the rhizomes and it’ll really take off. And also, you can get rhizomes on equipment and spread it to other places. It’s generally our experience that it’s not helpful.”
In an email to Undark, Michael Mascari, a public affairs officer with US Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, wrote that questions about Carrizo Cane eradication should be directed towards the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board, despite CBP’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year containing millions for carrizo cane removal. He did not respond to follow up questions. USDA-APHIS, the branch of the agency Goolsby said is now responsible for overseeing the biological control effort, did not respond to requests for comment.
For a brief time, the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence at Texas A&M University (one of several university collaborations that sought solutions to national security threats) tried to bring the programs together to better coordinate their approaches. But in the spring of 2025, the center, like California’s biological control program before it, fell under the chainsaw of Elon Musk’s DOGE. It lost funding, and the Arundo programs retreated to their siloes. “We’re all pulling on the same rope,” Tongate said. “Sometimes we’re not all pulling in exactly the same direction.”
Compounding these difficulties is one glaring, inescapable truth, the “elephant in the room,” as Tongate says. Standing on the bank of the Rio Grande on a bright October afternoon, Tongate cast his eyes to the far side of the river. There, just 50 feet away in Mexico, large tufts of Arundo donax sprouted from the water’s edge. The plant grows everywhere on the Mexican side, unmolested, uninterrupted, largely ignored, and spreading. (Officials at Mexico’s Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas did not respond to interview requests.) At any moment, a piece of rhizome from any upriver stand could free itself, float downriver, and lodge in an area recently cleared by Tongate’s drones. And then the whole battle would renew. “Everything’s going to just break off, re-establish down here,” Tongate said. “It’s just part of it.”
Understanding this grave threat to his progress, Tongate has spoken with Mexican officials about the possibility of spraying on their side of the river too. They’ve supported the idea, Tongate said, but have little funding to contribute. Therefore, the work in Mexico would have to be paid for with Texas’s general revenue funds, which may not be legal. Tongate’s request for clarity on the legal question rose up the bureaucratic ladder, ping-ponged around, and then vanished.
Still, facing considerable headwinds, Tongate remains steadfast. His program has managed to treat some 4,000 acres with the new, more successful, drone approach, and he expects work to soon begin in Big Bend National Park, a rare bureaucratic victory after so many months of wrangling. The relative success of the drone work has inspired legislators to increase the program’s budget to $3.5 million per year. Eventual success, Tongate said, will require “time, perseverance, and maybe a little bit more cleverness than we’ve shown thus far.”
Meanwhile, Arundo donax does not wait. While Tongate and others claw through the crooked timber, the plant spreads, sprouts, and colonizes, continuing its milennia-long march across the globe. In the face of such an unyielding adversary, Tongate remains sober in his appraisal: “You know, in some ways I’m very pessimistic,” he said. “But in some ways I’ve got the endless optimism of a bureaucrat.”
2026-03-22 06:45:44
The DHS shutdown battle heated up on Saturday as President Donald Trump threatened to send “brilliant and patriotic” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to the nation’s airports to do security and relieve TSA workers, who are starting to rebel after going without pay since February 14.
The shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security began on midnight that day, as Democrats refused to provide more funds until Republicans agree to various reforms related to deployment, training, and management of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. The intrusive and violent conduct of federal agents in Minneapolis—where they killed two US citizens and assaulted and detained many more—fueled widespread outrage and contributed to the recent ouster of former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem.
TSA officers require two to three weeks of academy training and months of on-the-job training. ICE agents would have none of that.
Democratic lawmakers also seek to curtail ICE’s rampant use of surveillance technology and ensure the rights of states and lawmakers to investigate alleged human rights abuses at the immigrant detention centers the administration has set up.
The funding impasse does not directly affect ICE, which the Republican-controlled Congress has bankrolled at unheard-of levels, but the shutdown has frozen other DHS activities, including the processing of paychecks for TSA staff, who are considered essential employees.
It is a felony offense for federal workers to go on strike, but after more than a month without pay, a fair number of TSA personnel have been missing days, calling in sick, and seeking jobs elsewhere. This has created nightmarish security lines at airports, putting pressure on both parties to make a deal. It’s been quite the a war of words.
Nobody wants long lines, in any case. Trump’s solution? Unleash the hounds! The same ones whose aggressive, legally dubious tactics and disrespect for the public helped to inspire this mess in the first place. Naturally, Trump couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to take a shot at his latest favorite targets: Somali immigrants and arch-nemesis Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)
It could indeed be “security like no one has ever seen.” Because if Trump is serious about sending ICE to perform TSA duties, it raises questions as to what, exactly, they would be doing—and their eligibility to perform those tasks. To become a Transportation Security Officer requires two to three weeks of immersive academy training, followed by months of on-the-job training.
ICE agents are poorly trained even for their own duties (ditto CBP), and that, together with government officials publicly signaling that agents are above the law, has been a recipe for disaster.
Of course, ICE agents wouldn’t have to complete TSA academy training if they were merely serving in the role of Security Support Assistants. These are the people who manage lines and do “bin control,” typically as they await the results of a background check so they can move on with their training—one Redditor called them “glorified bin pushers.”
But even then, the ICE personnel may not qualify. “TSOs and SSAs spend a lot of time interfacing with the public and providing customer service,” the TSA careers website notes.
One key qualification: “You’re a people person.”
2026-03-22 03:15:34
In a blow to the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against a free press, a federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of the New York Times in its December suit against the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets.
Senior US District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Clinton-appointee, ruled that a policy the Defense Department established in October, saying the Pentagon could revoke press credentials of any reporter who asked for information the department didn’t want to release was unconstitutional.
“A lot of things need to be held tightly and secure,” Friedman wrote. “But openness and transparency allows members of the public to know what their government is doing in times of peace and, more important, in times of war and upheaval.” The United States ongoing war against Iran, the judge said in his ruling, makes it “more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing.”
In the wake of the Pentagon’s restrictive decree, dozens of reporters—including seven Times journalists—turned in their access badges in protest instead of bowing to the new policy. Five major broadcast networks, too, announced that they weren’t going to comply with the Pentagon’s new rules, writing in a joint statement that the “policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections.” NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and CNN signed on, along with Fox News Media, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth used to work before heading up the world’s biggest military operation.
In the absence of these journalists, the Defense Department filled in the ranks with pro-Trump commentators and influencers. Friedman noted in his ruling that the policy rewarded those “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.” On Friday, he tossed out the policy for all journalists covering the Pentagon and ordered the DOD to restore the press passes of the seven Times journalists.
In a social media post, Sean Parnell, chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said it is “pursuing an immediate appeal.”
Friday’s ruling is a key win for press freedom in the administration’s ongoing legal battles against media organizations he views as unfriendly. Trump is currently embroiled in legal battles against the Wall Street Journal and News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch, the New York Times (in a different case), the British Broadcasting Company, the Des Moines Register and veteran pollster Ann Selzer, the Pulitzer Prize board, Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster, along with media giant Paramount, and CNN.
While some organizations—like Paramount Global and ABC News—have settled with the President, others, like the Times, have pushed back on Trump in court—and won.
On the whole, these legal attacks represent an unparalleled offensive on press freedom from a figure who has been raging against news organizations and individual journalists for decades. During his first term and beyond, on social media and face-to-face, he has attacked the media relentlessly as the “enemy of the people” and incited followers to harass reporters covering his rallies. He calls journalists treasonous and says they should be jailed.
According to a US Press Freedom Tracker database, from the moment Trump announced that candidacy in 2015 to early 2021, he posted negatively about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter. He often reserves his most biting personal insults for women—since Trump was re-elected he has called female reporters “stupid,” “nasty,” “ugly,” “piggy,” and “maggot.” He also criticized CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for not smiling—a misogynistic trope—as she was asking him a question about Jeffrey Epstein.
Following Judge Friedman’s ruling on Friday, a spokesman for the Times wrote that the decision “reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf.”
2026-03-22 02:36:35
Robert S. Mueller III died on Friday at the age of 81.
His family confirmed his passing, though did not provide a cause, according to reporting from the New York Times.
Immediately following the news, Trump wrote on his Truth Social page: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Mueller led the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 12 years and came head to head with President Donald Trump as special counsel tasked with looking into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—an inquiry that led to the president villainizing him
As the Times reported in its Saturday obituary of the former FBI chief, the Russia inquiry culminated in a now-infamous 448-page Mueller report. That document “concluded that Russia had systemically sought to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that the candidate and his campaign encouraged their clandestine assistance.”
Mueller concluded in his investigation: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Trump, who was harsh toward people who posted critically about the late Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, has shown no such restraint in his own posts involving people recently deceased, including the Hollywood director Rob Reiner, who was slain by his own son in December.
Outrage over Trump’s response to Mueller’s passing is spreading quickly around social media.
Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who invoked Trump’s ire by sitting on the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, posted on social media calling Trump “an abhorant [sic] piece of Human garbage.”
Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and Marine Corps combat veteran running for Senate, posted on X and Bluesky, calling the president’s post “disgusting.”
2026-03-21 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and Spotlight PA is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
“I don’t like to see anyone upset,” said Nick Farris of Provident Real Estate Advisors. He was sitting in the front of a crowd of roughly 150 inside Valley View High School’s auditorium in Archbald, a town of about 7,500, huddled between two mountain ranges in Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley. Farris was there to represent the developer for Project Scott, one of many data center campuses coming to town. “However,” he said. “I think that this is the best data center site in this area of the country, by far.”
The audience had been fairly quiet, bundled in thick coats against the late January cold. But as Farris spoke about data centers as a boon for communities, they began to laugh, drawing a rebuke from town officials.
“What about the children?” someone shouted from the crowd. The children were watching from the walls; long banners of Valley View Performing Arts students hanging around the auditorium like championship pennants. Project Scott and four other data facilities will sit just a few thousand feet from the middle and high schools.
“Isn’t there a missile plant next door?” Farris said, getting aggravated. He was referring to Lockheed Martin’s 350,000-square-foot Missiles and Fire Control facility directly next to the high school, parts of which are highly contaminated.
“That sucks too!” another attendee yelled back. This was nothing to worry about, Farris tried to convince the audience. This would bring in tax revenue, he said. It was just an office park, albeit one with roughly 450 diesel backup generators.
“It’s going to be away from everyone,” Farris kept repeating, to rising jeers. He was wearing a knit turtleneck with a large American flag emblazoned across the chest. “It’s not going to bother anyone.”
The specifications say something different: Five developers are planning to build six data center campuses in Archbald, which will cover a full 14 percent of the town, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. One campus alone, as The Scranton Times-Tribune reporter Frank Lefneskey pointed out, is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce.
Pennsylvania has become an epicenter of the data center boom in the United States, with over 50 campuses in development. Eleven of them are slated for Lackawanna County alone. Archbald, with six campuses composed of 51 massive buildings, has the most of any municipality in Pennsylvania.
Despite the public outcry, it has been surprisingly difficult to learn what Archbald’s elected officials think of the massive industry moving in. None of the town’s seven council members responded to my emails, so I stopped by the borough administration building in person a few weeks before Christmas, and was told to wait in the lobby while they held an informal closed meeting in council chambers. When the door opened, it was clear that anyone who actually had the power to make or break the data center plans had quietly filed out the back, leaving me with Archbald’s unelected borough manager, Dan Markey, who essentially runs the town, but cannot vote for or against development.
What did he think about artificial general intelligence, or AGI—the idea that eventually these efforts will produce something like a “computer god” capable of solving climate change, ending hunger, revealing the full breadth of science, and performing any number of other miracles? “I believe in one God, and it’s not a computer,” Markey told me evenly.
By now, hundreds of towns across the country have been caught up in the rush to build large language models that can parse unfathomable amounts of data to write copy, answer any query, develop new vaccines, and likely render a large number of jobs obsolete. That rush accelerated into an all-out arms race over the past year. What it means in practice is an enormous amount of data centers—enough to approximate a minor deity and enough, as OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever once speculated, to “cover the Earth.” Markey told me he had ChatGPT on his phone, but didn’t use it much.
“I don’t think anyone in their right mind wants to see the world covered in data centers,” Markey said. “[But], according to Pennsylvania law, we have to have a zone for everything. An adult bookstore, a strip club, a concrete and asphalt plant—anything that wants to come here. We have to have a zone for it. If it’s not zoned, it’s allowed to go anywhere.”
In most states, towns have the right to exclude businesses that they find disagreeable—a wealthy suburb, for example, would likely reject a landfill or gas plant—but in Pennsylvania, towns must allocate some patch of land to these “undesirable industries.” Some municipalities deal with this by forming what are called zoning collaboratives, which allow them to plan as a region for pollution. One town might get data centers, another gas plants, another a landfill. Markey approached the nearby boroughs of Blakely and Dickson City to discuss the possibility, but the data center development rush has outpaced him.
Whatever’s attracting data centers to the area, it’s forced Markey to answer for a rush of development, unprecedented since the town was settled in the 1840s in service of an industry that will bring vanishingly few jobs. Residents kept bringing up the threat of collapse—the network of empty mine shafts running underground, the town beneath the town, the structural instability that would accompany these massive buildings. The data centers would drive bears into town, they said, rattlesnakes into yards, and without trees to stabilize them, the mountains themselves would begin to crumble, sending landslides into the valley.
“I just try to listen, and I try to separate the valid concerns from the things that just sound like the sky is falling,” said Markey. “I was approached at a gas station a couple months ago and was told that I was going to kill everyone who lived in Archbald. I don’t think that’s valid. I don’t think that’s a reasonable argument to have with me.”
But the anger and suspicion directed towards town officials, incoming tech companies, and a powerful local businessman with reported mafia connections show no signs of abating. The AI rush is often spoken of in terms of grand harms or potential social goods that feel entirely divorced from the way it’s playing out on the ground—as an unmitigated mess, breeding confusion, paranoia, and fury.
Millions of years ago the Lackawanna Valley was an intertidal zone: swamp land bordering a shallow sea that stretched out to Central Pennsylvania. That sea was forced skyward as the African and North American continents collided, raising the mountains from the earth and crumpling and compressing the valley’s dying plant life in tight laminations, until it finally hardened into what’s considered the gold standard for coal—smokeless, slow-burning anthracite.
Anthracite is rare: Almost 90 percent of the world’s recoverable deposits lie buried in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and it represents only 1 percent of global coal stocks (the majority being the soft, sooty bituminous coal that you find in the western half of the state and across West Virginia), but it was the most in-demand fuel for household heating for over a century. Its discovery brought a rush of mining companies to the region, transforming the Lackawanna Valley from a mass of overgrown forest into a crucial coal production and transportation hub for New York and Philadelphia’s energy markets.
Coal patch towns—in which everything, the stores, the schools, the houses, were owned by coal companies—sprang up across the valley. Scranton became known as the “Electric City,” with the region’s bountiful fuel reserves powering some of the first street lamps and electric trolleys. The economic boom was short-lived though. Oil quickly outpaced coal, and a devastating flood in the 1960s effectively ended the industry, by which time the region was so thoroughly hollowed out that the Pennsylvania secretary of mining warned the city of Scranton “was sitting on toothpicks” and would be more cost-effective to abandon than reclaim.
The drive into Archbald is especially beautiful in fall—gently rolling hills covered in foliage, rivers winding lazily past clapboard houses—but winter brings a low, fixed gray sky and a perpetual blanket of snow. Without the forgiving cover of leaves, it’s easier for the old industrial history to lurch into view. The ground gives way occasionally, and huge, black mountains of mining waste called culm (pronounced “column”) dot the landscape.
At first, Archbald’s zoning code classified data centers as roughly on par with commercial office buildings.
By now, the culm piles are covered in vegetation and appear almost natural, but you can tell something is off if you look closely—their slope is too abrupt; their backs covered by spindly, young trees, slipping downhill. They’re enormous health hazards, sending fine particulate matter into the surrounding neighborhoods and leeching toxins into the groundwater, but they’ve become familiar enough, a woman named Tiffany told me, that people hike on them and kids play on them. We were at the end of her block, looking up at a massive culm pile. “I’ve never walked back there,” she said. “It’s kind of creepy.”
The land on the other side of the heap has been sold to Project Gravity, whose developers intend to build seven 138,000-square-foot buildings along Eynon-Jermyn Road. It will be bordered by two more data center campuses, known as Project Scott and Project North; across the road will be yet another campus called Project Boson. Further down Eynon-Jermyn Road is the Wildcat Ridge AI Center. Tiffany lives just over the town line in Jermyn, meaning she won’t benefit from the increased tax income, nor can she voice an opinion at the Archbald town meetings, even though the data centers are effectively in her backyard.
I’d met Tiffany a few months earlier in a nearby park, along with other members of a fast-growing group of locals fighting the new developments. I’d reached out to them through the Stop Archbald Data Centers Facebook group, which now has over 5,000 members, equal to nearly two-thirds the size of the town. Local opposition to data centers has swept the nation this year, with concerns over rising electricity costs, reliance on fossil fuels, excess water use and noise, pollution, and their placement in or near residential areas. These fights have forged unlikely political alliances and will potentially imperil incumbents come this year’s midterm elections. According to a Financial Times analysis, at least 370 measures to regulate the AI industry were introduced in state legislatures this past year, and roughly 80 percent of Republicans and Democrats believe the industry needs more regulation.
“We moved from a couple towns over and built a new house, thinking this was a good place to go,” said Archbald resident Ann Beynon, who grew up by a Superfund site in nearby Throop. She’d been looking to settle down somewhere in the area where her kids wouldn’t be at risk of lead poisoning. There was a landfill in Throop and a gas plant in Jessup. “And now this is happening” in Archbald, she said while gathered in the park.
Tiffany, Ann, and the others had brought maps to our meeting to demonstrate the scale of the problem. They were not, they explained, asking for the data centers to leave entirely—they just wanted them confined to industrial zones. They felt town council members were unprepared and ill-informed on this issue, ready to jump at the prospect of tax money without looking at the long term implications.
When the first data centers began to arrive in early 2025, Archbald’s zoning code classified them as roughly on par with commercial office buildings, allowing them to be built in some commercial zones. Residents fought back, demanding new zoning laws that would limit data centers to fully industrial areas away from the center of town, but the updated zoning ordinance passed last November wouldn’t go that far. Instead, they still allow facilities to be built next to residential neighborhoods—such as the Highlands, a condo complex occupied largely by retirees and a trailer park called Valley View Estates, whose owner has agreed to sell the land to a data center developer. Residents are set to be evicted next month, on April 15.
“These people have no resources,” said Beynon. “They can’t just get up and move—they’re really scared.”
Developers moved to purchase land before the ordinance went into effect, leaving Archbald with little recourse to stop them, said Brigitte Meyer, an attorney at PennFuture, a nonprofit environmental advocacy organization. Meyer has been sounding the alarm for a year now, warning municipalities across Pennsylvania that if they don’t get out in front of the data center boom, they could be overrun.
“The tragic irony is that it’s really hard to get the community activated at this on the front end, when things are more hypothetical,” she said. “People’s interest gets piqued when there’s a specific proposal. But by the time it gets to that point, the period has already passed where the municipality has the most power to actually affect how that’s going to go.”
When a trailer park closes, many people are forced to abandon their homes or sell for next to nothing.
Valley View Estates isn’t far from Tiffany’s house, just up Eynon-Jermyn Road. Residents received their eviction notice last July, shortly after Project Gravity was announced. The facilities would cover the surrounding woods; more buildings would replace the junkyard down the street. They were hemmed in, and the park owner wanted out. When reports of the eviction hit local news, “people were so horrible,” said Matthew Bucksbee, a Valley View resident. “One of the kids that commented, he’s like ‘Yeah, just get rid of that place, it’s infested with drugs.’”
Many residents, Bucksbee’s fiancée, Candace May, explained, are disabled or caretakers for disabled relatives; many don’t even have cars and subsist largely off the one Dollar General within walking distance. They’ve been told they cannot legally challenge the eviction notice until the land is actually sold, and they’ve received little to no information from the owner since—although they were warned, May said, that anyone withholding rent in the interim would be evicted immediately.
May’s mother, Sharon Williams, works as a home health aid for three disabled men, making $17.50 an hour. It’s enough for her to live on—she’s paid off her car, she can swing groceries, her internet, her phone, her healthcare costs, and the lot rent for her trailer, but it doesn’t leave her with much left over at the end of every month. She can’t afford a more expensive place, nor does she qualify for Section 8 housing, putting her in an impossible situation as the April eviction deadline looms.
Despite their name, mobile homes are not really mobile. Most will fall apart if you try to relocate them, and although residents generally own their trailers, they pay nominal rent to a park owner, who owns the land—in this case, a couple who run a beer store outside Philadelphia. As the cost of living skyrockets, it’s the only stable, affordable housing many are able to find. According to Princeton’s Eviction Lab, the average lot rent nationwide was only $470 a month in 2023; Williams pays just $390, but residents are uniquely vulnerable to displacement. When a trailer park closes, many people are forced to abandon their homes or sell them for next to nothing. If they don’t own their trailer outright, they can find themselves homeless and still paying off a mortgage.
The county’s public housing is roughly 98 percent occupied at the moment, according to a representative from the Lackawanna County Housing Authority. Placements are allocated by a point system, wherein victims of domestic violence, the homeless, and the disabled get first priority, but waitlists for one, two, and three bedrooms are currently closed. Waitlists for studios and four-bedroom apartments remain open, but it can take anywhere between one to five years to get into housing. For now at least, Valley View residents have few good options.
“Everybody’s worried about where they’re going to go,” said Bucksbee.
Tech companies are clearly coming to Archbald for the Susquehanna-Roseland powerline, a $1.4 billion high-voltage transmission line, which would give them access to bulk power. But locals also suspect that the area’s cheap land, lax zoning laws, and centralized capital also appealed to developers. This is old coal territory, and when the mines closed down, a lot of land wound up concentrated in just a few hands.
“Who runs everything with a lot of money? The name DeNaples is on a lot of these buildings,” one Archbald resident told me, after speaking out against the data centers at a utility hearing at the University of Scranton in December. “He’s got his tentacles all over the place.”
One local businessman told the Scranton Times-Tribune his interest in data centers was spurred by a Bitcoin mining hobby.
DeNaples is Louis DeNaples, an enormously powerful businessman infamous in the Lackawanna Valley, who has long been plagued by accusations of connections to organized crime—specifically to the late mob boss of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Russell Bufalino, who served as counsel to Jimmy Hoffa and may have had him killed, according to some popular accounts. Bufalino was thrust onto the national stage most recently by Martin Scorsese’s 2019 magnum opus, The Irishman, played by a quietly sinister Joe Pesci, but DeNaples himself has no such Hollywood notoriety. He remains a grim specter across the region though—some residents say they are scared of him and attribute a great deal of power to him. “If your little league team needs jerseys, [DeNaples] provides them,” another local explained. “If the local police department needs a new car, he donates.”
DeNaples was one of nine children and grew up poor, selling Christmas trees with his brother Dominick in a vacant lot and reselling junk cars for parts. He reportedly bought his first car for $18 and hauled it himself up the steep hill to his family’s house over the course of two days. Countless cars later, he opened the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, swallowing vast amounts of garbage from New York and Philadelphia, and making DeNaples a millionaire. Eventually, he expanded into real estate, then outwards and upwards from there.
In the late 70s, he pleaded no contest to a conspiracy charge of defrauding the federal government out of over half a million dollars for cleanup work after Hurricane Agnes, but was never convicted. One dissenting juror forced an acquittal, and a Bufalino family underboss was later sent to prison for witness tampering. The charge would come back to haunt him though. In 2006, DeNaples purchased nearby Mount Airy Casino, but was forced to hand control over to his daughter after it was revealed that he’d lied about his relationship to organized crime.
Decades later, he remains a major power broker in the area: one of the largest landowners, the proprietor of many businesses, and the chairman of First National Bank. His name is not just on buildings, but on billboards all across the metro area. DeNaples hasn’t sold any land directly to the data centers, but in 2023 he sold a 186-acre parcel to another local businessman, Jim Marzolino of Kriger Construction, who then sold it to Project Gravity for over $12 million, according to public records. The transaction has raised hackles locally, although there is no evidence DeNaples saw any benefit from the heavy markup of his former land. More recently, DeNaples’ nephew sold land to a proposed data center in nearby Olyphant.
But plenty of other local businessmen, without the alleged mob ties, are more directly involved in the data center boom—Marzolino, for example, or Anthony Domiano Jr., whose family runs a chain of local car dealerships, and who sold a large amount of land to Project South and Project North. Alpesh “Al” Patel, who runs the Al’s Quick Stop convenience store chain in the region, has partnered with Marzolino on development plans for Project Boson.
As for Marzalino, he told the Scranton Times-Tribune his interest in data centers was spurred by a Bitcoin mining hobby.
Neither DeNaples nor Marzolino responded to repeated requests for comment from Grist.
On a freezing night a couple weeks before Christmas, locals gathered at the University of Scranton for a public hearing on their electricity bills. PPL Electric Utilities had announced a rate hike for the fourth time in two years—this one raising consumer electricity prices by 7 percent.
“I make about triple the Pennsylvania minimum wage—and I still freeze in my house,” said Jordan Moran, a student in cybersecurity at Lackawanna College, who also works a full-time job. “My thermostat is at 60 degrees, and my PPL bill is still nearly 20 percent of my monthly income.”
PPL serves about 1.5 million ratepayers in Pennsylvania, and its territory has been overrun by data center proposals in recent years, significantly raising electricity prices in certain areas of the country. But under the utility’s proposed plan, data centers would receive a rate cut, which rankled attendees. Although the region needs jobs, “there’s no potential job growth really, for the local people. I’m one of the few people who would actually be qualified to even apply for a job there once they put [the data centers] up,” Moran told me after the hearing. “We don’t have a lot of computer science majors out there.”
“The developer gets all the benefits on the front end and bears none of the risk.”
As several people at the utility hearing pointed out, Trump was scheduled to speak the following night in the conference room at the DeNaples’ family casino, to begin what the president claimed would be a series of rallies across the country. Concerns of affordability—lost jobs, hiring freezes, inflation, skyrocketing bills, the kind of concerns that had brought people out to that utility meeting the night before—the president called, “a myth.” Something incredible was just over the horizon, he promised, growing closer by the day. “You’re going to see what happens over the next two years. It’s like a miracle is taking place,” he said, as he opened the rally. “All of the companies that are pouring their money into building right now—building plants in Pennsylvania and many other states—auto plants, AI plants, plants of every type.”
At this point, it appears all six data centers coming to the borough will pull from the grid. According to Archbald’s updated zoning agreement, oil, gas, and nuclear plants will not be allowed to co-locate alongside data centers. But the facilities are likely to fuel a fracking surge across Western Pennsylvania, and new buildings will bring hundreds of diesel backup generators to town. Should unsustainable power demands regularly force data centers off the grid, those generators could be running with relative frequency—emitting pollutants that have been linked to heart disease and cancer and generating noise that can disturb neighborhoods.
To make matters more complicated, Archbald’s water system is privately owned and operated by American Water, the nation’s largest private water company. Residents are concerned the town’s data center boom will also affect these bills and threaten their drinking supply. Project Gravity alone is expected to pump 360,000 gallons of water a day from Lake Scranton, which serves 134,570 people across Lackawanna County. Developers of the Wildcat Ridge Data Center are proposing to pump up to 3.3 million gallons per day—some of it potentially from the minor sea of ground and rainwater that now fills the empty coal mines beneath the building site. The developer’s plans include a subsidence contingency, but looking over the scale of the place, it’s not hard to see where the residents are coming from when they talk of colossal buildings collapsing and the ready-made grave the mining industry left beneath the town.
All of this assumes these facilities actually get built. Experts have speculated that half of data center proposals could be duplicative, meaning developers are applying in multiple places across the country but will ultimately only build a single campus. It’s also unclear who the tenants will be at this point, and according to Markey, developers have been tight-lipped. “They’ll say cryptic things like, ‘You know of this company. You probably use them every day,” he told me. “They all say the same thing—that they’re next in line for power.”
Battery storage could replace some of those backup generators, closed-loop cooling (in which water is endlessly recycled) could reduce water usage, and harmful chemicals could be swapped out, but there’s really no way to know for sure until the tech company that will be leasing the space is known, making approving these projects a significant gamble.
There are few guardrails for the industry at the moment. In February, the Trump administration rolled out the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, an initiative that asks tech companies to voluntarily agree to pay the cost of upgrading transmission lines and building power plants—rather than having those costs passed along to the average consumer. It was almost immediately derided as “smoke and mirrors” and “a toothless, empty promise” by Democratic congressman Frank Pallone, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Governor Shapiro, who has championed AI’s rush into Pennsylvania, recently proposed an initiative that would incentivize responsible data center development. Projects that agreed to bring their own transmission, offer transparent community engagement, and clear community benefits agreements would qualify for the state’s Permit Fast Track Program, which can significantly speed up the building process.
Critics pointed out that this would still incentivize developers to build gas plants, rather than switch to renewable energy, and that it’s difficult to enforce. “The developer gets all the benefits on the front end and bears none of the risk,” Emma Bast, a lawyer at PennFuture, told Spotlight PA. “And if the developer doesn’t follow through on the voluntary things, there are not a lot of options for the state.”
Some residents are reluctantly making plans to move. “These data centers have to go somewhere,” said Jim Schaback, who told me he would likely rent out his house in Archbald if the developments go through. “I hate that they’re going here.” Matthew Bucksbee and Candace May recently got word that they may be able to move to a plot of land owned by a friend in Forest City, about 20 minutes north. “We’ll be moving into another trailer for the time being, but once that’s paid off, we could build up there,” said May. She was excited about the prospect of having a bunch of land for their sons to roam around. Tiffany, whose property in Jermyn borders Project Gravity, said that she would consider moving if data center developers began building in Jermyn or neighboring Mayfield to avoid being sandwiched between the buildings.
“Where would you go though?” she said. “Because everywhere just sucks.”
Before Farris spoke at the Project South hearing in January, community members gathered outside the auditorium, some distributing pamphlets, others gossiping. Among the crowd were Jack and Amy Swingle, who told me they moved to the area to be close to their children. They recently signed on to a lawsuit appealing the updated data center zoning, arguing it does not adequately protect residents. But neither of them had high hopes for the night. At the previous hearing, they explained, developers had tried to soften the blow by promising that the data centers would bring more retail to the area—a Trader Joe’s, for example, which could potentially accompany the construction of the Wildcat Ridge AI center. “That’s one of the things I have [to say] in here,” said another woman standing nearby, gesturing to her notes. “Don’t be so condescending.”
But the revenue that the building boom promises the region is real enough. The data centers would bring roughly $20 million in property taxes for Archbald, Farris said to the audience gathered, $50 million for Lackawanna County, and $100 million for the Valley View School District every year. Many municipalities were throwing tax breaks at developers, hoping to attract their attention. Archbald is not. Its abundant fiber-optic cables, high voltage electrical lines, nearby gas pipelines, and its proximity to Secaucus, New Jersey (a “pairing point” for data centers, where they exchange information) make it attractive regardless. Farris had sought this place out himself, but other nearby towns looked nearly as appealing as Archbald, he explained. Should the opposition continue to grow, developers might take their projects elsewhere—maybe to Berwick, about an hour away.
“They’re going to get all the benefit, and you guys aren’t going to get anything,” Farris told the crowd. “[Data centers] are a necessity in life, and the decision has come down to, ‘Do you want to benefit from that necessity?”
Archbald resident, Tamara Healy, asked about Community Benefit Agreements—she’d googled them, and it seemed to her that something like that should be in place before things proceeded any further. “Now, it’s ironic that you’re Googling stuff and you’re against data centers,” said Farris. “Just for the record.”
Still, the town needs tax revenue, and it’s true that no other industry of this size and scale seems interested in the area. “We have just enough money in our checking account to pay payroll and keep the lights on, but every month we have a debate about canceling or suspending music or art,” said a solicitor, speaking on behalf of Valley View School District administrators in November 2025.
Documents first published last week by DeSmog show that developers played a significant role in determining the terms of the data center overlay ordinance that ultimately passed in November 2025. Council President Dave Moran requested a 1000-yard buffer zone between data centers and adjacent properties. That was whittled down to just 300 yards in the final language.
The area of the updated data center district that was ultimately passed was determined by the existing industrial zones in the town, and “the rest of the lines drawn were property lines of property owners looking to develop or sell to developers,” according to an email from Markey. “They were pretty much all specific requests.”
Armed with proof that town officials and wealthy landowners were seemingly working against them, the Stop Archbald Data Centers Facebook group erupted, organizing a petition to immediately relieve Dan Markey, zoning officer Brian Dulay, council president Dave Moran, and Archbald borough solicitor Jay O’Connor of their duties. But, as PennFuture attorney Brigitte Meyer explained, negotiating with the developer is fairly standard in cases such as these, especially given the fact that data centers were technically permitted in certain commercial zones. Had the borough tried to exclude the data centers on the basis of something like height restrictions, developers could have taken them to court over what’s called “de facto exclusionary zoning”—arguing that the restrictions betrayed an antiquated understanding of data centers and were unduly constrictive
“That is a valid type of legal challenge,” explained Meyer. It wouldn’t be a guaranteed win for developers, but nor would Archbald be assured of victory. The only certainty is that it would be a costly legal fight. “The borough may have looked at it and thought, ‘Well, our chances of winning a challenge like this aren’t so good.’” Other areas that rejected data center proposals, such as nearby Ransom township, have faced lawsuits. Clifton township, which rushed to get a data center overlay in place when they got wind of developer interest last year, is still locked in a lawsuit, filed by the developer mere hours before the ordinance was adopted.
Whether borough officials made things too easy for developers or felt their hands were tied isn’t totally clear. As of this writing, most of them have refused to speak to me, even though the most damning evidence against them to date is their secrecy. But council member Erin Owen, who has opposed the data centers since the outset, did return my calls last week. She had not been happy with the data center overlay and said she was shut out of private meetings—like the one I stumbled on back in December—to lay out the terms of the ordinance. “They made a big mistake in doing that, because it does not seem transparent at all,” she said. “They only picked the council members that they wanted to know.”
Council has had little luck helping Valley View Estates residents find alternative housing as of this writing, she told me, and although gas and nuclear plants are not allowed to co-locate alongside data centers, there is industrial land available in town where she believes developers will build their own gas plants.
“All the impacts will be terrible,” she said. Owen is a fourth-generation resident of Archbald and has served on the borough council for the past ten years. “A lot of trees will be lost. A lot of wildlife will be lost. Homes are going to be last. Pollutants in the air, pollutants in the soil, and then the water, the noise—it’s just going to be very disturbing.”
The only hope at this point seems to be drastic action on the state level. Legislators on both sides of the aisle have taken notice of the problems facing Pennsylvania as the tech industry moves in. Republican State Representative Jamie Walsh announced he would soon be introducing a suite of bills to better regulate development. Democratic State Senator Katie Muth released a memo announcing that she plans to propose a three-year moratorium on data center development, calling it a “necessary step to protect public health, safety, fiscal stability, and environmental integrity.”
Even so, it may not be enough to help Archbald, given how eager data centers are to set up shop in the area. It was nearly impossible to find anyone in town who was pro-data center development, although I asked around widely. Some said they weren’t against it, but wouldn’t explain further. Older residents tended to be the least troubled about the data centers, but in a fairly fatalistic way. “I’m going to die tomorrow,” one woman told me at Barrett’s Pub on Main Street. Barrett’s used to be owned by the mayor, and I’d stopped to grab some dinner. The woman told me she used to do nails; now she works for Lockheed Martin. “I don’t know what the data centers want. I don’t know what they do to you. I don’t know what they do to your children,” she said. “Younger people—do they know what’s happening?”
I wasn’t sure what to tell her, other than that the town was once again being targeted because of an accident of geography and moneyed interests. The longer I spent reporting on this, the more I felt no one had the full picture, not the developers, not the bankers facilitating the baffling circular investments financing the boom, not the chip manufacturers or software engineers, certainly not the tech CEOs. A few weeks earlier, while visiting San Francisco, I’d watched a dog riding in a driverless taxi—paws hanging out the window, tongue waving in the wind, seemingly ferried around by a ghost. This is where those ghosts would come from.
Editor’s Note: Pennsylvania is technically a borough. Because this article is intended for a national audience, we sometimes refer to it colloquially as a town.
2026-03-21 15:01:00
As news broke that Iran’s supreme leader had been killed, prominent critic Arash Azizi found himself trying to make sense of a moment he had long imagined.
For years, Azizi studied Iran’s political system and hoped for change from within. Now, with the man who defined that system gone, Azizi was left with questions: What comes next for Iran? And who gets to decide?
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.This week on Reveal, reporters Najib Aminy, Kiera Butler, and Nadia Hamdan follow the ripple effects of the war in Iran. Expats like Azizi wrestle with what the war could mean for Iran’s future, an influential group of Americans celebrate the conflict as a prophecy foretold, and residents of Lebanon grapple with the spiraling effects of the conflict.
