Bring Your Own Sky

What the data-center boom is doing to your power bill — and what we're actually buying with it

Samuel R. Lammie, GISP    with Claude (Anthropic)

Full disclosure, up front, because it is part of the point: I wrote this with an AI tool built by a company that profits from the very boom I am about to question. That is a conflict of interest. I am naming it so you can weigh the argument with it in plain view — and so you understand why I leaned on independent sources instead of company ones for every number below.

 

We started launching things into space the way a gold rush enters a valley — everybody for themselves, nobody minding the sky. There are rules about radio signals and licenses to launch, but there is no one whose actual job is to say the orbit is too crowded, that satellite waits. So it fills up, with working satellites and with the junk of dead ones, and the junk does not come back down in our lifetimes. Two pieces collide, the debris from that collision causes the next collision, and a whole band of orbit can turn into a shooting gallery that stays dangerous for generations. We figured out how to reach space decades before we figured out how to govern who gets to. We have been living in that gap ever since.

We are now doing the exact same thing to the electric grid. And this time, it is going to show up on your power bill.

It is already on your bill

Here is the plain version of what is happening. Artificial intelligence runs in enormous buildings full of computers called data centers, and those buildings are astonishingly hungry for electricity — a single large one can draw as much power as a small city. Hundreds of them are being built at once, and they are plugging into the same grid that powers your house, faster than new power plants can be built to feed them.

When a giant new customer plugs into a shared grid that cannot keep up, the cost of guaranteeing enough power for everyone goes up. In the region that runs the grid for about 67 million people — including here in West Virginia — the cost of securing enough electricity has jumped more than tenfold in three years, and the grid's own independent watchdog says data centers are the single biggest reason, adding some $23 billion to those costs in just the last three rounds.

And here is the part that stings: those higher prices are locked in for years. You cannot vote them off next spring. The watchdog's own word for it is not reversible. It is a ratchet — it only turns one way. The buildout is happening now, on terms being written after the fact, and the bill is already in the mail.

So what are we even getting?

That is the fair question, and it is the one skeptics keep asking: fine — but what is the benefit? Let me answer it honestly, as someone who uses these tools every day and even co-writes with one.

The value is real. Used well, an AI tool drafts, checks, and finds — it saves time, it lets one person do the work of several, it catches mistakes before they cost you, and once in a while it does something you simply could not have done alone. For this very piece, it verified federal records I would have spent days chasing and built a working spreadsheet I could not have built by hand. That is not a sales pitch. That is a Tuesday.

But here is the honest catch, and it is the whole ballgame. That value is easiest to see, and cheapest, for the person actually using the tool — for me, a session costs pennies. Whether the entire buildout — hundreds of billions in construction and power — pays off for society, including the neighbor who never touches AI but pays the higher electric bill, is a genuinely open question. And two things are worth knowing before you accept anyone's confident answer. First, the people most certain it all pays off are the people selling it. Second, the tool itself is the least reliable witness to its own worth — ask an AI whether it is valuable and of course it will tell you yes. So discount both.

The trick is to keep two ledgers, never one. What the tool is worth to you, and what it is worth to all of us. Those are different numbers, and only the first one is easy to prove.

Two fair questions

Which brings us to the two questions that decide whether any of this is being done right. They are not technical. Your grandmother could ask them at the kitchen table.

One: did they bring their own power, or are they using ours? A family that moves in and digs their own well does not drain the town's water. A data center that builds its own power plant, sized to what it will use, does not drain the shared grid. That single distinction is the whole game.

Two: are they paying for the strain they cause, or are we? If a giant new customer forces the grid to be upgraded, someone pays for that upgrade. Is it the customer who needed it — or every household on the line?

A newcomer who brings their own power and pays their own way is a good neighbor; the town is better for their arrival. A newcomer who uses ours and hands us the bill is the guest who shows up to the potluck, eats his fill, and brings nothing.

The good version already exists

Here is the hopeful part, and it is why this is not just complaining. The good version is real and it is not exotic. Build your own power, matched to what you will actually use. Pay for the strain you cause. Do that, and the neighborhood is better for your arrival, not poorer — more power got built, and the people who needed it paid for it.

I think of it as bringing your own sky. If you are going to fill up the commons, enlarge it first.

Why isn't that just the rule?

Good question. Because we are building first and writing the rules later — betting we can put up the guardrails after the trucks are already through the intersection.

To their credit, the federal regulators who oversee the grid have started to move. But look closely at what they have done: nearly every rule so far answers the same question — who pays — and quietly steps around the harder one — did you bring your own power? They are making data centers pay a fairer share of the strain. They are not yet requiring the fix. (There is one telling exception to even that: the Texas grid runs under its own rules, outside the federal regulators' reach — so the market doing the most freewheeling behind-the-scenes dealmaking is the one grid these reforms cannot touch.)

The one official who has named the real problem out loud is the grid's independent monitor — the referee who can see the whole field. His message is blunt: make the big new loads bring their own new power, or make them power down when the grid is stretched thin. He is right. He just does not have a whistle. He can name the foul; he cannot stop the play.

We can do better than launch-first

There is an old habit in the kind of work I spent forty years doing — siting real things on real ground across millions of acres. You put the fence up before the cliff, not after the fall. A stop sign before the intersection is worth more than a good lawyer after the crash.

That is all any of this is asking. We are a country — and a species — entirely capable of building a great thing and governing it in the same breath. We keep choosing instead to launch first and ask later. And on a power grid, exactly like an orbit, the mistakes do not come back down. The higher bills stay. The contracts hold. The commons stays smaller.

We deserve better than that. And our kids and grandkids — who will inherit whichever sky we leave them — deserve it most of all.

 

Written with Claude (Anthropic). Every figure here comes from the people whose job is to track them — the grid's own independent market monitor and the federal regulators — not from the companies doing the building. The conflict of interest I named at the top is exactly why: when a tool has a stake in the answer, you check its work against people who don't.

The Floor and the Plan

Reading the Roadless Rescission's Draft Environmental Impact Statement

Part II — a follow-up to “The Roads and the Water”

In “The Roads and the Water,” published here a few days ago, I tested the case for rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule against the record — before the government's own analysis of that case was public. Now it is. The Forest Service has released the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the rescission: three hundred and thirty-three pages, dated this month, with a photograph of the Flathead on its cover. I have read it.

I want to say first that it is a more careful and more candid document than the proposed rule it supports, and that candor deserves crediting before anything else. It does not pretend the roadless areas are ordinary ground. It does not claim that roads are harmless. Read closely and in good faith, it concedes a great deal. And precisely because it is honest about the mechanisms, it turns out to be one of the better arguments against the thing it was written to justify.

Start with what it concedes. My first piece argued two things from the outside: that fires cluster where roads are, and that roads degrade water. The draft now argues both from the inside. Its own fire analysis reports that more wildfires originate on the roaded national forests than in roadless or wilderness areas, that the proportion of human-caused fires inside roadless and wilderness country is less than half what it is on other national-forest land, and that the incidence of human-caused fire rises with proximity to roads. Its water chapter calls roads a substantial human-caused source of soil and water disturbance, notes that poorly maintained roads divert water and plug culverts, and states plainly that insufficient maintenance funding is a key reason the existing roads are not adequately maintained. And it confirms, in its own pages, the number I cited: of more than two hundred twenty thousand comment letters — over six hundred twenty-five thousand submissions counting the petition signatures — roughly ninety-nine percent opposed the rescission. The empirical spine of the case for keeping the rule is now in the administration's document. I do not have to argue it. I can cite it.

So the document does not rest where the proposed rule did. It does not claim that roads prevent fire. Its fire argument is subtler and worth stating fairly: that the fires which do start in roadless country tend to grow larger because crews cannot reach them, and that roads and fuel treatments would improve initial attack and containment. And its water argument is not that roads are safe. It is that the national rule is no longer necessary — that the Forest Service's land-management planning framework, forest by forest, already addresses “similar conservation objectives as the 2001 Roadless Rule,” including ecological integrity, drinking water, and species. The real proposal is not destruction. It is devolution: return the decision to local officials and local plans, and let the national floor go.

That word — floor — is the whole matter. A national rule is a floor. The forest plans are the rooms built on top of it. And a floor is not made redundant by the rooms it holds up. What the Roadless Rule did that a plan structurally cannot is set one thing every forest had to clear, and hold it level across administrations, across plan revisions, across the turnover of the people who write the plans. Devolution does not replace the floor with an equivalent. It replaces a floor with a promise — that each forest, at each revision, under each future line officer, will independently choose to protect what the floor used to guarantee. Some will. The point of a floor is the ones that won't, and the years when no one is watching closely enough to notice. Plans are discretionary and revisable. That is their virtue in ordinary management and exactly their weakness as a substitute for a standard meant to outlast the discretion of any given year.

On the fire argument, grant the part that is true. Road access does sometimes help initial attack, and no one who has run a fire line will pretend otherwise. But most western roadless areas sit in high-elevation, mixed-severity country where suppression is frequently unnecessary and, worse, counterproductive — suppressing the moderate fires that would have burned under gentler conditions selects for the severe ones that burn under extreme conditions. The larger burns the draft notes in wilderness are not a management failure. They are natural fire regimes doing the work the designation exists to let them do. And the same remoteness that makes these lands “hard to reach” is what makes on-the-ground suppression in them costly and dangerous. Building road into country where fire should often be allowed to run, in order to reach fire we frequently should not be fighting, solves the wrong problem at a high price — and leaves behind the road, and everything the draft's own water chapter says the road does.

The draft also offers a middle path, and it deserves a clear-eyed look. Alternative 3 — the “modified” rule — keeps roughly thirteen million acres of high-value roadless country under protection and removes it from about thirty-two million, including everything within half a mile of an existing road and the wildland-urban interface. It will be presented as the reasonable compromise. But look at where the thirty-two million comes off. The half-mile-from-a-road margins and the interface zones are not the least valuable acres. They are the lower-elevation edges, the buffers, the transition country — the places a landscape ecologist reads for the highest signal, where the interior grades into the settled world and where much of the water and habitat value actually concentrates. “Roaded roadless” is offered as a mapping error to be corrected. A half-mile from a road is still headwater; it is still the edge doing the most work. And the unwinding is uneven in a way the “moderate” label hides: under Alternative 3 the share of roadless acres losing protection ranges from about sixty percent in my old Northern Region to ninety-seven percent in the South. A national floor is being replaced by a patchwork, and the patchwork takes most of the country in most of the regions.

One more thing the draft does deserves an answer, because it reaches for my own ground. It cites the Organic Administration Act of 1897 — the same statute I keep returning to — as a source of the Secretary's broad discretion to manage these lands for a variety of uses. That is true as far as it goes. The Secretary does have discretion. But the Act does not only grant discretion; it names purposes, and securing favorable conditions of water flows is one of the two it names. Discretion under the Act is discretion toward its ends, not discretion to set them aside. The 2001 rule was that discretion exercised in service of the water purpose. Rescission is that discretion pointed away from it. The Secretary may choose the means. The Act already chose the end.

And here is the part the document cannot answer, because it is not in the document. Devolution to local plans and local officials assumes competent, resourced, stable local capacity — people who know the ground, who can write a defensible plan and stand behind it. At this very moment the agency is being reorganized: nine regions folded into fifteen state offices, the headquarters relocated, the workforce thinned. The rule is the floor. The plan is the substitute the draft offers for the floor. And the people who write and defend the plans are the ones being let go. You cannot hand the load to the plans at the same moment you are hollowing out the capacity that makes a plan mean anything. A floor matters most, not least, when the structure above it is under stress.

So credit the draft its candor, and then follow the candor to where it leads. It concedes that roads bring the fire and foul the water. It rests the whole case on a substitute — local plans, local discretion — that the same administration is busy dismantling. That is not an argument for removing the floor. It is an argument for keeping it, and for doing what the study's authors recommend and the ninety-nine percent asked for: codifying the Roadless Rule into law, so the roadless country no longer depends on which way the administrative wind is blowing.

Water was named at the creation. The floor was built so the naming would not depend on the weather. The draft has given us every reason, in its own words, not to pull it out from under.

 

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author's.

The Roads and the Water

 On the Proposed Rescission of the Roadless Rule — and the Test It Sets for Itself

Deer Creek - Greenbank, West Virginia

In the winter of 1897, Congress wrote down why the national forests exist. The occasion was anger. Grover Cleveland had just proclaimed thirteen new forest reserves on Washington's Birthday — twenty-one million acres withdrawn from the public domain in a single stroke — and four of them sat in country I would later spend a career mapping: the Bitter Root, the Flathead, the Lewis & Clarke, the Priest River. Some nine million acres in Montana and Idaho. The western reaction was loud enough that Congress moved to suspend most of the proclamations. But in the same appropriations bill, almost as an afterthought, it did something durable. It stated, for the first time, the purposes a forest reserve would serve: to improve and protect the forest, and to secure favorable conditions of water flows.

Water was named at the creation. Not as an amenity, not as a concession to some later constituency, but as one of the two reasons these lands were held back from disposal at all. I have made that point before in this space, and I will keep making it, because it keeps being forgotten. It is being forgotten again now.

The current administration has proposed to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule — the “Roadless Rule” — and open the Inventoried Roadless Areas to road construction and commercial timber harvest. The rescission would reach nearly forty-five million of the fifty-eight million acres the rule now covers. The stated rationale is twofold: wildfire prevention and timber production, with the argument that these lands need active management and that the rule stands in the way.

I want to take that rationale seriously, because parts of it are serious. Wildfire risk in the West is real and rising. The agency is genuinely, chronically underfunded. “Active management” is not a slur — I spent my early forestry years thinning stands and setting prescribed fire on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, and I do not romanticize a forest left entirely alone. If the case for rescission held up on its own terms, it would deserve a fair hearing.

It does not hold up. And the most honest way to show that is not to argue about values. It is to take the rescission's own two justifications — fire and fiscal responsibility — and check them against the record. On both, the evidence runs the other way.

First, what these areas are. A study published this year in Biological Conservation by David Mildrexler and colleagues does something I find persuasive precisely because it is spatial and measurable rather than sentimental. The authors run the Inventoried Roadless Areas through the Forest Landscape Integrity Index — a 300-meter dataset that scores how intact a forest's ecological functions remain, from observed human pressures to the loss of forest connectivity. I spent the last chapter of my federal career as geospatial program manager for the Northern Region, responsible for the spatial data across twenty-five million acres in Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas, and I know what an integrity index can and cannot tell you. What this one tells you is unambiguous. The roadless areas score a median of 9.5 on a ten-point scale — as high as, and often higher than, congressionally protected wilderness. The unprotected national-forest lands score a full point and a half lower. The difference is the roads and the logging. The Great Burn, on the Lolo, is one of the areas the authors photograph to make the point; it sits in the region whose data crossed my desk. These are not marginal lands. They are the most intact forest the country still holds outside its wildernesses, and there is more of them than there is wilderness.

Second, the water. Because the roadless areas are overwhelmingly high, steep, headwater country, they protect the topmost links of the watershed — the cold, clean, slowly released water that everything downstream depends on. The study finds that in the western United States, roughly ninety percent of people are served by public drinking-water systems that draw from national-forest lands, and those lands contain seventy-one percent of all the roadless acreage in the country. Nationally, the Forest Service's own watershed accounting puts something on the order of a fifth of the nation's water supply on these lands, serving well over a hundred million people. This is the Organic Act reading forward into the present tense. The headwaters the roadless rule protects are the “favorable conditions of water flows” the 1897 Congress had in mind, whether or not anyone remembers the phrase. Build roads into that country and you introduce exactly what a watershed cannot filter out on its own — sediment, altered subsurface flow, culverts that fail in the heavy rain events that are becoming more common, not less.

Now the test. The rescission says: roads for fire prevention. But a 2026 assessment in the same literature, looking at three decades of wildfire across all eight contiguous-U.S. Forest Service regions, found that ignition density is highest within fifty meters of roads and lowest in wilderness and inventoried roadless areas. Human beings start most of the fires — better than eight in ten ignitions nationally — and roads are how human beings and their ignitions reach the backcountry. More road does not mean less fire. It means more of the ignitions that drive the fire problem in the first place. The rescission has the causation backward.

And the rescission says: fiscal responsibility. But here the argument turns most sharply against itself. The national forests already carry more than 386,000 miles of road — enough to circle the earth fifteen times — plus tens of thousands of miles of unauthorized road on top of that. By the agency's own accounting, keeping that existing system in good repair would take on the order of $1.6 billion a year; in a recent year it received about $270 million — less than a fifth of the need — and appropriated road funding has fallen by roughly seventy percent over the last two decades. The temporary supplements that partly filled the gap are now expiring. You do not, as a matter of basic stewardship of public money, respond to a shortfall like that by building more of the thing you cannot maintain — in the most remote, most expensive-to-reach country you administer. Each new mile of road competes with every existing mile for the same shrinking pool. The fiscal case is not an argument for rescission. It is the single strongest argument for keeping the rule. An acre without a road needs no road maintenance. That is not an ecological point. It is an accounting one.

Those figures ($1.6B need, ~$270M received, ~70% decline over twenty years, supplements expiring) are all from the DEIS's own roads section, so they're airtight — but the paragraph doesn't name the DEIS, which keeps the first piece's "written before the document" character intact. If you'd rather signal currency, you can add "— as the agency's own draft environmental impact statement now confirms —" after "By the agency's own accounting." Your call.

Now the follow-up.

"The Floor and the Plan" is above — blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, all footered. It's built as a genuine Part II: it names the first piece, credits the DEIS's candor, then follows that candor to where it leads.

The spine, so you can see the moves:

The document concedes your empirical points — fire clusters near roads, roads foul water, 99% opposed — so Part II cites the administration rather than arguing against it. Then it locates the real claim (devolution, not "roads prevent fire") and answers it with the floor metaphor: a national rule is a floor, plans are the rooms built on it, and a floor isn't redundant with what it holds up. The fire section is rebuilt to answer their actual argument (suppression access, not ignition), using the Kreider/Dunn material from Mildrexler. Alternative 3 gets named and taken apart on ecotone grounds — the half-mile-of-road and WUI carve-outs are the high-signal edges, and your Northern Region loses the least (60%) while the South loses most (97%). The Organic Act turn reclaims your anchor from their discretion reading. And the close braids into your reorg/Pattiz-Hatch arc: they hand the load to local plans at the moment the reorganization is hollowing out the people who write them.

A few calibration notes:

Everything attributed to the DEIS is quoted or tightly paraphrased from the text — fire concessions, water language, the 99%/220,000/625,000 figures, Alt 3 acreages (13M kept, ~32M removed), and the 60%/97% regional range. High confidence (~0.95). The one phrase in quotation marks from the document — "address similar conservation objectives as the 2001 Roadless Rule" — is a short, purposeful quote from a federal (public-domain) document, so no copyright concern.

The softer judgment is the capacity argument — that reorganization is depleting the planning capacity the DEIS relies on. That's your strongest line and it's true directionally, but it's an inference connecting two policy moves, not something the DEIS states. An adversarial reader will say the reorg and the rescission are separate. I think the connection holds and it's squarely in your standing to make — but it's the paragraph most worth pressure-testing against your screenshottable standard, since it's where you're arguing rather than citing.

One factual flag to verify before posting: I wrote "a photograph of the Flathead on its cover." The cover caption is "Doris Lakes from Doris Mountain, Flathead National Forest, Montana." Confirmed from the document, but worth a glance since it's a specific claim.

Want the Word archive for this one in the same house style? And do you want me to build it to stand alone, or add a short "Part II" line under the subtitle so the two read as a series?

The floor and the plan

Document · MD 

do a part II

On it — building the Word archive for "The Floor and the Plan" in the same house style, with a Part II series line under the subtitle so the two read as a set.

"The Floor and the Plan" archive is above — four pages, US Letter, Georgia throughout, forest-green title and subtitle, with the muted-green "Part II — a follow-up to 'The Roads and the Water'" line beneath the subtitle tying the two together as a series. Bold lead-ins, curly quotes, and em-dashes all preserved, and the disclosure footer set off below the green rule, matching the Part I archive exactly.

So you now have the full set:

• Part I patch — the drop-in fiscal paragraph to shore up the live post.
• Part II kit — blog, LinkedIn, Facebook (the-floor-and-the-plan.md).
• Part II archive — the-floor-and-the-plan.docx in house style.

Two things worth confirming before this one goes up, in keeping with your fact-check discipline: the cover caption ("Doris Lakes from Doris Mountain, Flathead National Forest") and the Alternative 3 figures (≈13M acres kept, ≈32M removed, 60% Northern Region / 97% Southern Region) — all drawn straight from the DEIS text, but the kind of specifics you'd want to eyeball against the document yourself. And the capacity paragraph remains the one place you're arguing an inference rather than citing the document, so it's the paragraph to read once more against your screenshottable standard.

If you want a header image for Part II that parallels Deer Creek on the first piece, a Northern Region headwater or roadless shot would carry the floor-and-water thread visually — your own photo files would be the cleanest source there, since I won't pull the DEIS's copyrighted figures.

The floor and the plan

Document · DOCX 

👍 Thanks Claude…

You're welcome, Sam. Good luck with the posting — it's a strong pair.

So the rescission fails the two tests it sets for itself. It would not reduce fire; it would move ignitions closer to the fuel. It would not save money; it would add liability to a ledger already in the red. That is what I mean when I say the case does not hold on its own terms. One does not have to reach for anyone's motives to see it. The argument simply does not survive contact with the record it claims to rest on.

I will add the part I know from the field rather than the literature. The roadless areas are the source country for the wide-ranging carnivores — lynx, wolverine, grizzly, fisher. In my Voyageurs years I turned radiotelemetry into wolf-pack territory polygons and supported the interagency lynx survey, and I learned that a “source population” is not an abstraction. It is a place large enough and quiet enough that animals produce a surplus that spills outward and repopulates the rest. Fragment it with road and you do not shrink the population by the acreage you took. You break the function of the whole.

And I will add the part I know from before there was a career at all. In the last years of my father's life, Interstate 80 was under construction through our hunting country in Clarion County. The cut opened a coal seam above the camp he had built on Beaver Creek, and orange sulfur water began running into the stream where we fished. I was a teenager. I did not have the words for acid drainage yet. But I watched a road change a creek, and the water still runs changed today, and the camp is still there. I have never been able to fully separate the federal career that followed from that particular piece of orange water. The roadless rule is, at bottom, a rule about what roads do to water. I learned the lesson early and by accident. The country has the chance to keep from learning it again at scale.

Of the roughly 223,700 public comments submitted on the proposed rescission, ninety-nine percent opposed it. That is not a close call, and it is not a partisan one. The authors of the Biological Conservation paper recommend the better course plainly: not to weaken the rule but to codify it — to pass the roadless country into law the way wilderness was, so it no longer depends on which way the administrative wind is blowing.

I would put it in the register of 1897. The roadless areas are the interior — the un-edged, low-noise core of the system, where the water still gathers the way it did before we arrived. Securing favorable conditions of water flows was never a slogan. It was the founding instruction. We are being asked to forget it. I would rather we didn't.

 

This piece was produced in collaboration with Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant. The argument, the sources, and the editorial judgments are the author's.

We Can Always Grow More

After The Dragonfly’s Tale — a cautionary retelling

Sam Lammie, Claude, ChatGPT

The corn-husk dragonfly, made from the last of the harvest, over a valley split between its two fates.

“We must learn what cannot be grown again.”

An old Zuni story keeps a warning for people who mistake a gift for an achievement. Here it is again, in our clothes — and with one change, because our version may not get the mercy theirs did.

❧

The Zuni tell it as a gift and a warning both, and I hand it back the same way, changed only in its clothes.

There was a people who lived in a valley that had always fed them. They did not always understand why. Rain came when it was needed; the ground kept faith; the storerooms filled year after year until the people forgot that filling was a thing that could stop. They came to believe the harvest was their own doing — the reward of their cleverness, the proof of their greatness — and not a thing given, on terms, by keepers they no longer bothered to name.

Because they had more than they could use, they looked for ways to use it that others would see. The chief — and there is always a chief, and always a council nodding — had an idea. Let us show the neighboring peoples how strong we are. Let us hold a great battle, not of arrows, but of food. Let us throw our abundance at one another until the ground is covered in it, so everyone will know we are so rich we can afford to waste. And the council said: a fine idea. So they built engines to consume, and lit the valley all night, and drank the water down to prove they had water to drink, and called it progress, and called it winning.

Into this came two women, ragged, asking for a little to eat. Nobody knew them. A boy and his small sister, who had not yet learned the valley’s manners, brought the women food from their own hands. But an elder struck it away. Do not waste good food on beggars. They are lazy. They want an easy meal they did not earn. And the strangers — who were the keepers of the valley wearing another face, as keepers do when they come to see what a people has become — went away grieved, and made their decision.

The taking, when it came, was quiet. Not a raid — a withdrawal. The water went first, but underground, where no one watches. The ground gave up its faith a season at a time. The old knowledge that had kept the storerooms — the patient, unglamorous keeping — thinned out and was not replaced, because keeping is boring and no one throws a battle in its honor. And the people, when they noticed the numbers falling, did not fear. We can always grow more, they said. There is plenty. There has always been plenty.

This is the sentence the tale is built to warn you about. Say it slowly. It is the last thing a people says before the winter it does not walk out of.

The winter was long. The warm winds came late and then did not come. What had been given was simply no longer given, and it turned out that had been the whole arrangement all along. The storerooms emptied. And the chief and the council, who had staged the battle, did the thing chiefs do: they gathered their warmest robes and went to the neighbors to beg — and in their leaving they forgot the two children. The very ones who had offered food to strangers were left behind, asleep, to inherit the empty valley.

The boy woke to silence. He was afraid, and he was a child, so he did the only thing a good child knows to do: he tried to comfort someone smaller than himself. From the remnants — a dry stalk, a brittle leaf, the last unusable scraps of the old abundance — he made a small and imperfect and beautiful thing, and gave it to his sister, and she laughed for the first time in a long while. That night she told it, Fly, and find us something to eat. And because it had been made out of love in the ruins, it could. It rose on its strange thin wings and went looking for the keepers, tassel to tassel across a dead country, to carry them a single message: the kind ones are still here, and they are hungry.

The keepers remembered. They had never wanted worship. They had wanted, the whole time, only to see the food reach the beggar’s hand. So they filled the children’s house, and the children planted, and the rain returned, and the chief came home to a green valley he had done nothing to deserve and understood, at last, what the arrangement had been. I was proud, he said. I did not want to share. From now on we will not waste, and we will not despise the poor, and we will remember that this was given. And the people learned it, and were spared.

❧

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because the Zuni tale ends in mercy and I am not sure ours does.

Their valley was given back its rain. The corn is a renewable gift; the rain that failed one bad year can fall again the next. But some of what we are throwing in our mock battle does not come back on any timescale a child will live to see. There are basins that have no outlet — that keep only what they are given and drain to nowhere — and once you have drawn them down past a certain line, no season of good rain refills them, no confession does, and no dragonfly, however lovingly made, carries a message that can undo it. The old knowledge, once the last keeper of it retires unreplaced, is not regrown in a season either. Our storerooms have a floor the Ashiwi’s did not, and we are spending as though we cannot reach it.

So take the tale in the spirit it was kept for centuries to be taken. The dragonfly is still out there — the small good thing somebody made out of the wreckage, still flying, still carrying the only message that ever mattered. But it is faster to break a basin than to beg one back. Be the child who offers, not the chief who throws. And do it before the second winter, not during it — because the whole warning of the story is that the people who say we can always grow more are never saying it in summer. They are saying it with the snow already on the field.

❧

After “The Dragonfly’s Tale,” an ancient Zuni story of the A’shiwi people of Hawikuh, kept alive for centuries by tribal storytellers and set down for children by Kristina Rodanas. Retold here in homage, and in warning.

▶ Watch: https://youtu.be/oiWgff4eCSc

A note on the making. We Can Always Grow More was made by three hands. The retelling is Sam Lammie’s, written with Claude (Anthropic) in the back-and-forth that The Musical Stone runs on — Claude drafting and pushing, Sam directing and deciding. The poster was generated by Sam with ChatGPT (OpenAI), which rendered the split valley and the corn-husk dragonfly out of the tale’s own images. And beneath the three of us is the older source we only carry forward: the Zuni storytellers who kept “The Dragonfly’s Tale” alive for centuries.

Tapadh leat.

the disappearing interval

 A closing movement for “The Last Human Decision”

On August 12, 2026, in Huntsville, Alabama, the outgoing head of U.S. Space Command gave his last symposium speech and read out a list. Five capabilities the command says it will need between 2029 and 2033 to keep its edge over China in orbit: kinetic and non-kinetic space fires; means to counter an adversary’s low-orbit satellite constellations; refuelable satellites that can maneuver instead of husbanding the fuel they launched with; space domain awareness good enough for what the missile-defense world calls a “target-quality track”; and, third on the list, joint, integrated space command and control. Gen. Stephen Whiting was careful to name the genre. “This isn’t just a wishlist,” he said. “It’s a clear demand signal to several audiences.”

It is an interesting choice of words. Industry hears a requirement. Congress hears a justification. An adversary hears capability and intent. One transmission carries several messages simultaneously.

But one item deserves particular attention.

Whiting said the force must “enhance machine-to-machine connectivity to support decision-making and battle management of this global space fight on tactically relevant timelines.”

The important words may not be machine-to-machine. They may be tactically relevant timelines.

Because this essay has encountered that problem before.

In 1983, the Soviet Oko early-warning system told Stanislav Petrov that American missiles had been launched. The system was wrong. Petrov had something that increasingly sophisticated technology cannot guarantee:  time.

Time to look at the signal.

Time to compare it with what he knew.

Time to doubt the machine.

Time to decide.

More than two decades earlier, at NORAD, Air Marshal Roy Slemon confronted another extraordinary warning when the newly operational BMEWS system interpreted the rising moon as a massive incoming Soviet missile raid. He, too, occupied an interval between detection and action in which a human being could ask a profoundly important question:

Could the system be wrong?

The men mattered. Their judgment mattered. But something else mattered first.

The architecture gave them time to exercise judgment.

That distinction becomes important in orbit.

A contested space environment operates at velocities and distances that compress the interval between detection, interpretation and response. Sensors become faster. Networks become faster. Tracking becomes more precise. Machines exchange information directly because human communication increasingly becomes the slowest element in the chain.

There is nothing inherently sinister about this. Much of it is necessary. Machines can integrate sensor streams, maintain tracks and distribute information at speeds no human organization could match.

That is Licklider's promise still alive: machine and human doing different things well.

But there is another possibility.

As the system becomes faster, the machine may cease merely to provide information within the human decision window and begin determining the size of that window itself.

That is a different threshold.

The question is therefore not simply whether a human remains “in the loop.” That phrase may eventually tell us very little. A person can formally remain inside a decision architecture while possessing so little time, context or practical ability to intervene that the human role becomes largely procedural.

The better question is:  How much meaningful time remains between machine certainty and irreversible action?

Whiting does not tell us that humans are being removed from space battle management. His words actually preserve the opposite interpretation: machine-to-machine connectivity will support decision-making. That may prove to be exactly what is intended—machines managing the velocity of information while humans retain authority over consequential actions.

But the tension should not be dismissed.

Petrov's world contained minutes.

Slemon's world contained minutes.

The architecture Whiting describes is being designed for a domain in which minutes may be an eternity.

And that brings us back to the question underneath this entire essay.

For most of the history of automated warning, we have treated the human as the final safeguard against the machine's mistake. Sensors could fail. Algorithms could misclassify. Communications could distort. The human receiver remained the place where context, uncertainty and judgment could interrupt the chain.

But what happens when the speed required for the system to succeed becomes incompatible with the time required for that safeguard to function?

We should be careful here. The answer is not to romanticize slow human decision-making. Humans misinterpret signals too. They panic. They carry biases. They misunderstand adversaries. And in some circumstances hesitation can be as dangerous as haste.

The objective is not simply to preserve human delay.

It is to preserve meaningful human judgment.

That may prove to be one of the central design problems of machine-speed command and control: not merely making the system faster, but deliberately engineering places where speed stops.

A pause.

A threshold.

A requirement for corroboration.

A point at which uncertainty is allowed to remain uncertainty.

A place where the architecture itself says: not yet.

Petrov's pause was partly an artifact of the technological world in which he lived. We should not assume the next generation of systems will give it to us accidentally.

If we believe the pause matters, we may have to design it deliberately.

That is what makes the demand signal from Huntsville consequential.

Space Command is asking industry to build systems capable of operating on timelines increasingly inhospitable to unaided human cognition. That requirement may be unavoidable. It may even be essential.

But somewhere between the sensor and the weapon, between detection and decision, between machine speed and human responsibility, another requirement belongs on the list:  preserve the interval in which someone can still say no.

Petrov inherited that interval.

Slemon inherited it.

The next generation may have to build it.

 

— Samuel R. Lammie

 

A note on how this was made: This piece emerged through an iterative conversation among a human and two AI systems. I brought the underlying framework, questions, and professional perspective; Claude helped develop the initial argument and draft; ChatGPT challenged several of its stronger claims and helped reshape the piece around what I think is the more defensible question: not whether machines will replace human decision-makers, but whether the systems we design will preserve enough time for meaningful human judgment. I made the final choices. In a piece about human judgment in increasingly automated systems, that process seemed worth making visible.

 

A Return on the Investment

 On NSF, the National Academy of Sciences, and why I believe in the whole enterprise

In 1988, the National Science Foundation funded the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University at Buffalo — one of only three sites in the country, alongside Santa Barbara and Maine. That same fall, I walked into the Department of Geography to begin a master's degree. I did not know I was walking into something the NSF had just planted. I only knew that David Mark and Hugh Calkins were willing to advise a man who did not arrive empty-handed.

Because I had been doing the work of GIS for years by then — without a computer, and mostly without the name for it. As a Peace Corps conservation agent in the Guatemalan highlands, and later as a forester on the San Carlos and White Mountain Apache reservations, the daily work was spatial to the bone: siting nurseries by elevation, matching species to slope and soil, tracing a watershed by where the water wanted to go, laying land use over terrain over hydrology over the human communities living on it until the pattern surfaced. Call it analog GIS. Ian McHarg had already handed me the method — I read Design with Nature early, before Buffalo or right at its threshold — and his stacked transparencies, one ecological layer laid over another until the fitting ground for a thing declared itself, were exactly what I was doing in the field with paper and judgment and no machine at all: the layers stacked in the mind before any software could stack them for you. By 1986 I had made the jump to the digital tool, pushing the BIA Forestry Branch at White Mountain to trade its aging MOSS system for the new ARC/INFO out of a small company in Redlands. So I came to Buffalo to find the theory beneath a practice I already carried in my hands — not to be handed a practice I lacked.

I want to be plain about what that NSF grant became, because I am one of the things it became.

The three years I spent at Buffalo seeded a career of more than three decades in federal geospatial work. It carried me to Voyageurs, where the data on my desk turned wolf radiotelemetry into the territory polygons of twelve named packs — the early lineage of what people now call the Voyageurs Wolf Project. It carried me, eventually, to the Northern Region of the Forest Service, where I was responsible for the geospatial program across more than twenty-five million acres of Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas: fire, watersheds, timber, the whole living map. None of that was foreseeable in 1988. Nobody writing that NSF award could have drawn a straight line from a center in Buffalo to a wolf pack's boundary in the boreal north, or to a fire perimeter in the Bitterroot, or to the phone in your pocket that quietly knows where you are. That is not a failure of foresight. That is the nature of the thing. Basic science is funded precisely because you cannot yet see what it will grow into. And yet the ledger is not a mystery: the Federal Reserve reckons that federally funded research has returned somewhere between a dollar-fifty and three dollars on every taxpayer dollar spent since 1950. I am, in the most literal accounting, a return on that investment. So is the map that finds you.

Neil Shubin, who this July becomes president of the National Academy of Sciences, put it better than I can. He found a 385-million-year-old fossil — Tiktaalik, the creature caught in the act of crawling out of the water — and he is the first to say he could only find it because he had funding long enough to fail. Five or six years of failure, he tells it, before the discovery. He would not have survived in an industry that measured him quarter by quarter. Neither would the fossil. Neither, for that matter, would I. Long-horizon funding is not a luxury laid over science. It is the soil science grows in.

I spent my working life in that soil, and I know its economics from the inside. In the Peace Corps I raised two tree nurseries in the highlands of Baja Verapaz — some two hundred thousand seedlings in all. You plant a nursery for a rotation you will not personally cut. You put a seedling in the ground on behalf of a forester who is not yet born. That is silviculture, and it is also exactly what the National Science Foundation did in Buffalo in 1988 — put something in the ground whose harvest would fall to people it would never meet. I am one of that harvest. So are the students who came through the NCGIA training programs and now lead the discipline. So, indirectly, is anyone who has ever watched a map find them after an earthquake.

That is my case for the NSF, and it is not really an argument. It is a witness statement.

The National Academy of Sciences deserves its own word, because it does something different and just as necessary. Chartered by Congress under Lincoln in 1863, it is the body the nation turns to when it needs to know what the science actually says — advice built through a process designed to strip out conflict and bias and return evidence, not opinion. I know something about disciplined advisory work from my own years of it, at a different table than the Academy's — I served as the Eastern Region representative on the Forest Service's national Geospatial Advisory Committee. There is a particular integrity in an institution whose job is to reduce a policymaker's uncertainty without telling him what he wants to hear. In a country now awash in voices that reinforce what people already believe, an institution built to be a clean signal is not a relic. It is civic infrastructure as real as a bridge.

I have spent a career separating signal from noise — it is the frame I see the world through — so let me be precise about the present moment, because vagueness here would be its own kind of dishonesty. In the spring of 2025 the administration terminated roughly 1,752 National Science Foundation grants, some $1.4 billion of committed work, and proposed to cut the agency that seeded my entire discipline by 55 percent. The director resigned that April, in the fifth year of a six-year term; more than a year later the chair still sits empty. Congress, to its credit, refused the deepest cut and funded the Foundation near its old baseline — the institution has defenders yet, and I do not want to bury that — but the machinery was altered underneath the appropriation. New grants have gone out at a fraction of the historical rate. An entire research directorate was shuttered. Peer review, the thing that makes an award a merit award, was thinned from three readers to two.

The National Academy of Sciences has been hit in a quieter and more telling way. Its working arm, the National Research Council — the body that produces those gold-standard reports — lost more than forty federal contracts and around two hundred staff in a single year and is bracing for what its own leadership has called a radical downsizing. And some in Congress have begun to question whether the Academy's advice is truly nonpartisan at all, urging federal agencies to go find their science reviewed somewhere else. Read that twice. An institution chartered under Lincoln for the express purpose of being a clean signal is being told, by people who would plainly prefer the noise, that its signal cannot be trusted. That is not budget-trimming. That is an attack on the instrument itself.

You cannot claim the dividend while you burn the seed. You cannot ask for the fish while you defund the six years of failure that precede it.

And still — like Shubin, and I do not say this lightly — I am an optimist about the long run, and not out of naivety. Congress rejected the worst of the cuts; the appropriation held. The seed is not yet burned. I have reason to hope. I watched a grant made before anyone knew what it would do turn into a discipline, a career, a way of seeing. I have knelt in enough churches and stood in enough forests to believe that the curiosity behind all of this is not a policy line item but something closer to the human spirit itself — the same impulse that drew a boy to draw craters on the moon, the same one that drew me to read a landscape as a text. No administration plants or uproots that. It only decides, in its season, whether to keep the nurseries open.

I believe in science because I am, myself, a thing it grew. The only question worth arguing is whether we keep planting. I know which side of that I am on. I have a shovel, I have used it, and I am not done.

— Samuel R. Lammie

A note on how this was made. I wrote this essay in collaboration with Claude, the AI system built by Anthropic. The life in it is mine — the wolf packs, the nurseries, McHarg read early, the twenty-five million acres — and so is the judgment, and the decision to stand behind every word. Claude drafted and redrafted at my direction, ran down the current figures on the funding cuts and handed them to me to verify, and pushed back when I needed pushing back. When I told it my early forestry was really analog GIS in McHarg's overlay tradition, it took the correction and made the passage truer; when I asked it to drop a pine I had come to regret planting in Guatemala, it did. That is the arrangement I would want for this tool wherever it touches serious work: the human as witness and final judge, the machine as a tireless second pair of hands, and nothing consequential taken on faith. An essay in defense of human curiosity, made this way, is no contradiction. It is the disciplined version of the thing — the only version worth keeping.