Near the nation’s capital, residents of Virginia’s Data Center Alley live among hundreds of gargantuan facilities—and feel the health toll. “A data center should not be a potential death sentence for a community’s health,” says Conner.

Capitalists have tried everything under the sun to make farming—and everything associated with it—­faster, cheaper, bigger, better. Call it the God complex in them. Time and time again we find out that these human interventions are disrupting an age-­old process. Instead of deferring to Indigenous expertise, the pursuit of money will always lead greedy people to believe they know better than anyone else. Capitalists’ hubris is not-­so-­slowly killing us all, including this planet we call home.

In a country where land and its resources are commodities, the exclusion and expulsion of Black and Indigenous people from the land economy has been an act of financial warfare. Take the fact that Black Americans own less than 1% of U.S. farmland, or that Indigenous households have approximately eight cents of wealth for every White household’s dollar. It’s important that we remember and reiterate that racial wealth gaps are not accidental, nor to be blamed on an alleged lack of ambition or work ethic.

Atlanta is a unicorn. A predominantly Black city with among the highest percentage of tree canopy of any major U.S. metropolis, the Georgia capital earns its nickname: the City in a Forest. But some of that greenery is now being threatened after the Atlanta City Council approved a $90 million complex for police and fire officials to be built on 85 acres of Atlanta forest land.

Leah Thomas, known affectionately as Green Girl Leah, is a leading voice in the environmental justice movement. A quick scroll down her feed is full of colorful carousels that make for truly accessible content. But don’t let that perfect aesthetic fool you: Thomas is all about data-driven and hard-hitting facts