There is a common Internet idiom that commands "go touch some grass." It is typically used when someone online begins spouting logic that can only come by spending too much time in front of a screen. It is the phrase that came to my mind when I read that Google, hiding behind a shell company called Willowbend Capital LLC, is planning on building an AI data center east of Little Rock.

Data centers, from most accounts, are unpleasant. They fill the air with noise and pollute local waters while creating islands of heat in an already warming world. The artificial "mind" these data centers support requires as much power as a small city. And for all that, this data center will probably create about as many long-term jobs as Little Rock's Root Cafe, a great place for a burger that also supports a host of small Arkansas small farms.

It is no wonder the people of Maine recently put a freeze on data centers in their state.

Arkansas often seems to operate on the economic logic of a developing nation. We're glad to take the polluting waste-generating industries of other places in exchange for some modest tax payouts and low-wage jobs. In the case of data centers, we're acting as a colony of Silicon Valley, which is where the real profits extracted from our communities will go.

Given that Google is a corporate "person" that is largely online, it would be hard for it to go touch some grass and reconnect with reality. So, on a recent afternoon, I decided to touch some grass, or, as it were, some marsh sedges.

The site for the data center is in the Port of Little Rock, the city's taxpayer-funded industrial park. To get there from Sweet Home, the community that will be most directly impacted by the data center, one will pass an Amazon distribution center that was shuttered not long ago due to structural issues. I was not surprised. It was constructed on a wetland similar to that of the data center and built with all the speed and care of a delivery person tossing a package on a porch. It is just to its south that Google's data center will sit.

When my friend James and I arrived at the road leading into the site, the location was made clear by the new Entergy substation and high-voltage power lines leading into a swamp. Entergy, in the cocksure way of corporations used to getting their way, already put in the base infrastructure before the public comment period even opened.

I drove along a dirt path on a levee adjacent to the site, parked, and got out to explore. To the south was a beautiful lake filled with cypress trees. To the north there was a bottomland forest, the soil damp, the trees echoing with bird song. I heard a summer tanager singing, a bird whose males are bright red and females a mustard yellow. They winter in Central and South America, and many nest in forests like this one in Arkansas. It is always a wonder to witness a bird like this that has just arrived from a journey of hundreds of miles yet weighs no more than a cereal box.

Below us was a creek with a beaver dam across it. Sycamores and tupelos lined the water. As we walked along an old road, a copper-hued leopard frog jumped from the grass across our path. This is a still and quiet place, and yet full of life. I could imagine spending an afternoon fishing here, or just sitting, in the peaceful presence of the wild.

According to the public notice from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the data center's construction will require filling 16.8 acres of wetlands and over 6,000 feet of streams. When it is all said and done, the building will encompass 1.43 million square feet, not to mention parking lots and other auxiliary structures. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has reported that when the data center is up and running it will draw as much or more power than all the households in Little Rock.

From the place soon to be paved over I heard a burst of chatter. A tree near the path filled with nearly 30 orioles, both Orchard and Baltimore, blazing with yellow, orange, and rust. I had not seen so many orioles in one tree since a visit to High Island, Texas, a globally recognized birding hotspot, and yet here was a tree full of these colorful birds. The habitat here is suitable for them to nest in, and I imagine a few of them will settle in, building their distinctive hanging-basket nests from the branches of the waterside sycamores.

From the woods, I heard the call of a pileated woodpecker. They are large for their kind, some getting as big as crows, but are nothing like the ivory-billed woodpeckers that once ranged through these woods and elicited the exclamation "good lord!" from those who saw them. Now nearly extinct, the last universally accepted sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker was in April 1944 by the Audubon Society artist Don Eckelberry. He saw the birds in part of a large forest that stretched from east Texas to Louisiana.

The land was owned by Singer Sewing Machine Company, which sold the logging and milling rights to Chicago Mill and Lumber Co. The United States government offered to buy the land to protect the woodpeckers, but the companies refused. James Griswold, chair of the Chicago Mill and Lumber board, stated their position plainly: "We are just money-grubbers. We're not concerned with ethical considerations." The trees were cut and made into the sewing machine cabinets tucked away in many garages and flea markets, while the ivory-billed woodpecker is probably lost forever.

The corporate descendants of James Griswold are still chairing boards and leading companies willing to sacrifice communities and creation for the sake of money. And like those sewing machines, the data centers of today, once they have done their damage, will likely be abandoned in less than half a century. In Little Rock, we will have lost a wetland, and all its life, with little to show for it.

It is time that our leaders, corporate and governmental, leave the virtual worlds of their own creation, where money is the only measure of value. They need to touch some grass, to feel its smooth surface, to smell the miracle of life that is built from sunlight. If they did, then they might recognize that a wetland filled with tupelos and cypress, where beavers are hard at work building new habitats and hummingbirds are chattering from among the trumpet creeper, is far more valuable than all of Google's trillions. It would be a desecration to sacrifice such a place to the technological bubble of the moment.

Ragan Sutterfield is a writer and pastor in Little Rock. His most recent book is "Watch and Wonder: Birding as a Spiritual Practice." His opinions are his own.

Submit commentsThe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is accepting public comments regarding the Google Data Center (referred to as Project Boar) at the Port of Little Rock, through May 1.Email: Submit comments directly to michael.r.gala@usace.army.mil.Mail: Send written comments to: Little Rock District Corps of Engineers, Regulatory Division, PO Box 867, Little Rock, AR 72203-0867.Regulatory Request System: Comments can be submitted online via the USACE website at rrs.usace.army.mil/rrs.

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