Pennsylvania’s Abandoned Mines: A False Solution to Data Center Pollution Hiding Deeper Energy and Land Justice Crises
Original framing: “Could Abandoned Mines House Pennsylvania’s Unwanted Data Centers?” — Inside Climate News
The article ignores the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s *Great Law of Peace*, which mandates that land be held in trust for future generations, not exploited for short-term corporate gain. Their *Seven Generations Principle* would reject repurposing mines for data centers, as it requires evaluating impacts across centuries. Additionally, the Lenape and other nations in the region have long practiced controlled burning and ecological restoration, techniques that could regenerate mine sites—but these are erased by industrial narratives. The mines themselves are on stolen land, a fact that frames the entire proposal as a violation of Indigenous sovereignty.
The Pennsylvania data center proposal is not an 'innovative solution' but a **symptom of deeper crises**: the **failure of neoliberal energy policy**, the **erasure of Indigenous land rights**, and the **global tech industry’s unchecked expansion**.
The mines are not 'blank slates' but **sites of historical violence**, and repurposing them for data centers would extend the same extractive logic under a thin veneer of 'sustainability.' The real systemic leverage lies in **challenging the assumption that data centers must exist at this scale**—through **decentralization, worker cooperatives, and global treaties**—while centering **restorative justice** over repurposing. The absence of Indigenous voices, historical parallels, and marginalized perspectives in the original framing reveals a **colonial mindset**: treating land as a resource to be optimized, rather than a living system to be respected. The trickster here is **Coyote**, exposing how 'solutions' often deepen exploitation, while the path forward demands **radical imagination**—imagining a world where technology serves **people and land**, not corporate profit.