COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT

Working Together to Protect the Land

Community engagement has been central to this project. We hope that by threading these global sites together, we can call attention to the shared struggles communities face across the tech supply chain, and that this increased visibility could help build solidarity through those in every community affected by digital wasting, in all its forms.

We have highlighted two communities below who are actively fighting against ongoing extraction and digital wasting. Both Northern Virginia and South Greenland have been marked as sacrifice zones for digital futures, and both communities are mobilizing to imagine alternative futures beyond the extractive ones imposed upon them. While our project is global in scope, our approach to each of our sites is neither local nor global, but rather situates each site as part of the same trans-local struggle against larger forces of power and capital. From Greenland to Virginia, these communities, and their plights, are deeply connected.

Amazon Extension Cord - Virginia

In 2014, the coalition to protect Prince William County formed in Northern Virginia to resist a 110-foot-tall, 230 kV transmission line from cutting through the foothills of the Bull Run Mountains and across the Rural Crescent. Residents soon learned the new line was required to service a single bulk-load customer: Amazon to service its two newly built data centers. Once the coalition prevented routes that would cut through the rural area, they redirected their efforts to fight alongside another coalition, the Alliance to Save Carver Road, composed largely of elderly homeowners who are descendants of freed slaves. After a long four-year battle, together, the community effectively petitioned the Virginia State Corporation Commission to require Dominion Energy to bury the transmission line along the Interstate Highway.

A farmer tends to a lettuce crop at the Upernaviarssuk Farm, just northeast of Qaqortoq. Upernaviarssuk is an experimental farm attempting to expand the agricultural possibilities in South Greenland.

Jesper Enevoldsen, head curator at the Narsaq Museum, gives a tour of the collection

Employees of Narsaq’s Neqi slaughterhouse take a break to pose for the camera. Neqi is Narsaq’s largest employer, and the center of South Greenland’s sizeable sheep farming industry.

Zane Griffin Tally Cooper speaks to students at Campus Kujalleq in Qaqortoq about connections between local mining projects and global demand for digital devices. Students share their personal feelings about growing mining interests in South Greenland

Jan Rehtmar-Petersen presents on the history, present, and future of Urani? Naamik to a group of students from the Yale School of Architecture. Jesper Enevoldsen translates

Graduate students from the Yale University School of Architecture relax after a grueling hike at Theodora Høegh’s Ulu Net Café, one of only two restaurants in Narsaq.

Graduate Students from the Yale School of Architecture, led by Billy Fleming and Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, wait for a ferry at the docks near the Narsarsuaq Airport

Kvanefjeld Project - Narsaq, South Greenland

While hopes for future development in Narsaq have been held hostage by the specter of the Kvanefjeld Project, South Greenland is a uniquely vibrant region simply brimming with possibilities. In partnership with the Narsaq International Research Station, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper continues to work making this project’s research legible and useful to communities in Narsaq and South Greenland more broadly. In 2022, we partnered with Dr. Billy Fleming, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, to build a design studio around this project’s themes. Cooper and Fleming led a class of ten graduate students from the Yale School of Architecture on a research trip to Narsaq, where they met with local community members and activists to better understand local futures beyond extraction.