Faulty reasoning signals

• Appeal to Emotion - 20.4%
• Availability Heuristic - 16.3%
• Negativity Bias - 11.1%

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Growing up in Brown County, Ohio , Karley Baurichter learned to appreciate the land her family descended from. Her grandfather, whom she affectionately called “Papaw,” would take her to nearby paylakes and teach her how to catch and clean fish. He’d tell stories of shooting possum and digging for frogs when he didn’t have any other food, his grandfather who played the fiddle and rode the rails, and how the family’s milk and moonshine business allowed them to buy the 100 acres in Brown County Baurichter would spend Christmases and Easters on. That’s the Appalachian landscape that Baurichter, a writer and stay-at-home mother in Higginsport, yearned to return to after a stint in Cincinnati for college. It’s also the environment that large corporations want to take over with the construction of hyperscale data centers that are at the forefront of the artificial intelligence bubble. “These big companies use the same playbook everywhere,” she said. “They assume that rural folk are dumb. They assume that rural folk are not going to resist, and they’re wrong.” Related AI data centers are taking over. These Americans are fighting back Baurichter is a volunteer who manages internal communications for the ConserveOhio campaign, a grassroots effort springing out of rural, southwest Ohio proposing an amendment to the state constitution that would ban the creation of data centers that use more than 25 megawatts of energy per month. For reference, 25 megawatts can power an estimated 15,000 to 25,000 homes. Private-practice attorney Nick Owens and Austin Baurichter, a practicing lawyer and Karley’s husband, began drafting the ConserveOhio petition in March to fight back against local plans to build large-scale data centers across the region. Though they didn’t expect to collect enough signatures to get the proposed amendment on the 2026 ballot, the petition committee has set a new goal of allowing Ohioans to vote on the future of data centers in their state in the November 2027 general election. They’re confident they will make it, with a swath of supporters from across the political spectrum and more than 105,000 signatures from all 88 Ohio counties collected in just three months since the campaign launch. “I firmly believe that the stakes are as high as they just about can get with all this, in terms of the sanctity of the environment, the sanctity of our government, our communities [and] our resources,” Austin Bauricther, who is also a petition committee member, told Salon. “The time to act is right now, and I’m not sure we’re going to have another chance.” “The time to act is right now, and I’m not sure we’re going to have another chance.” Ohio ranks sixth in the country for the highest number of data centers and is on track to become the second-largest data center hub in the Great Lakes region, with 77 more facilities slated for construction by 2030. Of the 224 throughout the state, 140 populate central Ohio, dotting the city center through to the edges of suburban cities like New Albany and Dublin, according to Data Center Map . An investigation from The Columbus Dispatch found that Columbus-area data centers used about 1.2 billion gallons of the city’s water between May 2025 and May 2026, the equivalent of about 21,000 central Ohio households of three to four people in the same span. In rural areas, residents fear the worst. Karley Baurichter said she worries that building hyperscale data centers in Brown and Adams counties will exhaust natural water systems, mislead rural workers into believing data center jobs will bring long-term prosperity, disrupt the ecosystem with noise, light and excess heat, and expose rural communities to greater surveillance. The centers’ likely usage for AI concerns her as an artist, while the companies’ erasure of cultural landmarks in the construction process upsets her as a longtime resident. “The hyperscale site that is proposed in Adams…They’re calling it the Buck Canyon site , but you want to know what that place actually is? Carter’s Holler. People were born and raised in Carter’s Holler, and people have written poems about Carter’s Holler,” Baurichter said, tearing up. “So I’m seeing a depressed area being further squashed because they can’t even get the name right, and I have a sneaking suspicion it might be because they might have to feel something about destroying a place if they get the name right.” Start your day with essential news from Salon. Sign up for our free morning newsletter , Crash Course. ConserveOhio was born out of existing, smaller community efforts in southwest Ohio to track an Amazon data center in Adams County along the Ohio River and unearth plans for the use of 1,000 contiguous acres in Brown County. When county residents went to a Mount Orab Village Council meeting in January to learn about why houses were being torn down for a secret project, the council and mayor told them they couldn’t share details because they had all signed non-disclosure agreements. As Owens, the Baurichters and other petition committee members like realtor Jessica Baker began searching local deeds, filing information requests with the county and researching the company, they learned the land was likely to be used for a hyperscale data center and began raising the alarm in local Facebook groups. Owens would help the Mount Orab Village Council impose a moratorium on data centers in late March that would pause the project for six months. Soon after, they’d hear of proposed projects in Butler and Clinton Counties and encounter local and state officials who they felt weren’t listening. The only solution Owens and Austin Baurichter could fathom then was creating a ballot measure. “To really wake up the public — the General Assembly and Capitol Square crowd — we had to go to the direct democracy route with a constitutional amendment,” Owens said. To get a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Ohio, citizens have to first create a petition committee of three to five individuals who will represent the effort, collect 1,000 signatures from qualified Ohio electors on their written petition and submit it to the state attorney general. Only after receiving certification from the attorney general, the Ballot Board and the secretary of state can the petitioners begin collecting signatures. The requirements present their own hurdle, with the state requiring that the signatures must total at least 10% of all the votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, come from 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties and, for each county, amount to at least 5% of the county’s total vote in the last governor’s race. ConserveOhio completed the first three steps by April, getting approval from the Ohio Attorney General to move forward with signature collection at the beginning of the month. Though the committee initially sought to meet the July 1 deadline to get the measure on the November ballot, they shifted their goal to the 2027 general election to ensure they could gain enough momentum. “That’s a Herculean effort to get that amount of signatures without paid circulators, and we were aware of that when we started this process,” Owens said, referring to the initial July 1, 2026 deadline. “I feel absolutely confident to say we will be on the 2027 ballot because we essentially have 13 months to get that done, and if you just look at our scale, the issue is not going away.” As of July 8, ConserveOhio has collected more than 105,000 signatures, amounting to 25% of the 420,142 required. The petition committee said the values on the tracker are often slightly understated due to the time it takes to collect signature sheets, process them, and update the website. Our Summer sale is on! Support Salon’s bold journalism. Annual members save 58% The campaign has taken off since its launch. It has raised thousands of dollars toward petition-printing and signage, and garnered more than 1,000 volunteers across the state, including nearly 100 leads who head teams in 70 counties, who often use their own resources to circulate the petition. The effort is also entirely bipartisan, uniting Trump-supporting Republicans with young socialists in a fight for their land and resources. Andrew Gula, a petition committee member and volunteer who collects signatures at state festivals, said that the public response has been overwhelmingly positive. Though he and other volunteers encounter the rare few who accuse them of working for the Chinese Communist Party, he also signs up thousands of Ohioans at each event and sparks interest from hundreds of out-of-state visitors who want to stop data centers in their tracks. “I’ve had so many people glance over and read the sign and do a double take, and then run over to the table, and I’ve had lots of people come over and say, ‘Thank you, thank you for what you’re doing,’ and I’m just standing there holding a sign,” he told Salon. Amid worries of the environmental impact, there’s “the relief of seeing somebody out there, just a normal person wearing a homemade T-shirt, saying, ‘Hey, we’re here. We’re just normal people. We think this is crazy. So just hop on board, let’s sign this petition, only takes a minute.’” Only 18 other states allow for residents to conduct direct-democracy ballot measures. The ConserveOhio committee members said they hope others will see their bipartisan movement — and its burgeoning success — and take matters into their own hands in their states. “Everyday Republicans and Democrats and everybody in the middle are united in preserving our way of life for future generations,” Owens said, adding a message to rural communities across the country. “To small communities sprinkled throughout the country, including in Ohio, you’re not alone. We’re united. And in those states in which you have the direct democracy route, go for it.” Read more about tech Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county Trump’s immigration crackdown feeds on private data. It’s just getting started AI doomerism is misplaced. Here’s what it will take to pop the bubble The post Everyday Americans are fighting to take down data centers appeared first on Salon.com .