TODAY Call the Box Elder County Commission to Save the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

When I've felt like death, I've gone to the birds

Even when I couldn’t drive myself, my dad would scoop me up in his white Subaru Outback and we would drive as far as my body could handle it. My brain and spine and neck would be alarming, migraine thrumming, cells pushed to exhaustion, as we jolted along the highway. But we were headed to one of the world’s great conferences of the birds, just a short trip away from life in bed—The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, path for millions of migratory birds.

Of the Refuge, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service writes:

Established in 1928 by Congress (Public Law 304) and the initial boundaries designated by Presidential Proclamation (2011) in 1932, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge was one of the first Refuge’s to join a system of lands now encompassing over 560 Refuge’s in the National Wildlife Refuge System - a network of lands set aside and managed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service specifically for wildlife. The Refuge and other wetlands associated with the Great Salt Lake provide critical habitat for migrating birds, over 250 species moving through this area annually by the millions to rest and feed. As part of the Bear River Bay, the Refuge is designated as a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site, a globally important shorebird area.

The Refuge lies along the eastern edge of the Pacific Flyway and the western edge of the Central Flyway, making it an important resting, feeding, and nesting area for birds in both flyways. Of more than 250 bird species that use the Refuge, 67 species nest on the Refuge. American avocets and black-necked stilts nest by the thousands along Refuge dikes and roads. White-faced ibis nest in dense emergent vegetation in large colonies of up to 10,000 birds. Migrant tundra swans can number in the tens of thousands in the spring and fall. The Refuge uses a complex system of dikes and water control structures to provide different water depths for a variety of waterbird species over the seasons.

On the ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Bannock, and Ute people, known as the Newe or Meme (the People), the Refuge lands and waters support diverse plant and animal species in a mosaic of mudflats, river deltas, brackish and freshwater marshes, temporary ponds, and uplands. Refuge uplands have scattered knolls that form a unique ecological community in the Bear River delta.

Today, Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge contains nearly 80,000 acres of marsh, open water, uplands, and alkali mudflats. The marshes and open water are managed using a complex system of dikes and water control structures to provide a variety of water depths suitable for the needs of different waterbird species. The Refuge is an excellent place to observe wildlife along a 12-mile Auto Tour Route, as well as enjoying hunting, fishing, and wildlife photography.

Enthusiastically supported by Governor Spencer W. Cox and led by a Canadian Shark Tank actor, the proposed data center is in the same county where the Refuge is, Box Elder. They are trying to ram it through the County Commission without so much as doing an environmental impact report. They’re doing it in the name of national defense. The Refuge is just one of the enormous costs of this hubris.

I probably don’t need to tell you how energy consumptive these AI data Goliaths are. This one would consume twice as much energy as the entire state of Utah. Cox wants to allocate already precious water in our drought-ridden state to feed machines, machines that will kill birds and cause the temperature of the entire region to rise. Summers in Utah are already pretty unbearable. I’m sick about the birds. They don’t need massive computers in their habitat. Computers shouldn’t consume water meant for humans.

The people who want this are shortsighted, unimaginably greedy, and exceedingly foolish. The heroic commissioners stopped a vote on the topic that was basically sprung on them without warning and moved the vote to Monday, May 4, still not enough time to consider what it would do to the state to drop an environmental bomb on it like this. I wrote an email to the Box Elder County Commissioners telling them how much Box Elder means to me and how much I hope that they will act to save the Refuge. Maybe you can take some time today to send a similar email. Long live the birds.

Utah has an ‘obligation’ to allow the building of massive data centers, Gov. Cox says

Utah is about to hand 40,000 acres to a Shark Tank guy, with zero studies.

Contact Box Elder County Commissioners:

Boyd Bingham — bbingham@boxeldercountyut.gov

Lee Perry — lperry@boxeldercountyut.gov

Tyler Vincent — tvincent@boxeldercountyut.gov

Phone: 435-734-3347

Meeting: Monday, May 4, 4 PM, Box Elder County Fairgrounds Fine Arts Building, Tremonton. Protest at 3.