Save Rural Texas: Our Land, Our Water, and Our Future Are Not a Blank Check for AI, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. September 2, 2026

Save Rural Texas: Our Land, Our Water, and Our Future Are Not a Blank Check for AI

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 2, 2026

I want to call attention to Save Rural Texas, a growing grassroots movement organizing to protect rural Texans’ land, water, property rights, infrastructure, and communities amid the extraordinary expansion of artificial-intelligence data centers. Its message should resonate across political lines: economic development does not entitle corporations to a blank check on our land, water, electricity, or local democracy.

Artificial intelligence is often described as though it exists somewhere intangible, in “the cloud.” But the cloud has an address. It occupies land. It requires substations, transmission lines, generating capacity, roads, enormous buildings filled with servers, cooling systems, and, depending on their design, potentially extraordinary amounts of water. 

Increasingly, that address is rural Texas.

A recent Texas Tribune analysis found that more than half of the data centers planned for Texas are slated for unincorporated areas, precisely where county governments possess substantially less land-use authority than municipalities (Cobler, 2026). In places such as Hood County, residents confronting multiple proposed data centers have raised concerns about water, electricity, noise, traffic, pollution, and the transformation of rural landscapes, only to discover how little authority local governments possess to regulate what is coming (Martinez et al., 2026).

In this vein, I encourage you to listen to this community conversation on the matter with James Talarico to get a sense of just how profoundly our communities, landscape, and wildlife are already being impacted.

This raises a fundamental question about property rights. What does private property mean when a rural landowner can defend the boundaries of a ranch or farm but possesses very little democratic authority over an enormous industrial complex next door? Property rights cannot mean only the rights of corporations wealthy enough to assemble thousands of acres. They must also include the rights of families whose homes, wells, farms, roads, landscapes, and communities surround these developments. 

Texas groundwater law still carries something of a survival-of-the-fittest logic through the rule of capture—what the Texas Water Development Board has memorably described as the “law of the biggest pump.”

This raises an obvious question: In an era of hyperscale AI development, what happens when the biggest pump is backed by the deepest corporate pockets?

Although groundwater conservation districts provide regulation in many places, Texas has no single statewide agency controlling groundwater production, and areas outside groundwater districts remain especially vulnerable (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, 2025; Texas Water Development Board, n.d.-a).

That legal framework developed long before anyone imagined hyperscale AI facilities. What happens when the proverbial biggest pump belongs not to another farmer or rancher but to one of the most heavily capitalized industries in the world?

Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas Research & Policy Center, and I explored precisely this problem in our essay, “Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the Myth of Limitless Growth.” Project Matador, being developed by Fermi America in partnership with the Texas Tech University System northeast of Amarillo, is envisioned as a massive artificial-intelligence and energy campus covering roughly 7,570 acres. It is situated in a region deeply dependent upon the already-stressed Ogallala Aquifer (Valenzuela & Metzger, 2026).

The Texas Water Development Board has documented long-term declines in the Ogallala because groundwater withdrawals in much of the region exceed recharge (Texas Water Development Board, n.d.-b). Yet Project Matador has secured access to substantial water supplies. Access does not necessarily equal daily consumption, and actual usage will depend on cooling technology, recycling, buildout, weather, and other factors. Nevertheless, the potential scale should command our attention.

Metzger and I made a simple point that bears repeating: paying more for water does not make it renewable. A corporation's capacity to purchase a scarce natural resource does not answer the larger public question of whether that resource should be consumed at that scale. Markets answer, Who can afford it? Democratic governance must answer, What must be preserved?

This is why Project Matador and Save Rural Texas belong in the same conversation. Both expose an emerging imbalance in which private capital can move faster than democratic governance and ecological knowledge. Texas communities too often learn about massive projects after land has been acquired, financing negotiated, nondisclosure agreements signed, and development plans advanced. The corporation knows what it needs to know about the community before investing; the community may know very little about the corporation until the project is difficult to stop (Goldenstein & Foxhall, 2026).

Governor Greg Abbott's August 3 directive ordering an audit of data centers seeking connections to the Texas electrical grid is therefore significant. It recognizes that the state needs better information about electricity use, water, cooling systems, ownership, incentives, and community impacts (Office of the Texas Governor, 2026). But an audit should be the beginning of reform, not its conclusion. Texas still needs meaningful groundwater protections, greater transparency, genuine community participation, clearer limits on public subsidies, and stronger authority for rural communities confronting projects capable of permanently transforming their landscapes.

People across Texas are struggling to find information about proposed data center projects popping up in their neighborhoods, like Mason McCallister, center, who has been on a crusade to get information. Meanwhile, local officials and even state elected leaders say they need more information to regulate the growing industry. Illustration by Mariana Ocejo for The Texas Tribune. Source images: Shelby Tauber, Leila Saidane, and Briana Vargas for The Texas Tribune; Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune

That is why I support Save Rural Texas. Its position is not anti-technology. Artificial intelligence may produce genuine advances in medicine, science, education, accessibility, climate research, and communications. But acknowledging those possibilities does not mean accepting every data center, at every location, at every scale, consuming whatever water and electricity its owners can purchase.

That is not innovation policy. It is the surrender of public decision-making to the idea that technological expansion is inevitable.

There must be places where Texas says yes to data centers, places where the answer is yes only under enforceable conditions, and places where the answer must be no—because an aquifer cannot sustain the demand, because the electrical grid cannot support it, because the public subsidy outweighs the demonstrated benefit, or simply because a community decides that thousands of acres of agricultural land should remain agricultural land.

Rural Texas is not vacant territory awaiting its highest bidder. It is home, agricultural production, groundwater, habitat, history, family inheritance, and community. Texas can embrace innovation and participate in the future of artificial intelligence without surrendering the principle that technology must remain accountable to people and place.

Our communities are not sacrifice zones. Our aquifers are not corporate reservoirs. And our land, water, and future are not for sale simply because someone arrives with the biggest check—or the biggest pump.

References

Cobler, P. (2026, August 14). Data center audit lacks specifics even as Gov. Abbott, industry leaders tout it. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/14/data-center-texas-audit-moratorium/

Goldenstein, T., & Foxhall, E. (2026, August 10). While data centers boom in Texas, their plans stay shrouded in secrecy. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/08/10/texas-data-centers-transparency-information/

Martinez, A., Tauber, S., Mahajan, A., & Ford, A. (2026, June 2). Eight data centers threaten to transform this small Texas county. Local officials say they have no power to stop them. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/02/texas-data-centers-hood-county-local-control-rural-water-power/

Office of the Texas Governor. (2026, August 3). Governor Abbott directs comprehensive data center audit. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-directs-comprehensive-data-center-audit

Save Rural Texas. (n.d.). Save Rural Texas. https://www.saveruraltexas.com/

Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. (2025). Groundwater regulation for private well owners. https://www.tceq.texas.gov/response/drought/groundwater_regulation.html

Texas Water Development Board. (n.d.-a). General groundwater and private water well frequently asked questions (FAQ). https://www.twdb.texas.gov/groundwater/faq/faqgwm.asp

Texas Water Development Board. (n.d.-b). Ogallala Aquifer. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/groundwater/aquifer/majors/ogallala.asp

Valenzuela, A., & Metzger, L. (2026, July 23). Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the myth of limitless growth. Environment Texas Research & Policy Center. https://environmentamerica.org/texas/center/articles/draining-the-ogallala-aquifer-for-ai-project-matador-and-the-myth-of-limitless-growth/

"Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party," by Thom Hartmann

Friends,

I couldn’t agree more with Diane Ravitch’s post amplifying Thom Hartmann’s urgent message: progressives must learn from the radical Right’s playbook. The pre-MAGA Tea Party didn’t just protest—they took over the GOP by starting at the grassroots, winning local Precinct Committee seats, and reshaping the party from within.

History shows the Democratic Party can deliver transformative change—FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society—but only if we organize strategically, from the bottom up. It’s our turn to take on this slow and patient work at the grassroots level. 

In the meantime, we need to support our dems who are out of state so that mid-decade redistricting doesn't come to pass. Here is a link where all can contribute their support: https://poweredxpeople.org/ 

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

Time for Progressives to Become Active In the Democratic Party

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 Diane Ravitch's blog

By dianeravitch on August 4, 2025

Thom Hartmann, accomplished author, blogger, and podcaster, urges progressives to learn from the success of the radical Right. The ultra-Right as for many years a fringe group, far from the power center of the Republican Party. Now the extremists control the Republican Party. Hartmann explains how they accomplished this feat and why progressives should do the same.

He writes:

What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobbly’s) the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?

Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.

The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.

It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights act, the voting rights act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.

Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.

Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.

Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.

There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.

If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.

And it starts in our own backyards.

Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s Successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.

The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”

Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:


“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”

So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?


“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”

As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.

It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.

It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.

They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.

So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.

And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.

That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked....

Diane Ravitch's blog © 2025.

BEST NEWS ALL WEEK. Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones wins runoff race for San Antonio Mayor

Friends:

Oh my goodness! This is BIG! Congratulations to Gina Ortiz Jones, who won the race for Mayor in San Antonio. Great write-up in today's Texas Tribune. So glad to see Rosie Castro, former Mayor and Rosie's son Julian Castro and the Democratic party weighing in, beating back conservative PAC dollars. San Antonio remains a progressive, compassionate city!

Best news all week. Enjoy the story!

-Angela 

Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones wins runoff race for San Antonio mayor

Jones, who served in the Biden administration, defeated Rolando Pablos, a former Texas secretary of state, in a high-profile, bitterly partisan contest.
By Andrea Drusch, San Antonio Report
June 8, 202511 hours ago



San Antonio’s next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship.

Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, with 54% of the vote on Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff.

Thanks to new, longer terms that voters approved in November, this year’s mayor and City Council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection.

The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month’s 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies.

At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect.

She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.

“With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it’s very heartening to see where we are right now,” she said shortly after the early results came in.

When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that “deep in the heart of Texas,” San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it’s a city built on “compassion.”

Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot evening.

At Pablos’ watch party, he said Jones’ overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn’t wind up materializing.

“The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,” Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites’ Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. “This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.”
An unusual race

After an overwhelmingly long ticket discouraged much voter interest in the first round, San Antonio’s mayoral race suddenly took on new significance when it came down to a runoff between Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate, and Pablos, a close ally of Texas’ GOP leaders.

The two City Hall outsiders boxed out a host of candidates with more local government experience, including four sitting council members, and sent local politicos scrambling into their partisan camps for an otherwise nonpartisan race.

It also drew major interest from state and national political interests, with Republican and Democratic PACs each targeting a position that could be a springboard for a future politician from either party.

Between the candidates and their supporting outside groups, the runoff had already drawn roughly $1.7 million in spending as of May 28 — the last date covered by campaign finance reports before the election.

Both 2025 mayoral runoff campaigns and their supporting outside groups spent big on mailers, text messages and TV ads.

At a recent Jones rally on the West Side, new Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Republicans’ willingness to sink unheard-of money into symbolic victories was enough to spur the Democratic state party to spend money on Jones’ behalf near the end of the runoff — in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.

“These races are supposed to be nonpartisan, they are the ones making them not nonpartisan,” Scudder said of Texas Republicans. “They are the ones that are coming in and flooding money into these races … and we have to stand on the front lines of that.”
Third time’s a charm

For Jones, who most recently served as Air Force Under Secretary in the Biden administration, this is the third high-profile race Democratic interests have expected her to win.

She came close in 2018 in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, losing by roughly 1,000 votes to Republican Will Hurd, then lost by a larger margin in the same district two years later to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio.

Both were multimillion-dollar, top-tier races in the battle for the U.S. House, and the losses stung so much that Jones chose to watch last month’s election results in private — even though she’d led every public poll leading up to it.

At her watch party on Saturday night, Jones was joined by the iconic local activist Rosie Castro and former Mayor Julián Castro, as well as representatives from an array of outside groups that helped her in the race: Texas Organizing Project, Vote Vets, and labor unions, to name a few.

Underscoring the growing progressive influence at City Hall, Councilmembers Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), Phyllis Viagran (D3), Edward Mungia (D4) and Teri Castillo (D5) also attended.

Another new progressive, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, was celebrating a narrow victory for District 6 on the city’s West Side.

The Democratic National Committee, Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Mayors Association all put out statements congratulating Jones.

“With her win in a heavily-Latino city, Mayor-elect Jones will continue the legacy of Mayor Nirenberg and move San Antonio forward,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From school boards to city councils to mayoral offices across the state, Texas voters are making their voice heard loud and clear: They want strong Democratic leaders who will fight for them.”
Bucking rightward shifts

Going into the night, conservatives controlled just one seat on San Antonio’s City Council, while Republican elected officials on the whole have been nearing extinction in Bexar County.

Nevertheless, Republicans saw a big opportunity in the nonpartisan city election.

Mayors of Texas’ major urban centers have steadily become less progressive as longtime incumbents termed out, and in the November election, President Donald Trump flipped two historically blue counties in South Texas — fueling greater intrigue about Hispanic voters becoming more Republican.

Pablos and his allies sought to cast Jones as a progressive zealot, with a PAC supporting him dubbing her the “AOC of Texas” in recent days and the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association threatening that she would defund the police (something Jones has said she doesn’t plan to do).






San Antonio mayoral candidate Rolando Pablos concedes to Gina Ortiz Jones



Pablos purposefully dropped the “Ortiz” from her name nearly every time he was in front of a microphone, and ran ads accusing Jones, who is Filipina, of pretending to be Hispanic.

It was an unexpected approach from a well-known business attorney with good relationships on both sides of the aisle, and deviation from the “unity candidate” he set out to be more than a year ago when describing plans for his first political venture in San Antonio.

Pablos said Saturday that he was proud of the race he ran, even when it got ugly. The crowd at his watch party even booed Jones when her face came on the TV screen after early results were announced.

“I think that my team did a great job. I think we ran an excellent campaign,” said Pablos, who vowed to continue looking for ways to serve the community. “What we did is we just laid everything out for everybody to look at and consider.”
A vision built from personal experience

Jones, whose family grew up leaning on housing vouchers and other forms of government support, crafted a campaign around protecting San Antonio’s most vulnerable residents — particularly in times of political uncertainty at the state and federal levels.

She was one of the most vocal critics of the city’s plans for a roughly $4 billion downtown development project and NBA arena for the San Antonio Spurs known as Project Marvel early in the race, saying she instead wanted to focus city resources on expanded Pre-K programs, workforce development and affordable housing.

It was a major contrast to Pablos, a former San Antonio Hispanic Chamber chair, who vowed to focus on bringing major corporations to San Antonio, and led even some left-leaning members of the business community to view her with uncertainty.

A surprising number of progressive elected officials either stayed out of the runoff entirely or publicly backed Pablos.

Jones seemed undeterred by that dynamic, saying often on the campaign trail that her own approach was rooted in personal experience with leaders who only listen to the privileged few.

She joined the military under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell more than two decades ago at Boston University, and will now be the city’s first mayor from the LGBTQ community.

“That experience [of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] showed me the importance of when you are in leadership, always having the humility to ask, ‘Who am I not hearing from? And why am I not hearing from them?” Jones said at a recent San Antonio Report debate.

Jones pointed to San Antonio’s ongoing struggle with poverty — despite major investments over many years to try to change that reputation.

“We’ve had, I think, too many leaders listening to too small a part of our community.”

Noam Chomsky: “We will overcome the coronavirus crisis, but we have more serious crises ahead of us”

We all would do well to heed the words and warnings of Dr. Noam Chomsky.  In Chomsky's words, I opt for  a "radical reconstruction of society and more humane terms, concerned with human needs instead of private profit." Neoliberalism is destroying the planet and thusly, our children's futures.  In contrast, "radical reconstruction" is anchored in democracy, workers' rights, and a healthy, positive orientation to the natural environment.

Thank you, Professor Chomsky for your much-needed voice and wisdom in this existential fight against, as you say, "the neoliberal plague" wherein the relentless attacks on government is part and parcel to the neoliberal agenda to hand over our futures to the market, to corporations, for each to fend for themselves.  We see this playing out before our very eyes right now as we see states compete for resources in the wealthiest nation in the world (read: Governors Fight Back Against Coronavirus Chaos: ‘It’s Like Being on eBay With 50 Other States’).

Do listen to the actual interview.  In reference to the potentiality of nuclear war, Chomsky notes that we can avoid this nightmarish future of "environmental catastrophe from which there is no recovery once we've gotten to that stage." The solution is to organize and to oppose neoliberalism and its ugly twin, authoritarianism. Thanks to Victor Huerta del Cid for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

#RadicalReconstruction #GrassrootsDemocracy #GreenNewDeal #Organize

Noam Chomsky: “We will overcome the coronavirus crisis, but we have more serious crises ahead of us”

30.03.2020 - Pressenza Athens

According to Chomsky, it is shocking that in this crucial moment Donald Trump is in the lead, whom he describes as a sociopath buffoon. “The coronavirus is serious enough, but it’s worth recalling that there are two much greater threats approaching, far worse than anything that’s happened in human history: One is the growing threat of a nuclear war and the other of course is the growing threat of global warming. Coronavirus is horrible and can have terrifying consequences, but there will be recovery. While the others won’t be recovered, it’s finished.”

The US power is overwhelming. It is the only country that when imposing sanctions on other states like Iran and Cuba, everyone else has to follow along. Also Europe that follows the master, Chomsky argues. These countries suffer from US sanctions, but nevertheless “one of the most ironic elements of today’s virus crisis is that Cuba is helping Europe. Germany can’t help Greece, but Cuba can help the European countries.” Adding the deaths of thousands of immigrants and refugees in the Mediterranean, Chomsky thinks that the civilization’s crisis of the West at this point is devastating.

Today’s rhetoric that refers to war is of some significance, according to Chomsky. If we want to deal with this crisis we have to move to something like wartime mobilization. For example the financial mobilization of the US for the Second World War, which led the country into far greater debt and quadrupled the US manufacturing and led to growth. We need this mentality now in order to overcome this short-run crisis and which can be dealt by rich countries. “In a civilized world, the rich countries would be giving assistance after those in need, instead of strangling them.” “The coronavirus crisis might bring people to think about what kind of world we want”.

Chomsky believes that the origins of this crisis a colossal market failure and the neoliberal policies that intensified deep socio-economic problems. “It was known for a long time, that pandemics are very likely to happen and it was very well understood, that there was likely to be coronavirus pandemic with slight modifications of the SARS epidemic. They could have worked on vaccines, on developing protection for potential coronavirus pandemics, and with minor modifications we could have vaccines available today.” Regarding Big Pharma, private tyrannies, which is impossible for the government to step in, it’s more profitable to make new body creams than finding a vaccine that will protect people from total destruction. The threat of polio ended with the Salk vaccine, by a government institution, no patents, available to everyone. “That could have been done this time, but the neoliberal plague has blocked that.”

The information was there, but we didn’t pay attention.

“In October 2019 there was a large-scale simulation in the US, in the world of the possible pandemic of this kind, but nothing was done. We didn’t pay attention to the information. On December 31st, China informed the World Health Organization of pneumonia and a week later some Chinese scientists identified it as a coronavirus and gave the information to the world. The countries in the area, China, South Korea, Taiwan, began to do something and it seems contained, at least for the first surge of crisis. In Europe to some extent, that also happened. Germany, which had move just on time, has a reliable hospital system and was able to act in its self-interest, without helping others but for itself at least to have a reasonable containment. Other countries just ignored it, the worst of them the United Kingdom and the worst of all was the United States.”

When we overcome this crisis somehow, the options available will range from the installation of highly authoritarian brutal States to radical reconstruction of society and more humane terms, concerned with human needs instead of private profit. “There is the possibility that people will organize, become engaged, as many are doing, and bring about a much better world, which will also confront the enormous problems, that we’re facing right down the road, the problems of nuclear war, which is closer than it’s ever been and the problems of environmental catastrophes from which there is no recovery once we’ve gotten to that stage, that it’s not far in distance, unless we act decisively.”

“So it’s a critical moment of human history, not just because of the coronavirus, that should bring us to awareness of the profound flaws of the world, the deep, dysfunctional characteristics of the whole socio-economic system, which has to change, if there’s going to be a survivable future. So this could be a warning sign and a lesson to deal with it today or prevent it from exploding. But thinking of its roots and how those roots are going to lead to more crises, worse ones than this”.

About the quarantine situation that today more than 2 billion people on the planet face, Chomsky points out that a form of social isolation has existed for years and is very damaging.

“We are now in a situation of real social isolation. It has to be overcome by recreating social bonds in whatever way can be done, whatever kind that can be helping people in need. Contacting them, developing organizations, expanding analyzation. Like before getting them to be functional and operative, making plans for the future, bringing people together as we can in the internet age, to join, consult, deliberate to figure out answers to the problems that they face and work on them, which can be done. It’s not face to-face communication which for human beings is essential. But it’ll be deprived of it for a while, you can put it on hold.”

Noam Chomsky concludes by saying: “Find other ways and continue with, and in fact, extend and deepen the activities carried out. Can be done. It’s not going to be easy, but humans have faced problems in the past”.