I’ve been thinking about what happens when something gets our attention.
Perhaps I’ve been thinking about that for most of my life.
Environmental concerns have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, that sometimes meant making dioramas and taking them around to classrooms to bring attention to environmental issues. A little later it meant organizing a school walkout over the nuclear testing at Amchitka, and taking a tape recorder down to Centennial Square to record some of the people who were there and ask why they had come.
That recorder had already been part of something else important to me. I had used it to record my great-aunt, who was a pioneer, because I wanted to preserve what she knew and hear her tell it in her own voice.
Looking back, I think there was already a pattern there.
I wasn’t only interested in having an opinion. I was interested in documenting, asking questions, listening, and using whatever medium was available to bring attention to something that mattered.
And on it went.
Writing. Photography. Television and broadcasting. Film. Theatre. Workshops. Computers and websites. And later, as the technology changed again, streaming.
The technology kept changing. The impulse didn’t.
Some of my earliest lessons about attention came from theatre. Staging could draw the eye to one point and lighting to another, lifting one person or scene out of the darkness and wordlessly saying, Look here. This matters.
Sound could make us anticipate something we hadn’t yet seen or evoke an emotional response we hadn’t anticipated.
Later I discovered that writing could do much the same thing with words. Photography could choose what belonged inside the frame. Audio could ask us to stop and listen. Each medium had its own way of directing attention, not by telling people what to think, but by saying, there is something here worth noticing.
But I’ve also come to think that attention is only the beginning.
Once we have it, what do we do with it?
Do we simply become more certain of what we already believed?
Or can concern become an invitation to investigate?
What is actually happening?
What do we know?
What don’t we know?
Who is affected?
Who benefits?
Who pays?
How do we strengthen community rather than divide it?
And if there really is a problem:
What is a possible solution?
Not the solution.
A possible one.
That distinction matters to me.
Problems should be identified. Governments, corporations and institutions should be held accountable when they misuse resources, money or trust.
But accountability does not have to be the end of the conversation.
It can be the beginning of a better one.
Consider the data centre
Data centres use land.
They use electricity.
They use water, directly or indirectly, for cooling and related operations.
They require buildings, transmission infrastructure, fibre, equipment and enormous amounts of capital. Very large facilities can place very real demands on the communities in which they are built.
Those are not theoretical concerns.
They deserve scrutiny.
I’ve discovered over the years that sometimes the question itself can be mistaken for opposition.
Ask about an environmental consequence of an industry and someone may hear, You’re against the industry.
Ask about the limitations of a new technology and someone may hear, You’re against the technology.
I remember asking questions about dioxins and the paper industry years ago, after marrying into a family whose livelihood was closely connected to papermaking. The questions weren’t particularly popular.
But asking what an industry does with a pollutant doesn’t mean wanting to abolish the industry.
Nor does asking about the range of an electric vehicle mean being opposed to electric vehicles.
A question is not necessarily an objection.
Sometimes it is simply a question.
And so, with data centres, I find myself asking the question that comes before the environmental argument:
Why do we have them?
Take Victoria as an example.
Imagine an ordinary day.
Someone goes to hospital.
A physician needs access to medications, laboratory results, diagnostic images or previous treatment information.
Someone fills a prescription.
Someone goes to the dentist.
A child is registered for a programme.
Someone applies for a permit.
A business processes a credit card.
A person logs into a government service.
A ferry reservation is made.
A payment clears.
An identity is authenticated.
A record is retrieved.
And this is not a small amount of activity.
Island Health reported that its electronic health record alone was handling an average of 3.1 million transactions every day, with more than 22,000 healthcare professionals using the system. At the time those figures were compiled, the electronic record extended across 14 hospitals, 285 clinics, 18 long-term care facilities and seven community health service units.
(Island Health)
Those numbers are several years old, but that almost makes the point more effectively. The digital systems have continued to expand. Island Health subsequently moved its Cerner electronic health record from a Kamloops data centre to a Canadian remote-hosting environment, and the City of Victoria continues moving municipal functions online, including an expanded digital permitting system introduced in 2026.
(Medical Staff of Island Health)
All day long, information is being created, stored, transmitted, protected, backed up and retrieved.
Most of us barely notice.
We call it the cloud, which is a lovely word because it makes the whole thing sound weightless.
It isn’t.
I grew up in a darkroom
Perhaps that is one reason I think about this the way I do.
I grew up in a darkroom.
I understood the process.
An image was exposed. The film was developed. A negative was made. Light passed through it. An image appeared on paper. The paper went through chemistry. It was washed, dried and printed.
You could see the entire journey from exposure to finished photograph.
Nothing about it was invisible.
Film had a physical presence. So did negatives. So did prints. So did chemistry. So did storage.
And the chemistry mattered too.
People would ask me what I was doing with it when I was finished. How was I disposing of it? Was it simply going down a drain?
Thankfully, I had found ways of dealing with that responsibly. But the important thing, looking back, is that I was aware there was something to deal with.
Making an image had consequences beyond the image.
That awareness was also simply part of the household I grew up in. My mother recycled long before recycling became an ordinary household habit. She reused things rather than automatically throwing them away, preferred a reusable cloth to a paper towel, and we used VIP soap because of concerns about phosphates. There was an everyday awareness that what we consumed, what we discarded and where it went mattered.
Years later there was some irony in marrying into a family whose livelihood was closely connected to the paper industry and finding shipments of paper products arriving at our house. The contrast was hard to miss.
Perhaps all of that left me with a question that has followed me through almost everything I’ve done:
What does this choice require, consume, create and leave behind?
And yet people have often called me a techie.
I’ve always found that a little curious because, at heart, I’m an artist.
Technology has interested me because it changes what artists can do, and sometimes because it threatens what we have already learned to do.
I saw that very directly in photography.
I had a photography studio. Then came increasingly accessible scanners, digital images, digital cameras, online distribution and entirely new ways of making, copying and sharing photographs. Processes and businesses built around the old technology were threatened. Mine was one of them.
There is a temptation when that happens to treat the technology itself as the enemy.
But the technological change may be inevitable. Our response to it doesn’t have to be.
So I tried to do what I had always done.
Ask questions.
What is changing?
What is being lost?
What is being gained?
What part of the old way actually mattered?
How do we preserve the artistic integrity rather than simply preserve the technology that used to deliver it?
How do we use the new tools without allowing the tools to determine what the art becomes?
And how do we make those transitions without losing the communities that formed around the art in the first place?
Those are still the questions I’m asking.
Technology doesn’t rob us of being artists.
But it does ask us, sometimes rather forcefully, to reconsider how we use our tools, what we make with them, and what is worth preserving.
I’ve always been fascinated by the process behind things.
What happens between the idea and the finished thing?
What makes it possible?
What does it require?
What gets used along the way?
What is left when we’re finished?
And where does all of that go?
Those questions followed me from the darkroom into writing, photography, film, television and broadcasting, computers and websites, and later streaming.
The digital world changed the visibility of the process.
It didn’t eliminate the process.
We moved the filing cabinet
I remember working with paper records and microfiche.
Information occupied rooms.
Someone had to store it.
Someone had to retrieve it.
Someone had to protect it.
Someone had to decide what should be kept and what should be destroyed.
Storage had a shape.
When a filing cabinet was full, you knew it was full.
Digital storage changed that.
It gave us extraordinary access.
It made information portable.
It made records retrievable from another location.
It allowed a physician to see information without waiting for a paper file to arrive.
It allowed government services, banking, transportation and communication to become faster and more accessible.
And consider those Island Health numbers again: 3.1 million electronic health-record transactions in an average day. (Island Health)
Once, much of the information behind those transactions would have meant paper charts, folders, film, filing systems, clerical labour and physical archives.
Now millions of transactions can happen without most of us seeing a single filing cabinet.
But the information still has to live somewhere.
We did not eliminate the filing cabinet.
We moved it.
And then we made it very, very large.
If. Then. Therefore.
This is where I think a little simple logic helps.
If we expect healthcare, government, banking, transportation, education, commerce and communication to function digitally,
then the information those systems rely upon must be processed, transmitted and stored somewhere.
Therefore, we need physical digital infrastructure.
Some of that infrastructure is what we call a data centre.
That is a reality.
But it does not follow that every proposed data centre is a good idea.
It does not follow that every location is appropriate.
It does not follow that every use of electricity, land or water should be accepted.
Quite the opposite.
Once we acknowledge the need, we can ask much better questions.
If we need them, how should they function?
How much electricity should they consume?
Where should that electricity come from?
How much water should they use?
What kind of cooling should be permitted?
Where should these facilities be located?
Should valuable agricultural or environmentally sensitive land be used?
Should communities with constrained electrical systems be expected to support enormous new loads?
What should developers be required to disclose?
What should governments require in return?
What should communities receive?
Who bears the environmental and infrastructure costs?
Who receives the economic benefits?
Which uses are essential?
Which are optional?
Which are wasteful?
And how can the decisions we make about them strengthen the community rather than divide it?
That last question matters to me as much as the technical ones.
A development can affect electricity, water, land and public infrastructure. But the way we respond to it can affect something else too: the relationships between the people who have to continue living together after the decision is made.
And when someone proposes a particular data centre, perhaps the first question should be very simple:
What exactly is this one for?
That seems to me a much more useful conversation than simply being for data centres or against them.
And there is another question I find even more interesting:
How much better can we make them?
If a data centre uses water for cooling, can more of that water be captured, cooled and recirculated rather than continually replaced?
Can closed-loop systems dramatically reduce water consumption?
Can geothermal principles or underground heat exchange be used where conditions make sense?
Can newer forms of liquid cooling reduce demands on both water and electricity?
And if all of those computers are producing enormous quantities of heat, must we simply call it waste?
Could it heat buildings?
Could it heat water?
Could it support greenhouses or another nearby enterprise?
What technologies are emerging now?
What technologies haven’t been invented yet?
Environmental responsibility doesn’t have to mean that our imagination is limited to deciding what we must stop doing.
Sometimes the environmental question can be:
If we are going to do this, how could we do it dramatically better?
Perhaps the answer to the unintended consequences of innovation isn’t necessarily less innovation.
Sometimes it’s better innovation.
And then there is us
It’s relatively easy to ask a developer or government what they should be doing differently.
Perhaps we should be willing to ask ourselves the same kind of questions.
Not with guilt.
With awareness.
One photograph did not create a data centre.
One Facebook post did not build one.
One streamed film did not strain an electrical grid.
But collectively, we ask digital infrastructure to carry an extraordinary amount.
And because storage has become invisible, it is very easy to forget that it exists at all.
I grew up with film.
Film was finite.
You had a limited number of frames.
Processing cost money.
Storage took space.
There was a natural question embedded in the medium:
Is this worth photographing?
Today we can take four hundred images to find one.
We can shoot an hour of video to use thirty seconds.
We can keep every version.
We can upload all of it.
We can do it without ever seeing where it goes.
That freedom is extraordinary.
I’m grateful for it.
But perhaps freedom and discernment do not have to be opposites.
I take a photograph at an event.
Does everyone I know need to see it?
Maybe they do.
But perhaps it is really meant for six people. Could I send it directly to them?
If I want to share photographs with a particular group, is there a sensible way to distribute them to that group?
Do I need to photograph my lunch and put it online?
Perhaps I do.
But it is interesting that we’ve reached the point where we don’t often ask.
Do I need four hundred photographs of an afternoon?
Does every one of them need to be uploaded?
Does every version need to remain stored indefinitely?
Does this story need an hour of video?
Does it need video at all?
Would one photograph tell it?
Would audio?
Would writing?
There isn’t one correct answer to those questions.
The point is that we asked.
This isn’t about creating another list of things we shouldn’t do.
It is about becoming conscious of the choices we are already making.
And perhaps this is where the artist and the so-called techie meet.
The question isn’t simply What can this technology do?
It is:
What does this idea deserve?
Maybe bringing attention has more forms than we think
There was a time when bringing attention to an issue might have meant carrying a sign.
It still can.
But I can also carry a microphone just as I did all those years ago in Centennial Square and continue to do with Airstreaming and Gabe Radio.
I can ask the person who is concerned.
I can ask the person who supports the proposal.
I can ask an engineer.
I can ask an environmental scientist.
I can ask someone from government.
I can ask the developer.
I can ask the person living next door.
I can find the statistics.
I can compare the claims.
I can ask where the electricity will come from.
I can ask how much water will be used.
I can ask what resources are being committed and who will benefit.
I can ask who carries the cost.
And I can ask whether there is another way.
But perhaps I should also ask:
What could we do with what we learn that strengthens the community rather than dividing it?
Perhaps one of the most useful things I can do is make the information available to other people so they can think about it too.
That, to me, is participation.
Media can be a form of civic action.
It can hold people accountable.
It can bring attention to something.
It can complicate an easy answer.
It can let neighbours hear one another.
And it can make room for a possible solution.
Adventure • Imagination • Honour
These are three words I’ve used with my own children, with young people and in creative programmes for close to forty years. They have also become principles in the way I approach my own creative life.
They seem particularly useful here.
Adventure says: go and find out.
Don’t simply repeat what somebody else has said.
Take the microphone.
Visit the place.
Ask.
Listen.
Follow the question.
And don’t be afraid of the question simply because someone might mistake it for an objection.
Imagination says: what else could we do?
If something uses too much water, can we design it differently?
Can we capture and recirculate the water?
Can we use geothermal principles?
If something consumes too much electricity, can we make it dramatically more efficient?
If waste heat is being created, can somebody use it?
If we need data infrastructure, can we build better data infrastructure?
If we’re creating more digital material than we really need, can we become a little more intentional?
If technology changes an art form, can we use the new tools without surrendering the integrity of the art?
And if an issue is dividing a community, can we imagine ways of addressing it that bring people into the conversation rather than pushing them further apart?
What else haven’t we thought of?
How much better can we make this?
And Honour asks us to remember both the consequences and the people while we are doing all of this.
What does our choice require?
What does it consume?
What does it create?
What does it leave behind?
Who pays?
Who benefits?
And what happens to the community in the process?
The person who is worried about a development is our neighbour.
The person who supports it is our neighbour too.
So is the environmentalist.
So is the business owner.
So is the civil servant.
So is the engineer.
And so is the artist trying to understand what a new technology means for the thing they have spent a lifetime learning to do.
The person asking the difficult question is not necessarily an opponent.
Honour does not require agreement.
It requires consideration.
What medium does the idea deserve?
That is one of the questions I’m increasingly interested in through Airstreaming.
Sometimes an idea needs film.
Sometimes we need to see it.
Sometimes a photograph says something words cannot.
Sometimes writing is exactly the right medium.
And sometimes all we really need is a microphone, a voice and someone willing to listen.
Audio can travel lightly.
It can be intimate.
It leaves room for imagination.
It can be created almost anywhere.
Choosing audio when audio is enough is not deprivation.
It is discernment.
Perhaps it is even one small form of digital stewardship.
I’m not interested in rejecting technology.
I’ve spent too much of my life using it, adapting to it and discovering what becomes possible because of it.
But I am an artist first.
The technology is a tool.
The camera is a tool.
The microphone is a tool.
The computer is a tool.
The streaming platform is a tool.
And perhaps one of the responsibilities of the artist is not simply to use every tool available, but to ask what the idea deserves, what the medium contributes, and what our choices require of the world around us.
I’m interested in understanding technology well enough to use it thoughtfully.
And I’m interested in using the very media we now have at our disposal to understand the consequences of the world we’re creating.
Technology is extraordinary.
So perhaps the question is not whether we can stop the future from arriving.
Perhaps the question is how we participate in shaping it.
Bring attention to what concerns us.
Find the facts.
Ask better questions.
Hold people accountable.
Ask who pays and who benefits.
Examine our own part in the system.
Use our imagination.
Ask how the technology itself could become better.
Ask how we can preserve what is human and creative while the tools around us change.
Ask how our response can strengthen community rather than divide it.
Listen to our neighbours.
And when we find a real problem, bring something else with it:
a possible solution.
That is the kind of community I want to live in.
Not one without disagreement.
One curious enough to investigate it, adventurous enough to go looking for answers, imaginative enough to ask what could be better, and honourable enough to ask not only what our decisions will accomplish, but what kind of community they will leave behind.
Because when the technology changes, the tools change.
When the argument is over,
we still have to be artists.
And we still have to be neighbours.
