Our Environmental Impact

The process of making these Environmental Impact Statements accessible to the public has been a long one. Before the documents were presented on this website they were nestled in the Northwestern Transportation Library, stored physically on microfiche. To achieve this transformation we relied on several AI technologies, applied in different phases. In light of the content we present, a hypocrisy occurs. With the proliferation of AI, many parties have raised concerns over how its usage could negatively impact communities and the planet. Data centers, which power the digital world, have massive environmental impacts because of their large-scale energy and water consumption. In fact, if built using government money or on government land, a data center is exactly the type of project that would be debated in an EIS.

In the genesis of this project, we hoped to minimize the computational weight of our workflow. We wanted to quantify our environmental impact in a way that would be visually accessible to users. In many ways we fell short of those goals. With the constraints of time, skill, and the tools at our disposal we were not able to keep track of all the different ways AI was used. Our approach was flawed in that we attempted to quantify impact retrospectively, when we should have had guidelines and systems in place from the beginning. We also found difficulty in identifying a unified metric we could use across the different ways and layers AI was used in. It is also important to mention that the data that would be beneficial to this process is largely gatekept by corporate interests. While we take responsibility for our impact, the weight of unburdening the consequences of AI fall on the companies that profit from it.

Tension arises in the fact that without AI this project would be infeasible. The question then becomes, do the benefits outweigh the costs? We are obviously biased to say they do. Hopefully, access to this information will empower journalists, researchers, students, and community members to be engaged with local environments and our planet. Nevertheless, it is still important for future work in this field to continue finding ways to increase transparency and accountability and reduce impact.