Nobody selling this technology likes talking about what it costs the planet.
It gets sold as weightless. Cloud. Virtual. Generating. It runs on data centres drawing real power and real water, built in real places, trained and maintained by people whose work rarely gets named. There is a bill. Most of it is paid somewhere out of sight.
My work doesn't stand outside that. I use these tools too.
For every session booked, three indigenous trees are planted through Greenpop's landscape restoration work in Southern Africa (opens in a new tab).
In your name, in your company's name, or anonymously. Your call.
I have been planting trees for years — on my own along the Garden Route, through Greenpop Reforest Fest, and by paying for trees to be planted in memory of a friend. Hands in the soil, one way or another.
What you learn doing it is that an indigenous tree is not a piece of infrastructure. It binds soil and slows erosion, yes. It also feeds things and houses things. Birds, insects, the fungal networks under the ground that nobody photographs. It belongs to something already running, and it holds up its end.
Which is why this is about far more than shade. Shade is what a tree does for one person sitting under it. It is the smallest part of the job.
Modern industry has spent a long time drawing down from the ground and calling it productivity. AI is the newest, fastest version of that — and I'm one of the people using it.
I want to be precise about who I mean. Not the technology. The people designing it, the people selling it, the people taking the profit, and the people using it, which includes me. A tool has never decided anything. We decide.
I would rather go the other way. Put something back. Take part in the cycle instead of drawing it down. What nurtures us is worth nurturing back, and we are not standing outside nature managing it. We are made of the same material.
It is not an offset. Three trees do not cancel out a data centre. I am selling you a session, and this doesn't make that transaction clean — it makes the cost visible instead of invisible. That's the honest limit of what this can do.
It is not a cause attached to the business to make it look better. It is something I was already doing, brought inside the work instead of kept beside it.
What I have is a refusal to pretend the cost isn't there, a practice I already had long before AI, and a standing commitment to change course as better answers emerge.
No single business fixes this. It shifts only if enough of us look at it honestly and act where we actually can, individually and together.
So this is what I am doing. I would like to hear what you are doing.
There is a second part to this coming, to do with food waste, soil and urban harvests. I am working it out properly before I put it in writing.
One day the body I am walking around in goes back into the earth. Before then I would like to have put a great many trees in the ground.