You and I are meeting online today via what we all call “the cloud.” In reality, we’re communicating via data centers: massive, concrete, windowless buildings that process everything we do and are spreading furiously across the landscape. Just travel with staffers Stephanie Hanes and Riley Robinson today to “Data Center Alley” in northern Virginia, as well as to bucolic Carroll County, Maryland, which is bracing as our voracious appetite for greater processing power and more transmission lines encroaches. Even as people recognize what’s needed to maintain our highly connected lives, they’re asking an increasingly urgent question: Is no-holds-barred construction really the only way forward?

“These controversies are not just about energy and industry,” Stephanie writes. “They are about what we decide is progress, and how we imagine our future.”