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The Constitutional Case Against Exclusionary Zoning

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Friday, June 14, 2024

America is suffering from a severe housing shortage, and one of the main culprits is exclusionary zoning: regulations that restrict the amount and type of housing that property owners are allowed to construct on their land. Exclusionary zoning slows economic growth, severely limits economic mobility, and imposes burdens that disproportionately fall on racial minorities.No one simple solution to this problem exists. But a crucial tool may lie in the Constitution: the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The clause requires that, when the government takes “private property,” it must pay “just compensation” (usually the fair market value of the property rights taken). As we argue in a forthcoming Texas Law Review article, because exclusionary zoning severely restricts property owners’ right to use their land, we believe that it qualifies as such a taking, and is therefore unconstitutional unless the government pays compensation. Consistent enforcement of this interpretation would severely constrain exclusionary zoning, limiting it to cases where policy makers believe the benefits are worth the costs of paying compensation—and where they have the resources to do so.Just as there is substantial cross-ideological agreement on the policy aspects of zoning reform, there can be similar broad agreement on the constitutional dimension of this issue. One of us, Ilya Somin, is a libertarian sympathetic to originalism. The other, Joshua Braver, is a progressive living constitutionalist. We differ on many things, but agree here.The most significant type of exclusionary-zoning restriction is single-family-home zoning, which restricts housing construction in an area to homes that house only one family. Some 70 percent of all land zoned for residential use in the United States is limited to single-family residences only. Other types of exclusionary-zoning restrictions in many areas include minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, height restrictions, and more.[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]Exclusionary zoning severely reduces the housing supply in many jurisdictions, thereby preventing people from moving to areas where they could find better jobs and educational opportunities. It also increases homelessness by pricing poor residents out of the housing market. Exclusionary zoning causes enormous harm.In an important recent study, the economists Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga found that abolition of zoning restrictions in seven major urban areas would increase America’s GDP by almost 8 percent. That’s because zoning blocks many people from moving to areas where they would be more productive. Even many current homeowners in severely restricted areas stand to benefit from zoning reform. They can gain from the resulting growth and innovation, and from lower housing costs for their children, among other things. For these and other reasons, curbing exclusionary zoning unites progressives, such as the members of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and the former Obama CEA chair Jason Furman, with libertarian-leaning free marketeers like Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bryan Caplan of George Mason University.Exclusionary zoning also has a horrible history of racism and classism. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court ruled that explicitly zoning neighborhoods by race was unconstitutional. But as scholars such as Richard Rothstein and Jessica Trounstine have documented, many jurisdictions got around the decision by enacting facially neutral laws that effectively excluded poor minorities by making it impossible for them to afford housing in the area. Many jurisdictions similarly priced out white poor people as well.In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld such practices in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company, despite the district court’s warning that doing so would empower local governments “to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life.” Judge David C. Westenhaver of the Ohio District Court also presciently warned that the decision would result in racial segregation. Euclid was a terrible mistake, one the Supreme Court should fix.And it can do so: When the Bill of Rights was enacted, in 1791, the right of private property was generally understood to include a right not just to exclude, but also to determine the use of that property. William Blackstone, the great British jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England enormously influenced the founding generation, famously wrote that “the third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of property: which consists in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions” (emphasis added). Use undoubtedly included building a house on one’s own property. Blackstone’s formulation was echoed by many of the American Founders, including—most notably—James Madison, the principal author of the takings clause. At the time of the founding, like today, housing was one of the most common uses of land.Some originalists argue that the Bill of Rights, when applied to state and local governments, should be interpreted as understood not in 1791, but in 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment extended the limitations of the Bill of Rights to the states. In the 1868 understanding, the takings clause protected the owner’s right to use his property at his own discretion even more clearly than in 1791. In his influential 1868 treatise on constitutional law, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cooley wrote that “any injury to the property of an individual which deprives the owner of the ordinary use of it is equivalent to a taking, and entitles him to compensation.” Prominent federal- and state-court takings decisions around the same time also emphasized the centrality of the right to use, including the Supreme Court’s famous 1871 decision in Pumpelly v. Green Bay Company. All significant forms of exclusionary zoning constrain the right to use, and therefore at least presumptively violate the takings clause.Not every restriction on an owner’s right to use qualifies as a taking under the original meaning. Regulations that fit within the so-called police-power exception were not considered takings. Although the police-power exception has never been precisely defined, it generally applies to regulations that protect against significant threats to health and safety, such as fire, flooding, environmental harms, and disease. The exact scope of the police-power exception is a matter of long-standing controversy, but at the very least it permits regulations that protect people against severe dangers, such as public-health sanitation requirements, building-code regulations to prevent the spread of fire, and the disposal of toxic waste and other industrial pollution. Few exclusionary-zoning restrictions fit within any plausible view of the police-power exception. Their main effect is to exclude low-income people, not protect against environmental or health threats.For those who reject originalist arguments, the main alternative framework of living constitutionalism, championed by many progressives, may be more persuasive. Living constitutionalism is a broad tent of theories about how to interpret the Constitution, which permits change over time. We argue at length elsewhere that multiple versions of the theory support striking down exclusionary zoning. Here we focus on the representation-reinforcement theory.      In Democracy and Distrust, the classic defense of representation-reinforcement theory, John Hart Ely argued that judicial review was not a counterweight to democracy, but rather a crucial facilitator of it. For democracy to prosper, voting rights and freedom of speech must be protected. The problem is that incumbent politicians and their constituents, seeking to maintain their power, would legislate to prevent political competition. Because these threats to democracy are produced by democracy, the solution must lie outside it, namely judicial review.Exclusionary zoning is a perfect example of Ely’s fear of the “ins choking off the channels of political change to ensure that they will stay in and the outs will stay out.” In this case, the “ins” are a community’s current residents, and the “outs” are potential residents. To protect their home values and other perceived interests, residents vote for politicians who will work to prevent construction that would entice newcomers. The latter have no opportunity to participate in the process. Some evidence suggests that NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) resistance to housing construction is caused by ignorance of housing economics, rather than by self-interest. Either way, insiders block outsiders.The standard solution to a lack of representation is simple: grant representation. But it is neither reasonable nor feasible for outsiders to have representation in a local government where they do not and may never live. The question is how to find another way to provide representation reinforcement for potential residents.      Here, judicial review can give voice to voiceless outsiders by providing them an opportunity to acquire the housing they need to move in, an idea Ely partly anticipated when he endorsed judicial protection for a “right to relocate.” The takings clause is the best option for this, given that it is the constitutional provision that protects private property from uncompensated government interference. And it is thus best fitted to the problem of exclusionary zoning, which limits the use of property.Ely also worried that certain groups, especially racial minorities, were subject to prejudice and hostility by the majority and would systematically be on the losing end of political decisions. The racist and classist history of zoning provides further justification for using judicial review to curb the practice, especially because the disproportionate impact on racial minorities persists to this day.      The Supreme Court has multiple plausible pathways to using the takings clause to restrict exclusionary zoning. Currently, zoning restrictions are analyzed under a nebulous three-factor balancing test first established in the 1978 Penn Central decision, which requires courts to consider the “economic impact of the regulation on the claimant,” the “extent to which the regulation has interfered with distinct investment-backed expectations,” and the “character of the government action.” In practice, this much-criticized test is usually applied in a highly deferential way.The best and simplest alternative to this framework would be for the Supreme Court to rule that exclusionary zoning is a “per se” (which is to say, automatic) taking, thus removing the need to consider the Penn Central factors. That would restore the original meaning, enforce the requirements of major living-Constitution theories, and minimize uncertainty. Alternatively, the Court could instead apply the Penn Central standards in a less deferential way.The Court could make exclusionary zoning a per se taking or ratchet up scrutiny under Penn Central without categorically overruling Euclid. For complex historical reasons, Euclid never directly addressed the takings clause. Technically, it upheld exclusionary zoning only against challenges under the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court could simply confine Euclid to due-process clause cases, while making it clear that different standards apply to takings clause challenges.If all or even a large proportion of exclusionary zoning gets invalidated under the takings clause, the effect could be very great. If courts hold that a regulation is a taking, the government must pay compensation. Local governments could not afford to pay compensation to the many thousands of property owners whose rights are restricted by exclusionary zoning. They would likely be forced to repeal or severely constrain most exclusionary-zoning rules.[Jerusalem Demsas: The only force stronger than polarization? Rising home prices]YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) zoning-reform advocates have won important legislative successes, but those victories are still confined to a minority of jurisdictions. By contrast, a Supreme Court ruling would apply to the entire nation. To be sure, local governments are experts at evading restrictions on their authority. But even somewhat imperfect enforcement of constitutional constraints on exclusionary zoning could have a significant impact by eliminating the most sweeping and effective exclusionary policies, and the most obvious ways to circumvent restrictions. If the judiciary effectively addressed the most blatant forms of exclusionary zoning, advocates could focus on the next frontier of zoning issues.In addition, stronger judicial enforcement of the takings clause could curb the use of state constitutional protections for local government autonomy to stymie zoning reform. The recent dubious California court decision striking down S.B. 9—a significant law limiting single-family zoning—is a notable example.Historically, successful constitutional-reform movements have combined legal and political action, and have not relied on one to the exclusion of the other. That was true for the civil-rights movement, the women’s-rights movement, advocates of same-sex marriage, gun-rights advocates, and others. The cross-ideological YIMBY movement should do the same.

America is suffering from a severe housing shortage. A crucial tool may lie in the Constitution.

America is suffering from a severe housing shortage, and one of the main culprits is exclusionary zoning: regulations that restrict the amount and type of housing that property owners are allowed to construct on their land. Exclusionary zoning slows economic growth, severely limits economic mobility, and imposes burdens that disproportionately fall on racial minorities.

No one simple solution to this problem exists. But a crucial tool may lie in the Constitution: the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment. The clause requires that, when the government takes “private property,” it must pay “just compensation” (usually the fair market value of the property rights taken). As we argue in a forthcoming Texas Law Review article, because exclusionary zoning severely restricts property owners’ right to use their land, we believe that it qualifies as such a taking, and is therefore unconstitutional unless the government pays compensation. Consistent enforcement of this interpretation would severely constrain exclusionary zoning, limiting it to cases where policy makers believe the benefits are worth the costs of paying compensation—and where they have the resources to do so.

Just as there is substantial cross-ideological agreement on the policy aspects of zoning reform, there can be similar broad agreement on the constitutional dimension of this issue. One of us, Ilya Somin, is a libertarian sympathetic to originalism. The other, Joshua Braver, is a progressive living constitutionalist. We differ on many things, but agree here.

The most significant type of exclusionary-zoning restriction is single-family-home zoning, which restricts housing construction in an area to homes that house only one family. Some 70 percent of all land zoned for residential use in the United States is limited to single-family residences only. Other types of exclusionary-zoning restrictions in many areas include minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, height restrictions, and more.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

Exclusionary zoning severely reduces the housing supply in many jurisdictions, thereby preventing people from moving to areas where they could find better jobs and educational opportunities. It also increases homelessness by pricing poor residents out of the housing market. Exclusionary zoning causes enormous harm.

In an important recent study, the economists Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga found that abolition of zoning restrictions in seven major urban areas would increase America’s GDP by almost 8 percent. That’s because zoning blocks many people from moving to areas where they would be more productive. Even many current homeowners in severely restricted areas stand to benefit from zoning reform. They can gain from the resulting growth and innovation, and from lower housing costs for their children, among other things. For these and other reasons, curbing exclusionary zoning unites progressives, such as the members of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and the former Obama CEA chair Jason Furman, with libertarian-leaning free marketeers like Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bryan Caplan of George Mason University.

Exclusionary zoning also has a horrible history of racism and classism. In Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the Supreme Court ruled that explicitly zoning neighborhoods by race was unconstitutional. But as scholars such as Richard Rothstein and Jessica Trounstine have documented, many jurisdictions got around the decision by enacting facially neutral laws that effectively excluded poor minorities by making it impossible for them to afford housing in the area. Many jurisdictions similarly priced out white poor people as well.

In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld such practices in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company, despite the district court’s warning that doing so would empower local governments “to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life.” Judge David C. Westenhaver of the Ohio District Court also presciently warned that the decision would result in racial segregation. Euclid was a terrible mistake, one the Supreme Court should fix.

And it can do so: When the Bill of Rights was enacted, in 1791, the right of private property was generally understood to include a right not just to exclude, but also to determine the use of that property. William Blackstone, the great British jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England enormously influenced the founding generation, famously wrote that “the third absolute right, inherent in every Englishman, is that of property: which consists in the free use, enjoyment, and disposal of all his acquisitions” (emphasis added). Use undoubtedly included building a house on one’s own property. Blackstone’s formulation was echoed by many of the American Founders, including—most notably—James Madison, the principal author of the takings clause. At the time of the founding, like today, housing was one of the most common uses of land.

Some originalists argue that the Bill of Rights, when applied to state and local governments, should be interpreted as understood not in 1791, but in 1868, when the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment extended the limitations of the Bill of Rights to the states. In the 1868 understanding, the takings clause protected the owner’s right to use his property at his own discretion even more clearly than in 1791. In his influential 1868 treatise on constitutional law, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cooley wrote that “any injury to the property of an individual which deprives the owner of the ordinary use of it is equivalent to a taking, and entitles him to compensation.” Prominent federal- and state-court takings decisions around the same time also emphasized the centrality of the right to use, including the Supreme Court’s famous 1871 decision in Pumpelly v. Green Bay Company. All significant forms of exclusionary zoning constrain the right to use, and therefore at least presumptively violate the takings clause.

Not every restriction on an owner’s right to use qualifies as a taking under the original meaning. Regulations that fit within the so-called police-power exception were not considered takings. Although the police-power exception has never been precisely defined, it generally applies to regulations that protect against significant threats to health and safety, such as fire, flooding, environmental harms, and disease. The exact scope of the police-power exception is a matter of long-standing controversy, but at the very least it permits regulations that protect people against severe dangers, such as public-health sanitation requirements, building-code regulations to prevent the spread of fire, and the disposal of toxic waste and other industrial pollution. Few exclusionary-zoning restrictions fit within any plausible view of the police-power exception. Their main effect is to exclude low-income people, not protect against environmental or health threats.

For those who reject originalist arguments, the main alternative framework of living constitutionalism, championed by many progressives, may be more persuasive. Living constitutionalism is a broad tent of theories about how to interpret the Constitution, which permits change over time. We argue at length elsewhere that multiple versions of the theory support striking down exclusionary zoning. Here we focus on the representation-reinforcement theory.      

In Democracy and Distrust, the classic defense of representation-reinforcement theory, John Hart Ely argued that judicial review was not a counterweight to democracy, but rather a crucial facilitator of it. For democracy to prosper, voting rights and freedom of speech must be protected. The problem is that incumbent politicians and their constituents, seeking to maintain their power, would legislate to prevent political competition. Because these threats to democracy are produced by democracy, the solution must lie outside it, namely judicial review.

Exclusionary zoning is a perfect example of Ely’s fear of the “ins choking off the channels of political change to ensure that they will stay in and the outs will stay out.” In this case, the “ins” are a community’s current residents, and the “outs” are potential residents. To protect their home values and other perceived interests, residents vote for politicians who will work to prevent construction that would entice newcomers. The latter have no opportunity to participate in the process. Some evidence suggests that NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) resistance to housing construction is caused by ignorance of housing economics, rather than by self-interest. Either way, insiders block outsiders.

The standard solution to a lack of representation is simple: grant representation. But it is neither reasonable nor feasible for outsiders to have representation in a local government where they do not and may never live. The question is how to find another way to provide representation reinforcement for potential residents.      

Here, judicial review can give voice to voiceless outsiders by providing them an opportunity to acquire the housing they need to move in, an idea Ely partly anticipated when he endorsed judicial protection for a “right to relocate.” The takings clause is the best option for this, given that it is the constitutional provision that protects private property from uncompensated government interference. And it is thus best fitted to the problem of exclusionary zoning, which limits the use of property.

Ely also worried that certain groups, especially racial minorities, were subject to prejudice and hostility by the majority and would systematically be on the losing end of political decisions. The racist and classist history of zoning provides further justification for using judicial review to curb the practice, especially because the disproportionate impact on racial minorities persists to this day.      

The Supreme Court has multiple plausible pathways to using the takings clause to restrict exclusionary zoning. Currently, zoning restrictions are analyzed under a nebulous three-factor balancing test first established in the 1978 Penn Central decision, which requires courts to consider the “economic impact of the regulation on the claimant,” the “extent to which the regulation has interfered with distinct investment-backed expectations,” and the “character of the government action.” In practice, this much-criticized test is usually applied in a highly deferential way.

The best and simplest alternative to this framework would be for the Supreme Court to rule that exclusionary zoning is a “per se” (which is to say, automatic) taking, thus removing the need to consider the Penn Central factors. That would restore the original meaning, enforce the requirements of major living-Constitution theories, and minimize uncertainty. Alternatively, the Court could instead apply the Penn Central standards in a less deferential way.

The Court could make exclusionary zoning a per se taking or ratchet up scrutiny under Penn Central without categorically overruling Euclid. For complex historical reasons, Euclid never directly addressed the takings clause. Technically, it upheld exclusionary zoning only against challenges under the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court could simply confine Euclid to due-process clause cases, while making it clear that different standards apply to takings clause challenges.

If all or even a large proportion of exclusionary zoning gets invalidated under the takings clause, the effect could be very great. If courts hold that a regulation is a taking, the government must pay compensation. Local governments could not afford to pay compensation to the many thousands of property owners whose rights are restricted by exclusionary zoning. They would likely be forced to repeal or severely constrain most exclusionary-zoning rules.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The only force stronger than polarization? Rising home prices]

YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) zoning-reform advocates have won important legislative successes, but those victories are still confined to a minority of jurisdictions. By contrast, a Supreme Court ruling would apply to the entire nation. To be sure, local governments are experts at evading restrictions on their authority. But even somewhat imperfect enforcement of constitutional constraints on exclusionary zoning could have a significant impact by eliminating the most sweeping and effective exclusionary policies, and the most obvious ways to circumvent restrictions. If the judiciary effectively addressed the most blatant forms of exclusionary zoning, advocates could focus on the next frontier of zoning issues.

In addition, stronger judicial enforcement of the takings clause could curb the use of state constitutional protections for local government autonomy to stymie zoning reform. The recent dubious California court decision striking down S.B. 9—a significant law limiting single-family zoning—is a notable example.

Historically, successful constitutional-reform movements have combined legal and political action, and have not relied on one to the exclusion of the other. That was true for the civil-rights movement, the women’s-rights movement, advocates of same-sex marriage, gun-rights advocates, and others. The cross-ideological YIMBY movement should do the same.

Read the full story here.
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My father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, died fighting for a clean Nigeria. Thirty years on it’s time to stop sucking on the dirty teat of the oil cash cow | Noo Saro-Wiwa

In 1995, as one of the Ogoni Nine, he was hanged after protesting against Shell’s oil pollution. With education and a move towards renewable energy, we can honour his legacyEarlier this year, my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his eight colleagues, known collectively as the Ogoni Nine, were pardoned for a crime they never committed. After peacefully campaigning against environmental degradation of Ogoniland in Nigeria at the hands of the oil industry, they were imprisoned by the military dictatorship on false charges of treason and incitement to murder, following a trial condemned by the international community as a sham.On 10 November 1995, the men were executed by hanging. Continue reading...

Earlier this year, my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his eight colleagues, known collectively as the Ogoni Nine, were pardoned for a crime they never committed. After peacefully campaigning against environmental degradation of Ogoniland in Nigeria at the hands of the oil industry, they were imprisoned by the military dictatorship on false charges of treason and incitement to murder, following a trial condemned by the international community as a sham.On 10 November 1995, the men were executed by hanging.Thirty years on, the government of President Bola Tinubu granted a pardon to the Ogoni Nine. While our families welcome this as a step in the right direction, it is not enough – a pardon suggests that these nine innocent men committed a crime. Although the court of public opinion recognises their innocence and courage, it is important that they are officially exonerated. The refusal of successive governments to do this speaks volumes. It speaks of a corrupt cabal that has ruled Nigeria directly and indirectly over the past few decades and continues to stifle any attempt to honour my father’s memory.But that legacy can never be suppressed. Ken Saro-Wiwa and thousands of brave Ogoni protesters ensured that Shell Oil pulled out of Ogoniland in 1993. Since then, the multinational has been held to account for some of its environmental damage and was ordered to pay compensation for oil spills including the disaster in Bodo in 2008. Shell subsequently divested from the Niger delta earlier this year and sold its onshore leases to a local consortium (which raises further concerns about their liability for past oil spills). My father’s death led to the creation of the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (Hyprep), which continues its task of cleaning up the hydrocarbon pollution in Ogoniland, albeit with mixed results.Pollution levels are still unacceptably high. Militancy, the sabotaging of pipelines and illegal refining have further damaged the environment, and now, high unemployment and the cost of living crisis have compelled some Ogonis to call for the resumption of oil extraction. While I fully sympathise with their wishes, welcoming back the oil companies would be an insult to my father’s memory and a huge step backwards. The industry, even if properly managed, is not labour intensive and it benefits a relative few. Its continued extraction elsewhere in the delta offers a cautionary tale. Last year, I drove through the Obrikom oil and gas field, about 50 miles (80km) northwest of Ogoniland, where I saw crude petroleum gushing furiously from a broken pipe and into a river. The sight of that blackened water was horrifying. That the pipeline wasn’t fixed for months was even more appalling.Activists from Extinction Rebellion protest outside the Shell Centre on the 25th anniversary of the execution of the Ogoni Nine, 10 November 2020 in London, UK. Photograph: Mark Kerrison/In Pictures/Getty ImagesIronically, I witnessed that leak while on my way to visit a renewable energy project that I was involved with as a consultant. A solar power plant has now been installed in Umuolu, enabling the remote riverine community to rely entirely on clean energy. There are no oil spills and no tensions about who will be employed by the energy company. Residents fish and farm the land, which is how it should be. Why suck on the dirty teat of the petroleum cash cow when we have incredible natural assets? In September, I visited a conservation project, the SW/Niger Delta Forest Project, where Rachel Ashegbofe Ikemeh and her team are doing a sterling job of conserving a slice of the Apoi Creek, a primary rainforest that is home to the last most-significant population of the Niger Delta red colobus monkey, bush pigs, the African pied hornbill, water chevrotains, the mangabey and other species. The forest is a glimpse into our beautiful ecological past and a preview of what could be regained under the right stewardship. Ikemeh’s team have successfully educated the Apoi community about protecting the forest and its wildlife rather than eating it.My father understood that our wealth lies in our ecology and in education, and that we could one day move away from oilIt is an education sorely needed elsewhere in the region. Just a few weeks ago, on an Ogoni Facebook group page, I saw a photo of a live giant leatherback turtle that had been dragged into a village after washing up on shore. I was amazed and excited, yet in the comment section people discussed whether it should be eaten or not. Meanwhile, in places such as Tobago and Costa Rica, tourists pay thousands of dollars to come and see turtles like that. The animal’s appearance on our shores, though rare, proves that wildlife still exists in the Niger delta’s lushly vegetated creeks, rivers and beaches. Accommodating nature and farming is a huge conundrum, of course, but there’s an economy that can be created by leveraging our natural assets. Crucially, it requires moving towards non-polluting, renewable energy that can power our small businesses cleanly and reliably, and boost the economy.My father understood that our wealth lies in our ecology and in education, and that we could one day move away from oil, especially if it enriches everyone else at the Ogonis’ expense. I remember him showing me and my siblings around the garden in our house in Port Harcourt, teaching us about the flowers and the fireflies. Through the Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation, which will relaunch in the coming months, I hope we can boost education and bring solar energy to Ogoniland and gradually transform it into a place of non-oil entrepreneurship, agriculture and natural beauty that will honour my father’s legacy.Noo Saro-Wiwa is the author of Looking For Transwonderland (Granta) and Black Ghosts: A Journey Into the Lives of Africans In China (Canongate)A Month And A Day: A Detention Diary, by Ken Saro-Wiwa, is published by Ayebia Clarke Publishing

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White House Begins Mass Firing of Federal Employees Amid Shutdown War

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Russell Vought, the White House budget director, announced that the administration has begun firing federal workers en masse.Vought warned last week that “consequential” layoffs were forthcoming amid the ongoing government shutdown. On Friday, he tweeted, “The RIFs have begun,” referring to “reductions in force.”Vought, as anticipated, is now using the government shutdown to cull the federal workforce, fulfilling Trump’s recent vow to cut “vast numbers of people out,” as well as slash programs that he says Democrats “like.”An unnamed White House official told MSNBC’s Vaughn Hillyard, “We expect thousands of people to unfortunately be laid off due to the government shutdown.” CNN’s Alayna Treene reports that a White House official said that fired workers have begun receiving notices and, “It will be substantial.”Agencies poised to be affected, according to Politico, include the Departments of the Interior, Treasury, Commerce, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency.Reacting to Vought’s four-word social media announcement, the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 government workers, shot back: “The lawsuit has been filed.” The AFL-CIO told Vought, “America’s unions will see you in court.”This story has been updated.

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A.I. Is on the Rise, and So Is the Environmental Impact of the Data Centers That Drive It

The demand for data centers is growing faster than our ability to mitigate their skyrocketing economic and environmental costs

A.I. Is on the Rise, and So Is the Environmental Impact of the Data Centers That Drive It The demand for data centers is growing faster than our ability to mitigate their skyrocketing economic and environmental costs Amber X. Chen - AAAS Mass Media Fellow September 29, 2025 8:00 a.m. Amazon data centers sit next to houses in Loudoun County. Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images Key takeaways: A.I. and data centers As the demand for A.I. increases, companies are building more data centers to handle a growing workload. Many of these data centers are more than 30,000 square feet in size and use a lot of power and water. Gregory Pirio says he never would have moved to his townhome in Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County had he known that the area would soon be at the epicenter of a data center boom. Pirio—who works as the director of the Extractive Industry and Human Development Center at the Institute of World Affairs—moved to the county, just about an hour’s drive outside of Washington, D.C. 14 years ago. Back then, he recalls the place being filled with forested areas and farmland, with the occasional sounds of planes flying in from Dulles. “It was just really beautiful, and now it has this very industrial feel across it,” he says, adding that one can now drive for miles and just see data centers. Data centers are buildings that house the infrastructure needed to run computers, including servers, network equipment and data storage drives. Though they’ve been around since 1945 with the invention of the first general-purpose digital computer, in the past few years there has been an explosion in data center development to match the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. Over the past year, the environmental consequences of A.I.—specifically its most popular generative platforms like ChatGPT—have been under intense scrutiny. Last July, NPR reported that each ChatGPT search uses ten times more electricity than a Google search. In March 2024, Forbes reported that the water consumption associated with a single conversation with ChatGPT was comparable to that of a standard plastic water bottle. The emissions of data centers are only projected to go up, especially as companies look to employ A.I. on users’ behalf. For example, in May, Google announced A.I. overviews, a new user enhancement strategy that uses A.I. to create succinct summaries based on websites associated with a Google search query. Those queries and others like it on different platforms increase the need for additional data centers, which will require more and more energy. What are data centers? Data centers come in a variety of sizes. According to a 2024 report by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, they can range from smaller centers—integrated into larger buildings for internal use by companies—that are on average less than 150 square feet, to hyperscale centers which are operated off-site by large tech companies to facilitate large-scale internet services. On average, hyperscale data centers are 30,000 square feet, although the largest of these data centers can reach sizes of well over one million square feet. As of 2024, more than half of the world’s hyperscale data centers were owned by tech giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Large data centers, particularly hyperscalers, are the data center of choice for companies looking to operate A.I. platforms, due to their high computing power. Clusters of large data centers are strategically chosen based on proximity to clients, electricity costs and available infrastructure. For example, data centers have been running through Northern Virginia since the advent of the internet in the mid-1990s because of the area’s cheap energy, a favorable regulatory system and proximity to Washington. Northern Virginia holds the highest concentration of data centers in the world at over 250 facilities. Across the state, data centers are now near schools, residential neighborhoods and retirement communities. According to Ann Bennett, data center issues chair at the Sierra Club’s Virginia Chapter, new data centers that have been popping up across the area are of an entirely different scale and era. “These are bigger, taller,” Bennett says. “They’re pretty much only building hyperscalers.” How do data centers consume energy? To power the digital world—from day-to-day digital communications, websites and data storage—data centers require energy to power the hundreds of servers within them. With the advent of more hyperscale data centers being built to support A.I., data center energy use has increased. Benjamin Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, breaks the high energy consumption of A.I. into two categories. First, there is the training that A.I. models undergo, in which tens of thousands of graphics processing units, or GPUs, within a data center must consume large datasets to train the parameters of more powerful A.I. models. Second, once an A.I. model is trained, it performs inference—or the process of responding to user requests based on its training. According to Lee, every word that a user provides to an A.I. model is processed to figure out not only what the word means but the extent to which that word relates to all other words that have been fed into the model. Thus, as more words increase processing time, more energy is consumed. “Fundamentally, A.I. uses energy, and it doesn’t care where that energy is coming from,” Lee says. Data centers mostly get their energy from whatever local grid is available to them. Globally, because most electric grids still rely heavily on fossil fuels, A.I. increases greenhouse gas emissions, says Shaolei Ren, a computer engineer at the University of California, Riverside. Virginia, for example, is part of PJM grid, for which the primary fuel source is natural gas. According to Noman Bashir, a computer engineer at MIT, because data centers are huge power consumers they often disrupt electric grid infrastructure, which can decrease the lifespan of household appliances, for example. In addition, Bashir notes that grid infrastructure must be updated when each new data center comes in—a cost that residents are subsidizing. In a 2025 report, the Dominion Energy found that that residential electric bills are projected to more than double by 2039, primarily due to data center growth. Already, the technology industry has seen a growth in emissions, mostly fueled by data centers. In July, Amazon reported that its emissions rose from 64.38 million metric tons in 2023 to 68.25 million metric tons in 2024—the company’s first emissions increase since 2021, primarily due to data centers and the delivery fleet it uses. Google, too, reported that its 2023 greenhouse gas emissions marked a 48 percent increase since 2019, mostly due to data center development and the production of goods and services for company operations. How else does A.I. impact the environment? Another dimension of A.I.’s environmental footprint is its water consumption. To put it simply, Ren explains that these powerful computers that run A.I. also get extremely hot. So, to keep them from overheating, data centers cool them with power air conditioning systems that are run by water. Water that is heated by computers is moved to massive cooling towers on top of a data center, and then is circulated back in. A data center’s direct water consumption is attributed to the water that evaporates during this process. This water loss is then left to the whims of the water cycle. “You don’t know how long [the water] will take to return or whether it will return to a specific geographic location,” Lee explains. “So where water is scarce, it’s a concern.” In 2023, data centers in the U.S. directly consumed about 66 billion liters of water. Bashir adds that the industry’s environmental impacts can also be seen farther up the supply chain. The GPUs that power A.I. data centers are made with rare earth elements, the extraction of which Bashir notes is resource intensive and can cause environmental degradation. How will data centers affect power consumption in the future? In order to meet A.I.’s hunger for power, companies are looking to expand fossil fuel energy projects: In July, developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline—a natural gas system that spans about 303 miles across Virginia—announced that they were considering a plan to boost the pipeline’s natural gas capacity by 25 percent. Earlier this year, the Atlanta-based electric utility Southern Company announced that it would backtrack on its previous announcement to retire a majority of its coal-fired power plants, citing growing demand from data centers. And when the grid can’t satisfy their needs, Lee says that data centers are now increasingly developing their own power sources—whether from renewable energy sources like nuclear or fossil fuel-based power plants. Pirio lives about 150 yards away from a data center that is not connected to the local grid. Instead, it’s powered by natural gas turbines with back-up diesel generators. He says that the noise pollution associated with the data center’s gas turbines is a huge problem for him and his neighbors, describing the din as a constant, humming sound. “Many of the neighbors, we got decimal reader apps, and it was off the charts. … They were like 90 decibels near our house,” he says. Pirio explains that he can no longer open the windows of his house on cool evenings because of the noise. He says another neighbor put mattresses against their window to block the noise. Pirio says he and his neighbors have no way of assessing what the emissions coming from the gas turbines are. “There’s just not structure for us to know, and they’re pretty much invisible,” he says. The Environmental Protection Energy notes that the presence of a fossil fuel-based power plant can significantly degrade air quality and emit toxic heavy metals like mercury into the atmosphere, harming local populations’ health. Vantage Data Centers, the company which runs the data center near Pirio, says it has installed Selective Catalytic Reductions (SCRs) which, according to its website, can reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from diesel generators by up to 90 percent. Resident health and quality of life are not the only factors associated with data centers developing their own power sources. Even when data centers produce their own energy, Lee says the grid still provides them with significant backup infrastructure—which as Bashir explains, can still overwhelm the grid, causing it to become more unreliable for residents. How can A.I.’s data centers be made more sustainable? According to Lee, the renewable energy sector is simply not growing fast enough to meet the needs of A.I. While some analyses position data centers to grow at a rate of as much as 33 percent a year, the World Economic Forum says that global renewable energy capacity grew by 15.1 percent in 2024. Bashir and Lee both emphasize that much of the data center growth we are seeing is not being built on actual need, but speculation. According to Bashir, because tech companies are building data centers at such a rapid pace, these new centers will inevitably be powered by gas generators or other forms of fossil fuel, simply because infrastructure for widespread renewable energy does not yet exist. Beyond improving investments into renewable energy, Lee says that working toward algorithmic optimization is another way for A.I.’s data centers to lessen their carbon footprint. In a 2022 article, Lee—in collaboration with researchers at Meta—identified ways in which optimizing A.I. models can also improve sustainability. For example, researchers identified “data scaling”—in which a model is fed more data sets, resulting in a larger carbon footprint—as the current standard method to improve model accuracy. With a more efficient algorithm, energy costs could be significantly reduced. Lee emphasizes that those working toward creating more efficient A.I. must also focus on achieving a lower carbon footprint. Bashir adds that education remains an important tool to cutting back on A.I.’s emissions. “People can be educated on what are the A.I. tools available at their disposal,” he says. “How can they optimize their use? And [we need to tell] them of all the negative impacts of their use, so that they can decide if a particular use is worth this impact.” Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

Education
Energy
Forests

The Vatican Knows an ‘Industrial Revolution’ When It Sees One

To update Catholic teaching for the age of AI, Pope Leo should revisit the 19th century.

The pope didn’t take long to explain why he picked the name Leo. Two days after his election, he cited his inspiration: the preceding Pope Leo, who led the Church while the West confronted the social and economic disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. The world now faces “another industrial revolution,” Leo XIV said last month, spurred not by mechanized manufacturing but by artificial intelligence. In particular, he noted the challenges that AI poses to “human dignity, justice, and labor,” three concerns that his 19th-century namesake prioritized as he responded to the technological transformations of his time.In 1891, Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, a moral and intellectual framework that addressed the growing inequality, materialism, and exploitation ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. The current pope has signaled that AI’s arrival demands a similar intervention; if the earlier Leo’s tenure is any indication, it could be the most ambitious and enduring project of Leo XIV’s papacy. Rerum Novarum will be a guiding influence.Leo XIII insisted in Rerum Novarum that labor is both “personal” and “necessary” for each individual, and that societies should protect the dignity of their workers as they pursue economic growth. Idolizing capital widens inequality, hence the “misery and wretchedness” that many employers inflicted on much of the working class during the Industrial Revolution. The pope stated that socialism was no solution, but that employers must guarantee their workers reasonable hours, just wages, safe workplaces, and the right to unionize.[Randy Boyagoda: The pope’s most revealing choice so far]These statements by the Church gave crucial backing to workers’ movements and civic organizations fighting for labor protections. In Europe, Rerum Novarum consolidated Catholic support for workers and bolstered the political influence of labor unions, many of which adopted Christian principles to advance their cause. Leo XIII’s interventions played a significant role in the United States as well. The pope supported American worker movements such as the Knights of Labor, and inspired Catholic reformers including Monsignor John Ryan, whose advocacy for a universal living wage influenced architects of the New Deal. Leo XIII also commissioned the likes of Saint Frances Cabrini and Saint Katharine Drexel to expand their missionary work, ultimately seeding hospitals, schools, orphanages, and public-housing complexes that addressed injustices faced particularly by immigrants, Black Americans, and Native Americans.Rerum Novarum also had a profound influence on the Catholic Church itself. The document inaugurated what’s now known as modern Catholic social teaching, an expansive intellectual tradition that emphasizes the common good, social justice, human dignity, and concern for the poor.Now Leo XIV has an opportunity to update this tradition for the age of AI. Like his namesake, he could marshal the Church’s intellectual, cultural, and institutional resources, helping build a moral consensus about how to use a new technology that threatens to degrade humanity rather than serve it. Vice President J. D. Vance recently conceded that America is not equipped to provide this kind of leadership, but that the Catholic Church is.Leo has plenty of material to work with. Earlier this year, two administrative bodies within the Vatican produced an advisory document called Antiqua et Nova, which uses the Catholic intellectual tradition to argue that AI cannot engage with the world as a human can. For one thing, no technology has the capacity “to savor what is true, good, and beautiful,” the authors write. Lacking interiority and a conscience, AI cannot authentically grasp meaning, assume moral accountability, or form relationships. As a result, the document contends, developers and users must take responsibility for AI products, ensuring that they don’t exacerbate inequality, impose unsustainable environmental costs, or make decisions in war that could result in the indiscriminate loss of life.[Tyler Austin Harper: What happens when people don’t understand how AI works]Both of us have contributed to initiatives that seek to better understand AI in the context of Catholic social teaching. Mariele is a member of an AI research group within the Vatican that recently published a book, Encountering Artificial Intelligence, that considers the ethical impacts of AI in politics, education, the family, and other spheres of life. In health care, for example, AI can help improve access to certain kinds of assessment and treatment, but it can also perpetuate disparities through biases reflected in data, or disrupt the relationship between patients and health-care professionals. We are both part of a cohort at the University of Southern California investigating the ethical and social implications of transhumanism, especially as it intersects with AI. The group consists mostly of theologians and Catholic bioethicists, but we have found that many scholars working outside the Catholic tradition are eager to engage with the Church’s thinking on these issues. Encouraging such collaboration will be crucial for Leo.As was true of the technology of the Industrial Revolution, AI will become most dangerous when economies prioritize profit and technological development over human flourishing and the dignity of labor. Left unregulated, markets will continually choose efficiency at the expense of workers, risking widespread unemployment and the dehumanization of the kinds of work that manage to survive. If the social order does not put technology at the service of people, markets will put the latter at the service of the former.Although the Church may not have the same influence in the secular 21st century that it did in the 19th, there are signs of a possible Catholic resurgence—particularly among young people—that could help Leo reach a wider audience. Just as it did during the first Industrial Revolution, the Church has a chance to help safeguard work that is dignified, justly paid, and commensurate with human flourishing. The pope’s new name is a hopeful sign that this responsibility won’t go unmet.

Education
Health
Science

Luna: A moon on Earth

MIT students and faculty designed and fabricated a control room for the first lunar landing mission since the Apollo era — an achievement in design and engineering.

On March 6, MIT launched its first lunar landing mission since the Apollo era, sending three payloads — the AstroAnt, the RESOURCE 3D camera, and the HUMANS nanowafer — to the moon’s south polar region. The mission was based out of Luna, a mission control space designed by MIT Department of Architecture students and faculty in collaboration with the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Inploration, and Simpson Gumpertz and Heger. It is installed in the MIT Media Lab ground-floor gallery and is open to the public as part of Artfinity, MIT’s Festival for the Arts. The installation allows visitors to observe payload operators at work and interact with the software used for the mission, thanks to virtual reality.A central hub for mission operations, the control room is a structural and conceptual achievement, balancing technical challenges with a vision for an immersive experience, and the result of a multidisciplinary approach. “This will be our moon on Earth,” says Mateo Fernandez, a third-year MArch student and 2024 MAD Design Fellow, who designed and fabricated Luna in collaboration with Nebyu Haile, a PhD student in the Building Technology program in the Department of Architecture, and Simon Lesina Debiasi, a research assistant in the SMArchS Computation program and part of the Self-Assembly Lab. “The design was meant for people — for the researchers to be able to see what’s happening at all times, and for the spectators to have a 360 panoramic view of everything that’s going on,” explains Fernandez. “A key vision of the team was to create a control room that broke away from the traditional, closed-off model — one that instead invited the public to observe, ask questions, and engage with the mission,” adds Haile.For this project, students were advised by Skylar Tibbits, founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, associate professor of design research, and the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD)’s assistant director for education; J. Roc Jih, associate professor of the practice in architectural design; John Ochsendorf, MIT Class of 1942 Professor with appointments in the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and founding director of MAD; and Brandon Clifford, associate professor of architecture. The team worked closely with Cody Paige, director of the Space Exploration Initiative at the Media Lab, and her collaborators, emphasizing that they “tried to keep things very minimal, very simple, because at the end of the day,” explains Fernandez, “we wanted to create a design that allows the researchers to shine and the mission to shine.”“This project grew out of the Space Architecture class we co-taught with Cody Paige and astronaut and MIT AeroAstro [Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics] faculty member Jeff Hoffman” in the fall semester, explains Tibbits. “Mateo was part of that studio, and from there, Cody invited us to design the mission control project. We then brought Mateo onboard, Simon, Nebyu, and the rest of the project team.” According to Tibbits, “this project represents MIT’s mind-and-hand ethos. We had designers, architects, artists, computational experts, and engineers working together, reflecting the polymath vision — left brain, right brain, the creative and the technical coming together to make this possible.”Luna was funded and informed by Tibbits and Jih’s Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grant Program. “J. Jih and I had been doing research for the Bose grant around basalt and mono-material construction,” says Tibbits, adding that they “had explored foamed glass materials similar to pumice or foamed basalt, which are also similar to lunar regolith.” “FOAMGLAS is typically used for insulation, but it has diverse applications, including direct ground contact and exterior walls, with strong acoustic and thermal properties,” says Jih. “We helped Mateo understand how the material is used in architecture today, and how it could be applied in this project, aligning with our work on new material palettes and mono-material construction techniques.”Additional funding came from Inploration, a project run by creative director, author, and curator Lawrence Azerrad, as well as expeditionary artist, curator, and analog astronaut artist Richelle Ellis, and Comcast, a Media Lab member company. It was also supported by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design through Fernandez’s Design Fellowship. Additional support came from industry members such as Owens Corning (construction materials), Bose (communications), as well as MIT Media Lab member companies Dell Technologies (operations hardware) and Steelcase (operations seating). A moon on EarthWhile the lunar mission ended prematurely, the team says it achieved success in the design and construction of a control room embodying MIT’s design approach and capacity to explore new technologies while maintaining simplicity. Luna looks like variations of the moon, offering different perspectives of the moon’s round or crescent shape, depending on the viewer’s position.“What’s remarkable is how close the final output is to Mateo’s original sketches and renderings,” Tibbits notes. “That often doesn’t happen — where the final built project aligns so precisely with the initial design intent.”Luna’s entire structure is built from FOAMGLAS, a durable material composed of glass cells usually used for insulation. “FOAMGLAS is an interesting material,” says Lesina Debiasi, who supported fabrication efforts, ensuring a fast and safe process. “It’s relatively durable and light, but can easily be crumbled with a sharp edge or blade, requiring every step of the fabrication process — cutting, texturing, sealing — to be carefully controlled.”Fernandez, whose design experience was influenced by the idea that “simple moves” are most powerful, explains: “We’re giving a second life to materials that are not thought of for building construction … and I think that’s an effective idea. Here, you don’t need wood, concrete, rebar — you can build with one material only.” While the interior of the dome-shaped construction is smooth, the exterior was hand textured to evoke the basalt-like surface of the moon.The lightweight cellular glass produced by Owens Corning, which sponsored part of the material, comes as an unexpected choice for a compression structure — a type of architectural design where stability is achieved through the natural force of compression, usually implying heavy materials. The control room doesn’t use connections or additional supports, and depends upon the precise placement, size, and weight of individual blocks to create a stable form from a succession of arches.“Traditional compression structures rely on their own weight for stability, but using a material that is more than 10 times lighter than masonry meant we had to rethink everything. It was about finding the perfect balance between design vision and structural integrity,” reflects Haile, who was responsible for the structural calculations for the dome and its support.Compression relies on gravity, and wouldn’t be a viable construction method on the moon itself. “We’re building using physics, loads, structures, and equilibrium to create this thing that looks like the moon, but depends on Earth’s forces to be built. I think people don’t see that at first, but there’s something cheeky and ironic about it,” confides Fernandez, acknowledging that the project merges historical building methods with contemporary design.The location and purpose of Luna — both a work space and an installation engaging the public — implied balancing privacy and transparency to achieve functionality. “One of the most important design elements that reflected this vision was the openness of the dome,” says Haile. “We worked closely from the start to find the right balance — adjusting the angle and size of the opening to make the space feel welcoming, while still offering some privacy to those working inside.”The power of collaborationWith the FOAMGLAS material, the team had to invent a fabrication process that would achieve the initial vision while maintaining structural integrity. Sourcing a material with radically different properties compared to conventional construction implied collaborating closely on the engineering front, the lightweight nature of the cellular glass requiring creative problem-solving: “What appears perfect in digital models doesn’t always translate seamlessly into the real world,” says Haile. “The slope, curves, and overall geometry directly determine whether the dome will stand, requiring Mateo and me to work in sync from the very beginning through the end of construction.” While the engineering was primarily led by Haile and Ochsendorf, the structural design was officially reviewed and approved by Paul Kassabian at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger (SGH), ensuring compliance with engineering standards and building codes.“None of us had worked with FOAMGLAS before, and we needed to figure out how best to cut, texture, and seal it,” says Lesina Debiasi. “Since each row consists of a distinct block shape and specific angles, ensuring accuracy and repeatability across all the blocks became a major challenge. Since we had to cut each individual block four times before we were able to groove and texture the surface, creating a safe production process and mitigating the distribution of dust was critical,” he explains. “Working inside a tent, wearing personal protective equipment like masks, visors, suits, and gloves made it possible to work for an extended period with this material.”In addition, manufacturing introduced small margins of error threatening the structural integrity of the dome, prompting hands-on experimentation. “The control room is built from 12 arches,” explains Fernandez. “When one of the arches closes, it becomes stable, and you can move on to the next one … Going from side to side, you meet at the middle and close the arch using a special block — a keystone, which was cut to measure,” he says. “In conversations with our advisors, we decided to account for irregularities in the final keystone of each row. Once this custom keystone sat in place, the forces would stabilize the arch and make it secure,” adds Lesina Debiasi.“This project exemplified the best practices of engineers and architects working closely together from design inception to completion — something that was historically common but is less typical today,” says Haile. “This collaboration was not just necessary — it ultimately improved the final result.”Fernandez, who is supported this year by the MAD Design Fellowship, expressed how “the fellowship gave [him] the freedom to explore [his] passions and also keep [his] agency.”“In a way, this project embodies what design education at MIT should be,” Tibbits reflects. “We’re building at full scale, with real-world constraints, experimenting at the limits of what we know — design, computation, engineering, and science. It’s hands-on, highly experimental, and deeply collaborative, which is exactly what we dream of for MAD, and MIT’s design education more broadly.”“Luna, our physical lunar mission control, highlights the incredible collaboration across the Media Lab, Architecture, and the School of Engineering to bring our lunar mission to the world. We are democratizing access to space for all,” says Dava Newman, Media Lab director and Apollo Professor of Astronautics.A full list of contributors and supporters can be found at the Morningside Academy of Design's website.

Education
Nature
Science

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