By Sister Marlene Perrotte
Swarms of living creatures will live wherever the river flows. There will be large numbers of fish, because this water flows there and makes the salt water fresh; so where the river flows everything will live. […] Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear fruit, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.
Ezekiel 47:9,12
Season of Creation 2026, September 1-October 4, offers opportunities for prayer and action while exploring this year’s theme: Living Water. The theme comes from Ezekiel 47:9,12 as a powerful biblical vision of hope and ecological healing. Set amid exile and loss, the image of living water flowing from God’s sanctuary reveals divine healing that renews land, water, biodiversity and human responsibility towards the whole creation. We offer this series of stories about how Sisters of Mercy are taking action to care for our living waters.
Water is under siege. It’s increasingly being called the “new gold” or “blue gold” because clean, drinkable water is becoming scarce worldwide.
Living in the high desert of New Mexico makes me cherish water.
For more than 30 years I have worked with others in my adopted state to protect water from threats ranging from nuclear-waste contamination and agribusiness overuse to severe drought caused by climate change.
Water-hungry data centers threaten life in the Land of Enchantment – the state’s official moniker – as never before.
New Mexico already has 20 data centers and three massive new ones are in the works. The most concerning is Project Jupiter, which began construction in September 2025 and will be one of the largest data centers in the world. It’s located in drought-stricken Doña Ana County, where I once lived.
This gargantuan facility at 1,400 acres “could swallow New York’s Central Park,” according to National Public Radio. It will consume millions of gallons of water as it cools the artificial intelligence (AI) machinery of global tech giants Oracle and OpenAI. The permitting process and public hearings have been rushed and at times secretive.
I recently demonstrated at the state capital in Santa Fe against the latest accommodations for Project Jupiter: the fast-tracking of an air permit that would allow extra pollutants to be spewed by a center that is already the biggest polluter in the state, and an emergency water well. Not long afterwards, the New Mexico Supreme Court issued temporary stays on the permit and the well, which shows public pressure matters.
During this Season of Creation, whose theme of “living water” (Ezekiel 47:1-12) emphasizes protecting God’s life-giving waters worldwide, I invite people of faith and goodwill to stand up to data centers, as many determined individuals are doing already, and help reorder the values that drive our consumerist society.
As a Sister of Mercy dedicated to care for Earth, which is more than 70 percent covered by water, I encourage everyone to put the insatiable thirst of data centers in the context of a parched planet where one-third of humanity lives in areas of water stress and countless species of plants and animals are threatened as never before.
Data centers owned by billionaire oligarchs must not be allowed to consume enormous amounts of water that belong to everyone.
Suffering of Earth and immigrants intertwined
Mid-size data centers use up 300,000 gallons of water a day, while large facilities use up to 5 million gallons every day! That is comparable to a small town, according to the World Resources Institute. By 2028, data centers could need 32 billion gallons of water annually, the equivalent of the indoor water-use of 360,000 households.
Meanwhile, authorities cannot provide sufficient clean water to immigrants being held at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, a small town near Albuquerque, where I serve as a legal advocate for asylum seekers—all men—and provide pastoral care to their families whenever possible.
During a recent visit, I met with immigrants with skin rashes and sores from the water. For more than a year, immigrants have decried water issues at the facility, including toilets that wouldn’t flush, showers that lacked water and sewage that backed up into cells.
The facility, which is run by Core Civic, a for-profit company that is contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), is the largest commercial water user in the town, which has had to haul in potable water since late June 2026. And yet facility officials insist there were no safety issues with the water.
And consider the dry riverbed of the Rio Grande near my home. More than 100 total miles of the Middle Rio Grande are dry, including in the heart of Albuquerque, due to the historic drought and record-low mountain snowpack. Farmers cannot irrigate their crops properly.
The cries of the Earth and the cries of the poor are deeply interconnected, as Pope Francis pointed out in his encyclical Laudato Si’. It’s why the Sisters of Mercy’s critical concerns of caring for Earth and for immigrants are so intertwined.
Healing our spiritual crisis
Our worldwide water crisis is a spiritual crisis. It challenges us to examine our values about what matters. Human beings, especially the powerful, must move from a patriarchal worldview of domination and subjugation and extractivism, to an ethic of mutual sustainability.
We must take to heart the powerful teachings of Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, and not let AI and data centers ruin humanity and our precious planet.
As we celebrate the Season of Creation, let’s see water as a public trust, as a common good and gift of our Loving Creator. Let’s recover our passion and zest for all of life on this beautiful small blue planet Earth, spinning in the galaxy.