Sarah Zarling joined me from the top of a parking garage in downtown Milwaukee, where she had taken her children to celebrate the Milwaukee Brewers’ World Series victory parade. She described her life as busy, spontaneous, and full of activism work that often takes her away from a traditional office setting.
Sarah’s path into activism began in 2015 when she was a stay-at-home mother of five with no college degree or formal training in research or public speaking. Her “crude” awakening occurred when she spotted a train with hundreds of shiny black tankers near her home in Watertown, Wisconsin. Intrigued, she researched oil-by-rail transport and discovered a Vice News documentary about the Lac-Mégantic disaster. This prompted her to reach out to the documentary subjects and connect with Milwaukee activists concerned about an aging railroad bridge. She taught herself to create PowerPoint presentations using imagery to convey the dangers, eventually expanding her focus from oil trains to pipelines and then to data centers. Her advocacy took on personal urgency when an oil train derailed in her community just five days before she was scheduled to attend an oil train fighters conference in Pittsburgh. At that conference, she learned about the full “cradle to grave” lifecycle of fossil fuel extraction, production, and transport.
Currently, Sarah is focused on fighting hyperscale data center construction in Wisconsin, which she calls “the most cruel thing a city can do to its residents”. She got involved in September 2025 when she learned of a Meta project in Beaver Dam that had been approved and broken ground before residents knew about it due to non-disclosure agreements. Wisconsin now has three active hyperscale data center projects: Meta in Beaver Dam, Microsoft in Mount Pleasant (on land originally secured for the failed Foxconn deal), and a Cloverleaf/Vantage/Oracle project in Port Washington. Sarah has documented these sites through drive-by videos and worked to amplify stories of impacted residents, including Amanda from Port Washington who had already fled data centers in Texas only to have them follow her.
Sarah emphasized that successful community resistance requires swift, fierce, and relentless organizing with broad participation rather than relying on the same small group of people. She has seen communities like Caledonia and Wisconsin Rapids stop projects entirely, while many municipalities and counties have passed moratoriums. She advocates strongly for putting resident protections in place before any project approval, noting that Beaver Dam residents near the Meta site have had wells go dry and water contaminated with no assistance programs established. She also highlighted the interconnected nature of these fights—utility companies, transmission lines, gas plants, and even international developments like Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation backed by Peter Thiel all tie into the AI data center expansion. Through her work with groups like Stop AI Data Centres and connections made at a technofascist conference in Chicago, she has built a network of allies across North America including Darren from Oklahoma and environmental economist Barrett, recognizing that “we’re all connected across the rails and through the pipelines”.
