Category — sustainability

is not the phenomenon itself but the discourse surrounding it. Terms such as “global warming” and “climate change” are becoming marginalized in the mainstream media, and increasingly in product marketing. I see PG&E commercials in California with light bulbs talking about us being able to stop global warming and I recently heard an E-surance radio ad that discussed discounts on energy-efficient cars that “reverse the effects of climate change.” The fact is, it’s not that simple.

I’ve had many discussions on how the biggest hurdle facing environmentalism in this country is simply to burst into the mainstream. In other words, I have always thought the secret would be to “make environmentalism and sustainability fashionable.” However, I’ve also joked that this implies it may one day go out of fashion. In a way, as I see the increase in mainstream discourse surrounding this topic, we are setting ourselves up for a possible downfall. Climate change and global warming are still not fully understood. Even among environmental scientists from various disciplines, there is still much disagreement about its source. So, while we may be noticing more and more effects of these phenomena that perpetuate this ideology, one day we may see less noticeable effects. For example, we were supposed to have an even more active and deadly hurricane season last year than the devastating 2004 season-but this never happened. This year has again shown to be a disappointment in that regard (though, I think we are still on track for around 4 more hurricanes in the Atlantic U.S.). I’m not drawing conclusions from this that global warming doesn’t exist, I’m predicting that many other people will. It’s often that I hear in everyday conversation someone predicting climate through the weather. “It’s so dry and hot today, this global warming is killing me”. This line of thinking is not helpful.

I no doubt want environmentalism and sustainability to become a part of mainstream American culture and media. However, I want it to be for the right reasons. My observations worry me that we have created this mainstream movement on false pretenses-that global warming and climate change have been proven to be direct results of human activity. These pretenses may one day disappear, creating a backlash against the movement. If we all start driving hybrid cars and still suffer what we “believe” to be effects of global warming, the public may lose faith in the “science” and essentially give up (for lack of a less drastic way of putting this). This, of course would be harmful to the cause because any climatologist will tell you it’s impossible for people to judge climate change about what they can possibly notice on a day-to-day basis. These phenomena are trends that must be studied over long periods of times subjected to numerous models (which is difficult and is a large reason why there is still so much contention about the subject).

Of course, I have no real support for anything I’ve written but it’s been an ongoing and growing problem I have as there is more and more marginalization of scientific, environmental terms. Regardless of whether my fears are well-founded, I argue that the public needs to be better informed on what these environmental terms actually mean before we start acting upon them. Let media and marketing push us, rather, to become better environmental stewards but leave the science behind the movement to the scientists.

As I look around TreeHugger’s website I see videos and read articles in which people talk about how they are being sustainable. I just watched a video of a woman talking about how she was using finger food for her party to avoid using utensils so that she could ‘be sustainable.’ This term is quickly being misused and this is causing the idea behind sustainability to lose focus. In the mainstream it has basically become the new term for being ‘environmentally friendly’ or a ‘conservationist’. The term was well defined in the Brundtland Conference in ’87 as something that would describe a top-down approach to development. When people talk about their actions, that is simply conserving. Here’s an example: one might ‘act sustainably’ by flushing only when necessary (if it’s yellow let it mellow…you get the idea) but you are simply conserving water. Sustainability in this sense has more to do with the system and process. Is your toilet designed to use under 1.4 gallons per flush? Where is the water going? A sustainable system would be one where that same water would then run underneath your garden or lawn and irrigate food crops you eat. If that is the case, it really doesn’t matter how often you flush so long as your crops aren’t being irrigated otherwise. That is sustainability. It refers to the entire process. Essentially, a person cannot be sustainable in their actions (except maybe in the case of overeating) but one can conserve. It is the policy-makers, developers, designers and builders–those that create the systems–that have the ultimate responsibility of being sustainable.

To most people I think that the digital world seems untaxing on the environment. After all bits have no real physical form that we can see so it’s counter-intuitive to think that have any physical value. However, the first law of thermodynamics would tell us otherwise. All the information being transferred across fiber optics cable is created by something physical. Beyond the energy spent creating the devices that power the machines or the production of silicon and other metals, the real drain I see now comes from the electricity used to power these bytes. For every new computer connected to the Internet, the power drain grows exponentially. Computers are no longer used in isolation so as the numbers grow, their effects grow exponentially in a large network.

There has been a lot of discussion about ‘information overload’ since the early 90s but to me it is a term that has carried little significance because it is poorly defined. Nobody is really overloaded when they get on the web. There are plenty of filters that keep information from simply streaming onto your desktop. Users, decide where they go, which sites they visit or what to search for. The real overload happens in that the meaningless information out makes these processes all inefficient. To give a counter-example, wikipedia.org has provided well-filtered content all in one repository. While the site’s sustainable efforts are seemingly never cited (most likely because I don’t think this was a direct goal of the creators), the site provides a model nonetheless. Before wikipedia, to find information about a country, I would use a search engine. This will probably result in wasted time and energy sifting through mis- or irrelevant information. Now, wikipedia has decreased both. When I say energy, I’m not simply talking about my personal energy but the energy that is powering the data transfer between my computer and the servers that host the information. I’m sure the energy wasted is not great but multiply this by the number of searches, and the effect is quite noticeable (I should note that I have absolutely no data…just a ramble).

Searching is only one example of unsustainable ‘digital practice.’ I recently came across an article that discusses the electricity consumed by electronic avatar. According to some stats and extrapolation, the average avatar in a virtual world such as Second Life consumes around 71% the electricity of a human! This is the first ‘mainstream’ article I’ve found that actually tries to put a natural cost on something digital. As I look at images of server farms like the one Google is building (I think this was in January’s Wired), I would hope that this happens more in the future. I am not proposing that wikipedia be a model for this or that Second Life is bad. Simply, more notice needs to be taken about how the digital is physical.

UPDATE: I have actually found a great resource that at least gets at part of this issue. Megan Prusynski wrote about some sustainable web hosting services that have more sustainable practices on the server side. She provides a great list on this topic. Green Options alone is a great resource for practical sustainability issues–it’s listed in my blogroll.