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Green Action: Creating Sustainable Communities - Mar 2010
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Recently updated threads
- AASHE and the Green Trendline in Higher Education Sun, 2010-04-18 17:55
- Fast Company's Green Ride Fri, 2010-04-09 16:45
- How Green is my iPad? Mon, 2010-04-05 17:13
- Ben's observation about what we consider "community" Tue, 2010-03-30 17:00
- Grassroots and Government Sun, 2010-03-28 23:53
How Green is my iPad?
Today's New York Times has an opnion piece on Apple's new iPad, looking its "life-cycle assessment."
You should be able to view the piece for free and without registering for the Times for the next few days.
Life-cycle assessment is a central tenet of sustainable design (William McDonough, who you had a video of in the first week's materials) is an early advocate of this protocol to judge if something is truly green (sustainable) or not.
This is a technological approach to sustainability--finding out the "true costs" of something, like a computer gizmo: materials, transportation, disposal, etc. It also has social elements to it, like this article: Is it more earth-friendly to NOT own an iPad?
Read this piece and offer your thoughts if you are inclined. It's a "wicked problem," as they say, about sustainabilty.
John
Good article, a couple of things occurred to me whilst reading it. Firstly there's a temptation to frame this debate in a oppositional technology vs tradition way. I think this misses that we can have both things and we can do both better. As the article states books can be printed with soy ink and you can get them from the library, equally you don't have to buy an iPad but you can still read a novel on your second hand, 5 year old iBook.
I agree that it's more earth friendly to not own an iPad, but that's also the kind of talk which gave the environmental movement a bad reputation for being puritan kill joys for decades. Perhaps a better question and one which life cycle assessment helps with is how can we have really sexy IT tools which don't damage the planet and the people on it.
Another issue the article doesn't cover is the ecological cost of the data itself sitting up there in an Amazon data center which spins into life every time you download an e-book. This is a particularly pertinent issue for a course on sustainability where all the work and materials are on-line!
Greenpeace has just launched a campaign highlighting the ecological cost of cloud computing (http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/make-it-green-clou...). Again the issue for me and one which I don't think the report makes clear enough is that cloud computing isn't bad per se, in fact I think that economies of scale should mean it has the potential to be far more efficient that businesses around the world running their own servers but that we should be doing it much better. Surely companies such as Google and Apple who cultivate an image of being progressive and responsible should be running all their data centers from renewable energy sources?
Ben
About a year ago, a number of articles came out about how much CO2 a Google search causes because of the energy needed to power the data servers.
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5489134...
Yes, the Environmental Movement has long been associated with Luddite sympathies, and that has somewhat taken it out of the central game being played everyday throughout the world: a fast-replicating, resource-hungry, global economy.
The "technological fix" to ecological problems has often been eyed suspiciously (and rightly so in many cases) by ecos, in part, because of basic ecological principles of closed-looped natural systems. You pump too much pollution into the atmosphere and the system is going to be stressed and something else within that closed system will have to give. Thus, a solution to cut that pollution, say, "clean coal" is met skeptically in many green quarters because it is a technological fix that does not get at the real source of the problem: people use too much energy too wastefully, there's big profits in fossil fuel production, etc.
For most of the world, the most striking symbol of our ambivalence about doing the right thing environmentally individually and collectively when it comes to technology has to be the automobile.
Notice the authors of the op-ed, said "walk" to your library, not drive, to rent (not buy) that (more sustainable) book.
And more and more I hear people say they want their next car to be a hybrid (if they can afford it).
I think the sustainability movement allows for technological fixes, whereas, earlier movements within environmentalism (rightfully) did not: wilderness preservation, say. I hope that with time these fixes are more than palliative, which is still how they largely feel like to me.
And irony of ironies is when we get together online about a course on sustainability with materials hosted on servers god knows where and we enjoy a particular article or website so much that we PRINT it out and put it in a folder so it feels more permanent, substantial, more like a magazine, or a book. Am I the only one who does this with great guilt on occasion?
John
Thanks for the Times article John, I'm certainly guilty of comfort printing :).
I agree that we should be suspicious of techno fixes that ignore the real causes of our unsustainable life. However I think it's still worth lobbying and encouraging the IT sector to improve how they deliver the services we are already using. An example of this might be using Yahoo for our searches rather than Google as Yahoo is in the process of building what looks to be the most energy efficient data centre thus built which is also powered mainly by hydro:
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/ecogeek/1125/yahoo-data-center-will-be-power...
Although have to admit I'm pretty wedded to my Gmail account!
Choosing a green ISP is of course a good way of working toward sustainable IT usage. I've previously come across AISO who run a solar powered off grid data centre.
http://www.aiso.net/
Don't know if P2PU use a green ISP if not perhaps we should advocate for it :).
Ideally there would be a browser setting similar to security settings which checked the environmental credentials of sites you were browsing too and gave you a warning if the site was hosted at a data centre that was run on dirty electricity. Unfortunately at the moment that would probably mean 99% of the internet!
I think the main thing for me is educating people so that they become aware of the ecological cost of IT use just as people have become more aware of the true cost of car use and home energy use. Currently I think most people still feel that internet just floats around in the air and magically appears in their laptop when they need it.
Of course perhaps the internet in it's present form and growth rate is systemically unsustainable or at least a huge waste of limited resources that could be spent more profitable else where. If anyone holds that opinion be interested in hearing your rationale.
Ben