Armchair eco-warriors have the rug pulled out from under them!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/12/carbon-footprint-internet
As I piously sit having my Skype videocon imagining how much more virtuous this is than driving (or flying) to the meeting, the attached article from the Guardian today reminds me that all virtue is relative and that the infrastructure required to support my Skype virtue is a massive consumer of resources belching out volumes of CO2. As we all embrace the digital, a whole backstreet industry is putting in the servers (mainframes on air-conditioning) that add to our pollution problems at a gathering pace.
It reminds me of an essay by Wendell Berry, the American writer and farmer, explaining why he will not own a computer - that the imagined utility is bought at too high a cost; his own line drawn at a typewriter. The essay was notable for attracting the anger of certain women who miss-read it when Berry referred to his wife as helping him type up his work, reading this most innocent (and true) remark as if she were an oppressed chattel (the utter improbability of this would be apparent to anyone who has met Tanya). A miss-reading that Berry had great and energetic fun with in a subsequent essay.
As I piously sit having my Skype videocon imagining how much more virtuous this is than driving (or flying) to the meeting, the attached article from the Guardian today reminds me that all virtue is relative and that the infrastructure required to support my Skype virtue is a massive consumer of resources belching out volumes of CO2. As we all embrace the digital, a whole backstreet industry is putting in the servers (mainframes on air-conditioning) that add to our pollution problems at a gathering pace.
It reminds me of an essay by Wendell Berry, the American writer and farmer, explaining why he will not own a computer - that the imagined utility is bought at too high a cost; his own line drawn at a typewriter. The essay was notable for attracting the anger of certain women who miss-read it when Berry referred to his wife as helping him type up his work, reading this most innocent (and true) remark as if she were an oppressed chattel (the utter improbability of this would be apparent to anyone who has met Tanya). A miss-reading that Berry had great and energetic fun with in a subsequent essay.