"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him" (Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, p. 223)

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozone_maps/movies/OZONE_D1979-12%25P1Y_G%5E720X486.LSH.mpg

ubiquitous media, rare earths

the environmental footprint of digital media and what to do about itSean CubittPervasive Media Lab, University of the West of Enlgand22 Sept 2009

Every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, practice of non-violence .. Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours. (Arne Naess)

http://www.arnenaess.com/

“The non-alignment of media with message seems terribly ironic at a time when there is such an intense awareness of environ-mental responsibility and all things “green. Businesses in North America spend $65+ billion per year on print media advertising. The average office worker generates 2 pounds of paper waste per day. Paper and printing related expenditures typically represent 15 to 30 percent of every corporate dollar spent, exclusive of labor, according to the Institute for Sustainable Communication. Adding websites, email blasts, direct mail and events to the mix and the size of this communication activity is significant. However, few en-terprises today can tell you the footprint of their marketing com-munication, print or digital. That is about to change.”

Lisa Wellman, CEO SustainCommWorld. http://www.businessof-greenmedia.com/

The problem (1) Extracting materials

some basic digital materials:

galliumarsenicgermaniumsapphirecopperaluminumleadgoldzincnickeltinsilver . . . .

lanthanides

Sebastiao Salgado, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986

Coltan, short for columbite tantalite, is the principal source of tantalum, a rare and valuable metal in huge demand in today's high technology industries.

Tantalum is an extremely hard, dense element that is highly resistant to corrosion. It has a very high melting point and is a good conductor of heat and electricity. Demand for tantalum has been growing since 1992, mainly due to the increase in applications for tantalum capacitors used in personal computers and mobile phones.

The electronics industry is by far the biggest consumer of tantalum but there was a massive shorfall in 2000 and early 2001 as a result of the market demand for capacitors. This has put pressure on the mining of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and illegal exploi-tation soon became a serious problem during the second war, which broke out in 1998.

The costs and technology involved in sourcing coltan are low – it is found by digging in the soil and it is easily sold. Eighty percent of the world’s coltan reserves are located in Africa, and 80% of the deposits are found in the eastern part of the DRC.2

Coltan is mainly extracted from forests. Mining activities are carried out by workers, many of who were once farmers, often working under the supervision of soldiers. The setting up of mining camps and the con-struction of routes to reach and take away coltan can be a threat to the forest and its wildlife.

Coltan stocks are obtained in places such as the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, home to the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), and the Kahuzi Biega National Park, home of the endangered mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei ). In 2004, it is estimated that over 10,000 people moved into the Kahuzi-Biega National Park to work in the mining industry.

As the pristine forest is denuded for mining, gorillas are being killed and their meat is sold as bushmeat to the miners and rebel armies that control the area.

In 2004 alone, 4,000 people are reported to have migrated to the east-ern DRC’s Okapi Wildlife Reserve to mine coltan. The reserve is the only protected area in the world for the okapi.

http://www.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/congo_basin_forests/problems/mining/coltan_mining/ http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/kenneth-anderson-imperial-clash-on-the-congo-resource-front/

The problem (2): manufacturing

The number of toxic materials needed to make the 220 billion silicon chips manufactured annually is staggering: highly corrosive hydrochloric acid; metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and lead; volatile solvents like methyl chloro-form, benzene, acetone, and trichloroethylene (TCE); and a number of super toxic gases.

“The materials are just part of the problem,” pointed out JoLani Hironaka, director of the San Jose, California-based Santa Clara Center for Occupational Health (SCCOSH), which works on behalf of computer chip industry work-ers in Santa Clara County, where Silicon Valley is located. “There has been a tremendous growth in the number of industries manufacturing chemicals and other materials used at computer chip plants and in the amount of waste generated in the production process.”

According to Graydon Laraby of Texas Instruments, the manufacture of just one batch of chips requires on average 27 pounds of chemicals, 29 cubic feet of hazardous gases, nine pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,787 gallons of wa-ter, which requires extensive chemical treatment.

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/154/57/

"Under NAFTA, maquiladora employment increased by 54% in Ciudad Juárez, spurring significant population growth. Yet Juárez still has no waste treatment facility to treat sewage produced by the 1.3 million people who now live there."

(NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch)

The problem (3) consumption

Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the period 2000 to 2005 both in the U.S. and worldwide. Almost all of this growth was the result of growth in the number of the least expen-sive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attribut-able to growth in the power use per unit.

Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary in-frastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated infrastructure) is equivalent (in capac-ity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operat-ing those servers and associated infrastructure in 2005 was about $2.7 B and $7.2 B for the U.S. and the world, respectively.(Koomey, Jonathan G. (2007), Estimating Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, February. )

We found that total direct power use by office and network equipment is about 74 TWh per year, which is about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S. When electricity used by telecommuni-cations equipment and electronics manufacturing is included, that figure rises to 3% of all electricity use (Koomey 2000). More than 70% of the 74 TWh/year is dedicated to office equipment for commercial use. (Kawamoto, Kaoru,et al (2001), Electricity Used by Office Equipment and Network Equipment in the U.S Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California Berkeley, February

According to the US Department of Energy, 'Data centers used 61 billion kWh of electricity in 2006, representing 1.5% of all U.S. electricity consumption and double the amount consumed in 2000. Based on current trends, energy consumed by data centers will continue to grow by 12% per year.' IT manufacture and use is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions – the same amount as the airline industry – and is heading for 3% by 2020 http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_IT_can_cut_carbon_emissions_2221

The problem (4) recycling

In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and ability to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment including comput-ers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local experts complain that of the estimated 500 40-foot containers shipped to Lagos each month, as much as 75% of the imports are “junk” and are not economically repairable or marketable. Consequently, this e-waste, which is legally a hazardous waste is being discarded and routinely burned in what the environmentalists call yet “another“cyber-age nightmare now landing on the shores of developing countries.”

The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa, Basel Action net-work, 2005http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/

http://it.truveo.com/The-Digital-Dump-Exporting-HighTech-ReUse-and/id/2654447730

The phosphors and other potentially toxic dusts must be removed from the CRT cullet and managed responsibly in developed coun-tries, and

The ‘competent authority’ of the importing country must formally consent to accept the cleaned cullet as a non-waste because it essentially meets specifications to be used as a direct replace-ment feedstock in a primary manufacturing process to create new consumer products without further processing, other than qual-ity control – that is, it is not going to a recycling destination and no further cleaning or processing is needed prior to entering into primary manufacturing.(Basel Convention)

– Recently, the Malaysian government decided to no longer accept any CRT glass from the United States, as of December 31, 2008.

. . . the division between nature and politics, humans and non-humans, has had detrimental effects upon not only how we see ourselves in relation to nature, but also on democratic politics and contemporary green political thought and practice. I argue that political theory needs to put aside the distinction between humans and the nonhuman world and build a democratic poli-tics based on a new ontology that incorporates the messy hy-brid entities of human and nonhuman, natural and social.

Michael Nordquist, The End of Nature and Society: Bruno Latour and the Nonhuman in Politics Prepared for presentation at Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting March 16-18, 2006 Albuquerque

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html#

Why must political ecology let go of nature? Be-cause nature is not a particular sphere of reality but the result of a political division, of a Constitu-tion* that separates what is objective and indisput-able from what is subjective and disputable. To do political ecology, then, we must first of all come out of the Cave, by distinguishing Science from the practical work of the sciences. This distinction al-lows us to make another one, between the official philosophy of ecologism on the one hand and its burgeoning practice on the other. Whereas ecology is assimilated to questions concerning nature, in practice it focuses on imbroglios involving sciences, moralities, law, and politics. As a result, ecologism bears not on crises of nature but on crises of ob-jectivity (p. 00). If nature is a particular way of total-izing the members who share the same common world instead of and in place of politics, we under-stand easily why ecologism marks the end of nature in politics and why we cannot accept the traditional term “nature,” which was invented in order to reduce public life to a rump parliament. To be sure, the idea that the Western notion of nature is a his-torically situated social representation* has become a commonplace. But we cannot settle for it without maintaining the politics of the Cave, since doing so would amount to distanc-ing ourselves still further from the reality of things themselves left intact in the hands of Science. To give political ecology its place, we must then avoid the shoals of representations of nature) and accept the risk of metaphysics. Fortunately, for this task we can profit from the fragile aid of comparative anthropology. Indeed, no culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its po-litical life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature;

they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sci-ences, to the practice of ecologism, to anthropology, we can thus understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collec-tive* instituted to paralyze democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collective with two houses: nature and society?

Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry . . .) (extract) from Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, Harvard UP, 2004 (translation Catherine Porter)http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/ix_chap5.html

Within the romantic imagination the global is told as something very, very large, as something very, very complex, but also as something that may be grasped and held as a whole. Left to its own devices, romantic complexity leads to the holism of grand nar-rative. But there is an alternative: one can in-stead go looking for the global as something that is broken, poorly formed, and comes in patches; as something that is very small, and pretty elusive.

John Law (2002) And if the Global Were Small and Non-Coherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroquehttp://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/research/resalph.htm

we need to look somewhere between the anciently interred traces of microbial promiscuity and the all-too-recent flourishing of electronic miscegenation. It is in the city – at the hubs of human movement and habitation – that we find a long but still relatively accessible history of socially accelerated flows and fusions, here that we might uncover a succession of culturally mediated human encounters with the aliens within and without. Before the Internet could be constituted as a luxuriating ecology of life-like entities, I would suggest, it was first necessary to the construe the city as a mesh of heterogeneous ele-ments, to experience the variegated life secreted in les passages and le paysage des grandes villes; if not literally, then at least metaphorically. To a far greater degree than during its recent enmeshing with new electronic media, the human body in the metropolis has been open to diverse flows, has entertained new forms, has participated in a ‘baroque sociability’ with all its invited and uninvited guests.

Clark, Nigel (2000), ‘”Botanizing the Asphalt”? The Complex Life of Cosmopolitan Bodies’, Body & Society 6(3/4), 12-33.

Problems of this scale require not one but many tools for their resolution. Consumers may be persuaded to ease their use of media-rich files, or to amend their habits in terms of power usage, just as many have learned to use anti-viral software on a regular basis. Governments may take the message of Kyoto and ap-ply it to the information and communications infra-structure. Civil society bodies may be able to persuade manufacturers, service providers and governments to synchronise their activities on this front. But it is clear that the solutions are not exclusively about these fa-miliar sectors of the political economy. What digital media have demonstrated is that a different type of economy is possible, one grounded in collaboration (Scholz 2008) and peer-to-peer systems (Bauwens 2005), most familiar in the examples of the Linux soft-ware environment and Wikipedia. Equally it is clear that proprietary solutions will benefit only sectors of a global network, not the whole system. For that, we require social as well as economic reactions to the emerging energy crisis of information.