Part 1 | Part 2
Have you ever wondered where all the stuff we buy comes from and where it goes when we throw it out? I couldn’t. So I looked it up! And what the textbooks say is that stuff moves through a system. From extraction, to production, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal. All together it’s called the materials economy.
- The Story of Stuff
I’ve always been surrounded by people who are mindful of human impacts on the environment. So, when I packed up and went to college I payed close attention to an up-and-coming form of environmentalism; sustainability. I can’t say exactly how it caught my attention, but the differences between sustainability and previous environmental approaches are notable.
Traditional environmentalism advocates conservation and preservation. Think of Jane Goodall fighting to save gorilla habitat or the government creating a national park. The other. Well, the other – if it’s not carefully heeded – means that humans need to drastically change the way they live. Proponents of sustainable living practices note that we only have a finite number of resources on Earth and that it’s our duty to change present consumption habits from linear to sustainable ones.
Unfortunately, this is not only a tall order but it’s complex to boot. Complex enough in fact that it requires every portion of the materials economy (including you) to do it’s share! Previous identification of environmental issues weren’t quite like this. Take, for example, halting global climate change… perhaps the largest issue identified by environmentalists to date. Scientists point out that they think Earth’s recent warming trend is being caused by Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and that it comes from tangible sources. Human sources! The United States yearly transportation accounts for 529 million metric tons of CO2 released
a year while Industrial, Commercial, and Residential sources produce 447, 340, and 296 million tons respectively.
So, without taking too much time to go into Global Warming, an important point needs to be made: previous environmental protection measures have identified specific problems and sought to reduce or resolve their severity to protect the environment. In cutting CO2 emissions humans can take drastic measures that change their lifestyle, but that’s where the impact stops – the problem being fixed. Sustainability, instead focuses on making an entire society sustainable. It follows that human influences are treated differently. Sustainability is an orientation toward the world around us… not an attempt to resolve or avoid singular problems that constitute the whole. And, because it doesn’t limit itself it requires help to make feasible. A lot of help. Humans can try and act as stewards and protect the environment on a case-by-case basis, but unless we try to do so in a sustainable manner (across the breadth of the materials economy) a long-term risk is run; we can run out of a given resource. We can damage local ecosystems and the planet beyond repair too.
This is where I intrude.
I think that, properly used, digital libraries can help librarians do their part to “go green.”
Certainly, the concept of sustainability is controversial to some, and Cornucopians argue that humans can always find ways around or through our problems. Transforming the global economy to a sustainable footing may also turn out to come at a very high social, humanitarian, or economic cost!
Not being willing to ignore these objections I personally believe that it never hurts to prepare for the future. That in mind, I am willing to argue that digital libraries can offset a number of environmental and ecological problems. Plus, since libraries are moving toward a dependence on digital material anyway it seems harmless to entertain the benefits of such a model. If it helps the environment then great! If it can be run on a realistic sustainable model even better still.
but the most basic sites my parents are effectively being denied a link to the outside world. Given a recent
