Greening through IT

• Book: Bill Tomlinson, Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. 2010. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 210 pp.,

Review

Jorge L. Zapico:

"The relationship between information and communication technologies and environmental sustainability is complex and still little understood. Will ICT help us move toward a more efªcient and sustainable society, or will it increase resource consumption and emissions? Recent books by Bill Tomlinson and Robert Rattle present two opposing answers to these questions. Each details the negative environmental impacts of computers, such as energy consumption, resource depletion, and e-waste, and they both put more weight on the second order effects of using ICT. But while Tomlinson focuses mostly on the positive potential of ICTs for sustainability education and behavioral change, Rattle focuses mostly on the negative effects and rebound effects. A rebound effect (sometimes also referred as Jevon’s paradox) occurs when the increase in efªciency of how a resource is used increases the total use, instead of decreasing it (Alcott, 2005).

Bill Tomlinson’s book Greening Though IT is one of the ªrst books on ICT for sustainability published for a broad and nontechnical audience.

The book’s central discourse is that environmental problems are caused because there is a gap in time, space, and complexity. While environmental problems are broad, big, and slow, we humans have a narrow, fast, and small perception of them. Tomlinson suggests that ICT presents an opportunity to bridge this gap, since it compresses time, space, and complexity. With this opportunity as the central theme, the book explores a variety of potential positive impacts of ICT on the environment, with examples from agriculture, food, energy, manufacturing, transportation, buildings, and IT manufacturing itself. Three areas are developed in depth, connected with some of the author’s own projects: education (with focus on the informal acquiring of environmental skills), personal behavioral change, and organization of collective action.

Greening Through IT is thus a good introduction to the emerging field of ICT for environmental sustainability. As a survey, its main weakness may be a relative lack of broad references. Most cited projects and texts come from computer science, human-computer interaction, and other technical fields, and the text misses references to much of the interesting work coming from such fields as sustainability, future studies, or ecological economics."

More Information

• Book: Robert Rattle, Computing Our Way to Paradise? The [[Role of Internet and

Communication Technologies in Sustainable Consumption and Globalization]]. 2010. Globalization and the environment series. Berkeley, CA: Altamira Press, 246 pp., $