Events, Innovation, New Media - Friday, December 11, 2009 18:48 - 4 Comments

Direct from Copenhagen: Don Carli Reporting on Sustainability

Don Carli, Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for Sustainable Communications and EVP, SustainCommWorld, is reporting and blogging live from Copenhagen this week on areas not generally covered by the media.  Below is a major piece for your review on deforestation.

COPENHAGEN ON MY MIND – REDUCING DIGITAL MEDIA TREE-WASH

Most people will tell you that they care about saving our forests, but they tend to be uninformed or misinformed when it comes to knowing the causes of deforestation or some of the places being affected most significantly by land use change that kills trees, pollutes rivers and contributes to climate change. Until recently the conventional wisdom has been to demonize paper and print media as the major culprit behind “killing trees” and to idealize digital media as “green and groovy” alternative without consideration for the full backstory or life cycle footprint of either.

Pixels Don’t Grow on Trees

Paper and print media supply chains are far from being sustainable, but may be far less of a threat to forests than the “Tree-Wash” claims about how digital media saves trees or how pixels are greener than pages. “Tree-Wash” is my term for a special class of “greenwash” making false, misleading or unsupported marketing claims that ignore the causes of deforestation associated with digital media, or that fail to identify the actual trees and forests allegedly being saved or planted.

However, the Copenhagen Climate Summit and technologies developed to verify land use are likely to play a major role in changing the status quo with regard to foot-printing forests, identifying trees and the calculating the climate impacts of coal-powered IT. Continue…