Talk at University of

1. "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him"
(Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, p. 223)
ubiquitous media,
rare earths
the environmental
footprint of digital
media and what to
do about it
Sean Cubitt
Pervasive Media Lab, University of the West of Enlgand
22 Sept 2009
http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozone_maps/movies/OZONE_D1979-12%25P1Y_G%5E720X486.LSH.mpg

2. 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/

3. The problem (1) Extracting materials
some basic digital materials:
gallium
arsenic
germanium
sapphire
copper
aluminum
lead
gold
zinc
nickel
tin
silver
....
lanthanides
Sebastiao Salgado, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986

4. 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/

5. 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,
"Under NAFTA, maquiladora employment increased by 54% in Ciudad Juárez, nine pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,787 gallons of wa-
spurring significant population growth.Yet Juárez still has no waste treatment ter, which requires extensive chemical treatment.
facility to treat sewage produced by the 1.3 million people who now live
there."
http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/
(NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch) view/154/57/

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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, 2005
http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/
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
http://it.truveo.com/The-Digital-Dump-Exporting-HighTech-ReUse-and/id/2654447730
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.

9. . . . 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

10. 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- http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html#
torically situated social representation* has become they are unacquainted with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sci-
a commonplace. But we cannot settle for it without maintaining ences, to the practice of ecologism, to anthropology, we can thus
the politics of the Cave, since doing so would amount to distanc- understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collec-
ing ourselves still further from the reality of things themselves left tive* instituted to paralyze democracy. The key question of political
intact in the hands of Science. To give political ecology its place, ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the
we must then avoid the shoals of representations of nature) and collective with two houses: nature and society?
accept the risk of metaphysics. Fortunately, for this task we can
profit from the fragile aid of comparative anthropology. Indeed, no Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry . . .) (extract) from Bruno Latour, Politics of
Nature, Harvard UP, 2004 (translation Catherine Porter)
culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its po- http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/ix_chap5.html
litical life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature;

11. Within the romantic imagination the global we need to look somewhere between the anciently
is told as something very, very large, as interred traces of microbial promiscuity and the all-
something very, very complex, but also as too-recent flourishing of electronic miscegenation. It
something that may be grasped and held as is in the city – at the hubs of human movement and
a whole. Left to its own devices, romantic habitation – that we find a long but still relatively
complexity leads to the holism of grand nar- accessible history of socially accelerated flows and
rative. But there is an alternative: one can in- fusions, here that we might uncover a succession
stead go looking for the global as something of culturally mediated human encounters with the
that is broken, poorly formed, and comes in aliens within and without. Before the Internet could
patches; as something that is very small, and be constituted as a luxuriating ecology of life-like
pretty elusive. entities, I would suggest, it was first necessary to the
construe the city as a mesh of heterogeneous ele-
John Law (2002) And if the Global Were Small and Non-
Coherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroque ments, to experience the variegated life secreted in
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/research/resalph.htm 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.

12. 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.