If you’re not yet accustomed to the collapsing barrier between “human activity” and “environment,” and recognizing that everything we do with our high-tech, silicon-based, electrically-powered devices is directly related to everything that happens with the ecosystem, then you should read this post from the Guardian Technology Blog. Here’s an excerpt:
Google claims that its servers generate 0.2g CO2 per search, and counters that “the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the U.S.) produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches.” Kevin Marks, who works at Google on their Open Social project, says on his personal blog that people generate about 6g of CO2 from simply breathing for 10 minutes.
How is that for a consciousness-raiser? Do a Google search and Google’s servers generate two-tenths of a gram of carbon dioxide, which goes into the air we breathe. Your own computer or web-connected device is doing something similar when you run that search. Now compare that to the CO2 that would have been generated, back in the old days, by whatever means you had to research the same questions.
And by the way, do you remember the old days? You would be with your friends and somebody would ask a question like, “I wonder how much carbon dioxide a server at Google generates when you submit a search.” People would pull numbers out of thin air, and whichever of you could manage to sound the most authoritative would trigger a discussion that, based on your imaginary numbers, was little more than discursive masturbation. Now you can pluck just about any fact not from thin air, but from the combined informational resources of the entire human species, thanks to Google.
At any rate, so long as you ignore news from the Middle East, or anything having to do with religion, it sure seems the human species is progressing nicely toward increasing its collective knowledge and awareness of its surroundings. The idea that there is a “we” that is separate from the “environment,” and the environment is out there, barreling along like a truck that we just happen to be riding in, doing our whole “All the world’s a stage” schtick, pretending that human history is something separable from natural history, looks like it’s on the way out. Finally.