CIOs Will Turn Green...

...because they will have no choice. As this Reg piece explains, the worlds of computing and the environment are inexorably becoming more intertwined. From the story:

"Today, energy costs typically form less than 10 per cent of an overall IT budget. However, this could rise to more than 50 per cent in the next few years. The bottom line is that the cost of power on this scale would be difficult to manage simply as a budget increase and most CIOs would struggle to justify the situation to company board members."

Enough to make anyone go green.

Is the New Commons Killing the Old Commons?

An interesting meditation on the way in which the application of the commons metaphor to information - something I've certainly been doing in these posts - commits the sin of ignoring the way in which computers, the creators of that metaphorical commons, are destroying the concrete commons of the environment through the toxic materials they habitually contain, and which are dumped when they reach the end of their life.

It therefore suggests:

Perhaps the time has come to revisit the metaphor of an 'environmentalism for the net' to talk not only about multiple forms of resistance to an ever expanding intellectual property regime, but quite literally of the ecopolitical implications of the very infrastructures that facilitate and sustain the net.cultural dynamic of collaborative creation. Such an environmentalism, articulated conceptually and organisationally in the challenging context of electronics manufacturing's 'global flagship networks', could significantly broaden existing efforts by labour unions and NGOs to develop a broader agenda of economic and environmental justice.

Food for thought. (Via OnTheCommons.)

The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

One of the reasons it took a while for people to accept free software is that there is a traditional diffidence in the face of things that are free. After all, if something's free, it can't be worth anything, can it? The same infuriating obtuseness can be seen writ large when it comes to the environment: since the air and sea are all free, they can't be valuable, so polluting them isn't be a problem.

Against this background, it is no wonder that traditional economics pays scant regard to the value of the environment, and rarely factors in the damage caused to it by economic activities. It is also signficant that the seminal work on valuing all of Nature goes back to 1997, when Robert Costanza and his co-authors put the worth of the planet's annual contribution to mankind at a cool $33 trillion per year, almost certainly an underestimate.

So it's high time that this work was updated and expanded, and it's good to see that the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is providing some much-needed money to do precisely that:

Over the next year, with an $813,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Costanza and his team will create a set of computer models and tools that will give a sophisticated portrait of the ecosystem dynamics and value for any spot on earth.

"Land use planners, county commissioners, investment bankers, anyone who is interested," Cosntanza said, "will be able to go on the Web, use our new models, and be able to identify a territory and start getting answers."

For example, if a town council is trying decide the value of a wetland--compared to, say, building a shopping mall there--these models will help them put a dollar value on it. If a country wants to emulate Costa Rica's program of payments to landowners to maintain their land as a forest, they'll better be able to figure the ecosystem value of various land parcels to establish fair payments.

This is a critically-important project: let's hope its results are widely applied, and that we can use it as a step towards paying back the debt we owe Nature before it - and we - go environmentally bankrupt. (Via Digg.)

How to Save the Commons: Compute

There aren't many commons bigger than the atmosphere, nor one whose existence in something near its present state is so critical to our own survival. But in the face of the indisputable scientific consensus that global warming is taking place, it is hard to know what to do.

Well, short of rugby-tackling your elected representatives to the ground and refusing to let go until they do something about the climate crisis, you might at least join this project. It's pretty standard distributed computing stuff: your PC (Windows only, alas) does calculations in the background during idle time, and contributes its bit(s) to the greater whole - in this case making more accurate predictions about climate change.

It hardly requires much commitment from you, just a quick download, plus some electricity (pity that the latter will make the global warming worse). In fact, it's worth taking part just to get the ultra-cool screen-saver, which shows your model - your earth - and its climate, evolving before your very eyes.

Magna Carta and the Commons

A spectacular riff on the Magna Carta and its relationship to the commons. Along the way it brings in "petro-violence" and the environmental ravages it entails:

woodlands are being destroyed in favor of commercial profit, petroleum products are substituted as the base commodity of human reproduction and world economic development, and commoners are expropriated.

I really must pop down to Runnymede. (Via On the Commons).

The Commons: When Digital Meets Analogue

Given the convergence of thinking about the digital and analogue commons that is taking place, the news that EarthTrends is releasing its online collection of information regarding environmental, social, and economic trends under a Creative Commons licence is welcome.