The Tate Britian

A coalition of writers including playwright Caryl Churchill and the critics Rebecca Solnit and Lucy R. Lippard are signers of a letter printed in The Guardian last weekend calling for the Tate Britain to disassociate itself with BP. According to the letter, “The public is rapidly coming to recognise that the sponsorship programmes of BP and Shell are means by which attention can be distracted from their impacts on human rights, the environment and the global climate.”

According to this report from Art Info, “The primary signatory was [a] veteran of exposing the opaque and politically-loaded sources of funding for arts institutions, Hans Haacke — whose 1970 MoMA Poll addressed New York governor and Museum of Modern Art board member Nelson Rockefeller’s continuing support of Nixon’s Indochina policy.”

The Guardian letter goes on to say:

As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations.

We represent a cross-section of people from the arts community that believe that the BP logo represents a stain on Tate’s international reputation. Many artists are angry that Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. Little more than a decade ago, tobacco companies were seen as respectable partners for public institutions to gain support from – that is no longer the case. It is our hope that oil and gas will soon be seen in the same light.

This Nov. 11, 2008 photo released by ArborGen shows a field of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees in Sebring, Fla. South Carolina-based ArborGen has received federal approval to plant about 250,000 more trees in locations around the South for use by International Paper, MeadWestvaco and Rubicon LTD. (AP Photo/ArborGen)

According to this AP report, the commercial paper industry is going forward with plans to “plant forests of genetically altered eucalyptus trees in seven Southern states.” The plant was developed by ArborGen, a biotechnology company “affiliated with three large paper companies,” and is designed to grow faster than other native trees.

Critics of the plants are “worried that such a large introduction of a bioengineered nonnative plant could throw natural ecosystems out of whack.”

“Australian eucalyptus trees grow faster than native hardwoods and produce high-quality pulp perfect for paper production, but thus far, they have been able to thrive only in very warm climates. ArborGen genetically altered the trees to withstand freezing temperatures, and the idea with the test forests is to see how far north they can now be grown,” says the report.

One critic, Anne Petermann, executive director of Global Justice Ecology Project, noted that the eucalyptus tree is “is quite a dangerous tree to be mass planting,” as it requires “vast amounts of water that could reduce groundwater levels, and increase the wildfire risk because they are so flammable.” ArborGen counters that “eucalyptus trees have not proven invasive in dozens of tropical countries where they are widely grown on plantations. Also, ArborGen genetically modified the trees to limit their ability to disperse seed and spread.” The company also calls the introduction of the plants into seven states “very confined research.”

“If you thought you were saving forests and protecting the environment by going paperless…think again.”

Over at PBS Mediashift, Don Carli covers the ever-persistent concern of using digital media to “help” or “save” the environment. But Carli isn’t promoting that you add “please consider the environment before printing this email” to the bottom of your digital correspondence, or recommending that you pay your bills online. He’s not arguing against it either, but rather argues that this choice between digital or print is a “false dilemma” — one that makes us feel guilty about using paper products and eliminates any sort of concern for the environmental impact of the digital sphere and the internet. But really, we should at this point be more concerned about the latter. All of our use of digital media, the internet, cell phones, iPads, etc. is the cause of record-breaking global energy use. And that record-breaking energy use is becoming worse for the environment than paper use. We’ve just yet to realize the consequences.

The difficult part in recognizing the environmental hazards of digital media is the fact that the energy use and backend are unseen. When we search the internet, we don’t think of Google and Yahoo’s massive server farms all over the world, or the fact that a $20 uptick in our monthly utility bills is causing enormous increases in Appalachian coal strip-mining and deforestation. To us, it seems cheap and harmless. And because we can see the waste that book production produces, by lessening that waste, it makes us think that not only is digital media harmless, but it is helpful. Unfortunately, that is a misperception. (See this earlier MobyLives report, “How Green is Your Ebook?”.)

So when claiming that book production is killing the planet and reading on Kindles/iPads/etc. will save the environment, think again. The digital revolution might actually be hastening global warming, deforestation, and the release of poisonous emissions into the atmosphere. I can’t recommend Carli’s piece more strongly: read it here.

People need to “get over the misconception” that digital publishing is more environmentally friendly than traditional print publishing, says British publisher and author Karen Christensen.

Christensen, CEO of Berkshire Publishing and co-editor of the forthcoming title The Business of Sustainability volume 2, tells The Bookseller in this report by Catherine Neilan that, “I can’t think of an issue where our beliefs about an issue are more out of line with the realities …. Both print and digital publishing have an impact on the environment, and we need to get over the misconception that digital publishing is inherently better than publishing on paper. It might be a lot worse.”

It never fails: If you’re a publisher appearing in public nowadays — on a panel discussion, doing an interview, walking the dog — someone is going to stand up and accuse you of murdering trees, of ruining the atmosphere by having trucks move books about, and of, in general, being a dinosaur who is harming the planet irredeemably by publishing books. (Invariably, the person who attacks you thusly at a public appearance will also, afterwards, pitch you their novel. Which they envision in hardcover.)

In any event, the question is, are ebooks, by being composed of bits of ether, actually better for the environment than, er, 100% recyclable books?

According to Tom Tivnan in a recent report for The Bookseller, maybe not.

For example: One study, Tivnan notes, “by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group, a company which supports the development of clean and environmentally sustainable technologies, suggested that, on average, the carbon an Amazon Kindle emits in the life of the device is offset in its first year. Emma Ritch, author of The Environmental Impact of Amazon’s Kindle, wrote that after that first year, each additional year’s use would ‘result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168kg of CO2 per year’ — the amount of emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 printed books.”

But the Cleantech report, and other similar reports, “skims over” some key issues, says Tivnan. It doesn’t discuss, for example, “the long-term landfill implications of devices that are certainly not biodegradable and may contain toxic materials.” (To understand how serious an omission this is, see this devastating 60 Minutes report on how people in China and other third world nations are dying in the effort to get rid of our old electronic devices.)

“And that leaves aside the social and environmental implications of ‘resource extraction’, or the obtaining of raw materials — which more often than not come from developing countries.” Here Tivnan is referring to materials such as tantalum or coltan, a.k.a.“blood coltan” — minerals included in every cell phone and ereader. (See this devastating report on how these minerals are mined under deadly conditions in warring regions of Africa by virtual slaves.)

Tivnan doesn’t get into the fact that ereader devices, like books, get to the store via trucks. But he does note that “e-book devices, hooked up either wirelessly or through a PC to the internet, do use a not inconsiderable amount of energy.” And studies such as the Cleantech report don’t say much about “where the electricity comes from.” Nor does the report say anything about the server farms where the bits of ether that are ebooks are stored — server farms which are on track to do more damage to the atmosphere than airplanes, which is considerable, according to this recent report from The Economist.

In short, and disregarding any consideration of sociological considerations, direct comparisons of the environmental impact of print and electronic formats of books are complicated and multi-faceted, and so the jury is still out. But as studies continue to attempt to make that comparison, it’s hard not see old-fashioned, 100% recyclable printed books as the superior technology when it comes to taking care of mother earth.