"If a lion could talk, we would not understand him" (Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, II, xi, p. 223)

http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/ozone_maps/movies/OZONE_D1979-12%25P1Y_G%5E720X486.LSH.mpg

MECM90015 History and Philosophy of Media 2012

9. Ecocritique

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 environmental re-sponsibility and all things “green. Businesses in North America spend $65+ billion per year on print media advertising. The average office work-er 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 ac-tivity is significant. However, few enterprises to-day can tell you the footprint of their marketing communication, print or digital. That is about to change.”

Lisa Wellman, CEO SustainCommWorld. http://www.businessofgreenmedia.com/

The problem (1) Extracting materials

some basic digital materials:indiumgalliumarsenicgermaniumsapphirecopperaluminumleadgoldzincnickeltinsilver . . . .

Sebastiao Salgado, Serra Pelada gold mine, Brazil, 1986

The problem (2): manufacturing

The number of toxic materials needed to make the 220 bil-lion silicon chips manufactured annually is staggering: highly corrosive hydrochloric acid; metals such as arsenic, cadmium, and lead; volatile solvents like methyl chloroform, benzene, acetone, and trichloroethylene (TCE); and a number of su-per 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 workers 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 com-puter 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, nine pounds of hazardous waste, and 3,787 gallons of water, which requires extensive chemical treatment.

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/154/57/

"Under NAFTA, maquiladora employment increased by 54% in Ciudad Juárez, spurring significant population growth. Yet Juárez still has no waste treatment facility to treat sewage produced by the 1.3 million people who now live there."

(NAFTA at 5, Global Trade Watch)

The problem (3) consumption

Aggregate electricity use for servers doubled over the pe-riod 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 expensive servers, with only a small part of that growth being attributable to growth in the power use per unit.

Total power used by servers represented about 0.6% of to-tal U.S. electricity consumption in 2005. When cooling and auxiliary infrastructure are included, that number grows to 1.2%, an amount comparable to that for color televisions. The total power demand in 2005 (including associated in-frastructure) is equivalent (in capacity terms) to about five 1000 MW power plants for the U.S. and 14 such plants for the world. The total electricity bill for operating those serv-ers 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 Na-tional Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, February. )

We found that total direct power use by office and net-work equipment is about 74 TWh per year, which is about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S. When el ectricity used by telecommunications equipment and electronics manufacturing is included, that figure rises to 3% of all elec-tricity 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

The problem (4) recycling

In Lagos, while there is a legitimate robust market and abil-ity to repair and refurbish old electronic equipment includ-ing computers, monitors, TVs and cell phones, the local ex-perts 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 market-able. 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 network, 2005http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/

http://it.truveo.com/The-Digital-Dump-Exporting-HighTech-ReUse-and/id/2654447730

The phosphors and other potentially toxic dusts must be removed from the CRT cullet and managed responsibly in developed countries, and

The ‘competent authority’ of the importing country must formally consent to accept the cleaned cullet as a non-waste because it essentially meets specifications to be used as a direct replacement feedstock in a primary manufacturing process to create new consumer products without further processing, other than quality control – that is, it is not going to a recycling destination and no further cleaning or processing is needed prior to enter-ing 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.

. . . 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

Behaviour can no longer be localised in indi-viduals conceived as preformed homunculi; but has to be treated epigenetically as a func-tion of complex material systems which cut across individuals (assemblages) and which transverse phyletic lineages and organismic boundaries (rhizomes). This requires the articulation of a distributed conception of agency. The challenge is to show that nature consists of a field of multiplicities, assemblages of heterogeneous components (human, ani-mal, viral, molecular, etc.) in which ‘creative evolution’ can be shown to involve blocks of becoming. (Ansell Pearson, K. (1999) Ger-minal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London: Routledge.: 171)

The Greek prefix epi- in epige-netics implies features that are “on top of” or “in addition to” genetics; thus epigenetic traits exist on top of or in addition to the traditional molecular basis for inheritance

http://www.bruno-latour.fr/virtual/index.html#

it is not enough to talk about nature and politics; we also have to talk about science. But here is where the shoe pinch-es: ecologism cannot be simply the introduction of nature into politics, since not only the idea of nature but also the idea of politics, by contrast, both depend on a certain con-ception of science. Thus we have to reconsider three con-cepts at once: polis, logos, and phusis.

CHAPTER 1: Why must political ecology let go of nature? . Because nature is not a particular sphere of reality but the result of a political division, of a Constitution that separates what is objective and indisputable 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 allows 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 con-cerning 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 objectivity). If nature* is a particular way of totalizing the members who share the same common world instead of and in place of politics, we understand 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 historically situated social representation has become a commonplace. But we cannot settle for it without maintaining the politics of the Cave, since doing so would amount to distancing ourselves still further from the reality of things themselves left intact in the hands of Science.To give political ecology its place, we must then avoid the shoals of repre-sentations of nature and accept the risk of metaphysics. Fortunately, for this task we can profit from the fragile aid of comparative anthropology. Indeed, no culture except that of the West has used nature to organize its political life. Traditional societies do not live in harmony with nature; they are unacquainted

with it. Thanks to the sociology of the sciences, to the practice of ecologism, to anthropology, we can thus understand that nature is only one of the two houses of a collective instituted to paralyze democracy. The key question of political ecology can now be formulated: can we find a successor to the collec-tive with two houses: nature and society?

Summary of the argument (for readers in a hurry . . .) (extract) from Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, Harvard UP, 2004 (translation Catherine Porter)http://www.bruno-latour.fr/livres/ix_chap5.html

Within the romantic imagination the global is told as something very, very large, as something very, very complex, but also as something that may be grasped and held as a whole. Left to its own devices, romantic complexity leads to the holism of grand nar-rative. But there is an alternative: one can in-stead go looking for the global as something that is broken, poorly formed, and comes in patches; as something that is very small, and pretty elusive.

John Law (2002) And if the Global Were Small and Non-Coherent? Method, Complexity and the Baroquehttp://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/research/resalph.htm

we need to look somewhere between the anciently interred traces of microbial promiscuity and the all-too-recent flourishing of electronic miscegenation. It is in the city – at the hubs of human movement and habitation – that we find a long but still relatively accessible history of socially accelerated flows and fusions, here that we might uncover a succession of culturally mediated human encounters with the aliens within and without. Before the Internet could be constituted as a luxuriating ecology of life-like entities, I would suggest, it was first necessary to the construe the city as a mesh of heterogeneous ele-ments, to experience the variegated life secreted in 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.

Do you understand?

1. Do you understand the language I am using?

2. Do you understand that you are being given an order?

3. You do not understand what I am saying and you don’t need to. Just do as I say

4. You are incapable of understanding. I do the understanding (of the situation) and you do the understanding (of my order)

5. You understand language, I speak it

1. I understand that you are giving me an order

2. I understand that you are speaking and that you expect me to understand but you don’t expect me to follow your reasons

3. I understand that you are telling me we don’t speak the same language, or that you speak and I can only understand

4. Nonetheless I do understand you are giving me an order

5. So I also understand that you are lying when you tell me that I am incapable of language

Rancière, Jacques (1999), Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

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