Business & Innovation...

I guess you could consider Luddites to be environmentalists. As you could the Amish. Or the Unabomber. Yeah, you could forsake all modern comforts - live off the grid - grow your own food and bask in your lack of impact on the environment. You could not have a cell phone, computer or zippers. That is within your rights as a citizen. Go on. Knock yourself out.

I’m not going to be able to do that. No. Like most people, I am going to have to live in a city.  I’m going to have to have some kind of transportation. I’m going to have to have some communication devices. And - in order to write for this site - I’m going to have to have a computer.

So, the question is: does that make me a hypocrite?

The answer may be less complicated than the question. The way I see it - technology was at one time the arch nemesis of all things green. At least it was around the time of the Industrial Revolution. It got even worse after WWII, when plastics and processed foods came into fashion. Then the 80’s and 90’s saw disposable everything. Things then got even sloppier.

The economy trumped eco-friendly. The apogee to this in my mind was the rise of fast food, oil exec windfall profits and the US opting out of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these things happened in the early part of this decade (if you can think of a name for this decade, please email it to me).

Now there is a consumer cry for sustainability. The economy can also push eco-friendly as it turns out. Today, I would say that most people who consider themselves to be environmentalists are not Luddite types. They are actually like myself, a (excuse this) hybrid of higher tech and lower impact hopefuls. Technology is looking like the way forward. Cleaner ways to live sure existed for Cro-Magnon, and there are certainly 3rd World countries that produce less garbage than the US. But finding a balance between the two extremes is what’s in store for the future.

The one example that I think about all the time is how much paper has been saved since the advent of the internet.  When I was a kid, I got stationary as a gift. Could you imagine? Who owns stationary? Think of all the forests that have been saved by the internet. The letters that are now emails. The newspapers that are now websites. The catalogs that are now online stores. The CD’s that are now MP3s. The junk mail that’s now – well, I still get junk mail (and spam on top of that!) Think of all that waste and land fill that has been saved just by the world wide web. Perhaps the future isn’t so bleak after all…