Features, sustainability, technology - by roningirl - December 10, 2009 - 01:39 Europe/Brussels - Be first to Comment!
The following article, featuring yours truly and my newest initiative with Vin Sumner — Greenshift Europe — is included in a Copenhagen Climate Change Conference publication for New Europe magazine this week. Your feedback welcome!
Greenshift Europe
“Greenshift Europe is a movement promoting ICTs to fight climate change,” says Vin Sumner, CEO of UK-based Clicks & Links, and an expert in applying information and communication technologies to address climate challenges. Sumner and Cheryl Miller, founder of ZenDigital.be, have recently joined forces behind Greenshift Europe to promote ICTs for building “smart,” sustainable communities across Europe.
“First and foremost, we aim to lower the footprint of ICT itself,” says Sumner about the principles behind Greenshift Europe. “Then, we look at how ICTs can make the way we do things today, like powering our homes and public buildings, smarter and more energy efficient. And finally,” he adds, “we plan and build ICT infrastructures in our communities, like free, public broadband networks, which help transform our behavior in a direction that will have less impact on the environment.” The last of these, according to Sumner, represents the ultimate, digitally-driven, green “shift.”
Announced this week by EUROCITIES, a Greenshift Europe and City of Manchester-led initiative called the “EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter,” [download pdf here] builds on the Greenshift principles, and calls on European cities to publicly commit to deploying ICT projects to fight climate change. Emphasizing the role cities can play as important catalysts for achieving climate goals, signatories of the Charter pledge to undertake specific actions using digital technologies “to increase energy efficiency, facilitate emissions reductions and forestall climate change.”
“The EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter might be seen as a kind of ICT ‘component’ of the Covenant of Mayors,” says Cheryl Miller, a veteran ICT consultant who has partnered with Sumner to promote Greenshift Europe. “Covenant of Mayors signatories have committed to surpassing the European climate goals for 2020,” says Miller. “And both the European Commission and EUROCITIES acknowledge the important role ICTs can play in enabling cities to achieve their climate objectives,” she adds. The European Commission DG Energy launched the Covenant of Mayors in February of 2009, and today it has almost one thousand signatories.
At the launch of the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter last week, Leader of the Manchester City Council, Sir Richard Leese, explained that while signing the Charter is good for the environment, it is also potentially good for a city’s economy. “One of the greatest means for innovation lies in exploiting ICTs to contribute to a greener digital world,” said Sir Richard.
With fourteen major European cities signing up to the EUROCITIES Green Digital Charter in the days leading up to the Copenhagen talks — including Manchester, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Vienna, The Hague, Birmingham, Ghent, Nantes, Genoa, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon, Bristol and Tallinn — the Charter would seem to represent a kind of green “shift” in Europe which many welcome.
Entertainment, Features, sustainability, technology - by roningirl - October 8, 2009 - 02:57 Europe/Brussels - Be first to Comment!
The pie I’ve most recently stuck my thumb into is TEDxBrussels — a TED-licensed member-driven event taking place at the European Parliament on 23 November 2009!
Burn this Box!
Although I am not certain about the calligraphy (I would have preferred something a little more Art Nouveau), it looks pretty cool on the event T-shirt, I must say. Wonder if it comes in a babydoll model…?
Burn, baby, burn!
For the moment, I’m trying to keep on top of the TEDxBrussels LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter and FaceBook sites. It’s a lot of work — so PLEASE feel free to help — but LOADS of fun! And… it’s for a terrific cause, in many ways.
The TEDxBrussels event itself is cheap, and places are filling up, so be sure to pre-register to get your place right away!!!
Features, technology - by roningirl - June 5, 2009 - 20:53 Europe/Brussels - 5 Comments
It is said that in nature there are no right-angles. Which is probably why when humans could start making right-angles with their opposable digits (”she stood there looking dumb, with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an ‘L’ on her forehead”…), things started to go all wrong. Then we started picking up things. And hitting things with things. And hitting each other with things. And we started making things with right-angles, and developed intricate ways of explaining how to make things with right-angles, etc., etc.
Might we say, then (not being the first, of course!), that opposable digits are the cause of our technological advancement — of the evolution of humanity? (NB Are these the same thing? And should we throw “progress” into the mix as well?) And is technology, or simply “tools,” then what separates us, literally, from the rest of God’s Creation? And, by extension, is technology at the heart of our estrangement from our roots, from the planet, from our fellow creatures, from what is organically “us”?
Viviane Reding says ICT is the solution to the environmental crisis. I’m questioning here whether technology — and our obsession with it (where does that come from anyway?!) — is in fact _not_ the key to achieving so-called “sustainable development,” but actually the largest single contributor to creating the sustainability problem we now face. Or maybe it is both.
Think of the graphic metaphors from the writings of JRR Tolkien: It seems much (most?) of our misery arises from this obsession with technology-driven consumption — expending natural resources to churn things out of the earth that we consume to make our human lives “better”… Or is this a simple case of materialism/consumerism driven by the “financial industrial complex”?
In the case of “technology,” or ICT at least, one may argue that there are no particular actors (except ALL of us, as it’s “just dna”) behind the evolution to today — unless you consider the All-Encompassing Evil Microsoft… or Google. The finance industry, certainly has players and “vested interests,” however, whose position has only strengthened through the cycles of boom and bust over the past one hundred years. And it is certainly in the interest of these players that humans continue to borrow money, buy things, consume them, borrow more money, buy more things, etc.
I am still not certain.
Nonetheless, the dilemma remains. On the one hand: Technology may be the key to a sustainable future for Mother Earth and all her Inhabitants. (=Thumbs Up.) On the other hand: Technology, and its increasing encroachment upon our lives in the tiniest level of detail, may be a self-perpetuating leviathan of destruction that has brought us to disastrous disharmony with our surroundings and will inevitably force us over The Edge. (=Thumbs Down.)
It is this, the “Sustainability/Technology Paradox,” that I would like to explore on this blog. I will post information about what the different parties to this discussion in Brussels — policy-makers, consumers, NGOs, industry — have to say. I’ll try to make my own observations on the course of the discourse. And of course (!), I welcome feedback from anyone out there wishing to contribute to the dialogue. I, personally, am only a new-comer to the table — and like all Americans at an elegant, European dinner — I risk being “all thumbs.”
