April 2024 archive

Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are!

Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by others.

”The Internet and Climate Change” – In this article that I published today on the Internet Society’s site, I explored how the Internet is helping address climate change, how the Internet is harming the climate, and how the Internet’s infrastructure is at risk in the face of our changing climate.

I’ve been talking about these topics with many different people, but this article was my first attempt to bring all these thoughts together into one piece. I would love any feedback you have! Was it helpful? Did you learn something? Do you have ideas or pointers to other people working on these topics? Or do you think I have things all wrong? Or are there other articles or papers you think I should read?

Please do let me know any feedback. If you received this via email, you should just be able to reply. If not , you can send it to me at dyork@lodestar2.com .

If you are looking for a speaker or a panelist for a workshop, podcast, webinar, video, presentation, etc. about this whole topic… it’s one I’m looking to spend more time on and I’m eager to engage in discussions about!

“The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud” – in this excerpt from a longer case study for MIT Press, anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate dives DEEP into the data centers that power all the applications and services we use every day. He goes first into energy consumption, offering staggering statistics along the way, including:

The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.

He goes on to talk about the enormous amounts of water required by data centers, and then gets into the noise pollution that affects local communities. His excerpt concludes with a section about the huge amount of electronic waste generated from data centers, and some final thoughts.

If you’ve been looking to understand climate impacts of the apps and services we use, this is a great piece!

”We Need To Rewild The Internet” – This is an amazing article by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon! It’s not about climate change … or anything directly related to Earth Day… but rather it uses the lens of ecology to look at today’s Internet, and to offer suggestions for its future. As they subtitle it:

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

It’s a brilliant piece! I enjoyed it and found it so powerful that I just may have to write an entire newsletter about it. I probably will… but in the meantime I wanted to get this out to you all.

BONUS: One fourth article to wrap on a hopeful note – if you have not read “Collapse, Renewal and the Rope of History” from the folks at FutureCrunch, do so now! It’s another amazing piece of writing that gets to the core of the stories we tell … to ourselves… and to everyone else.

With that, I wish you a Happy Earth Day! And… the reminder that really every day must be Earth Day if we are to keep living on this pale blue dot of ours!

[The End]

Recent Posts and Podcasts

Here is some of the content I’ve published and produced recently on my personal sites:

• Celebrating 20 Years as a Wikipedia Editor – and the companion podcast episode TDYR 416 – 20 Years of Wikipedia Editing
• 1,000 Days of Journaling with Day One
• The Github Malware Attack – and the Importance of Trusting the Repository You Use
• New Excellent Analysis of Where IPv6 Grew in 2023

And new posts I wrote for the Internet Society (who has no connection to this newsletter):

• Nevada Wants to Reduce Online Protections for Children: All Internet Users Should Benefit from Strong Encryption
• Protection for Intermediaries Is Vital for the Internet in Mexico
• Major Internet Outages Across Western and Southern Africa Today
• Internet connectivity disrupted in Chad amidst unrest
• 3 Years On, Myanmar’s Internet Service Blocking Results in $232 Million Loss

Thanks for reading to the end. I welcome any comments and feedback you may have.

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Until the next time,
Dan

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Disclaimer

Disclaimer: This newsletter is a personal project I’ve been doing since 2007 or 2008, several years before I joined the Internet Society in 2011. While I may at times mention information or activities from the Internet Society, all viewpoints are my personal opinion and do not represent any formal positions or views of the Internet Society. This is just me, saying some of the things on my mind.