World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It

World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet—and What We Can Do About It
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2020-03-13
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1916444628

Speaking out when it's unpopular. Back in the day, Henry David Thoreau raged at the robber barons-the big shots of their age, despoiling the environment in the name of progress. Deep in the throes of the seemingly unstoppable growth of tech, a modern-day Thoreau has emerged in the guise of Gerry McGovern-decrying the massive, hidden negative impacts of tech on the environment. McGovern has thoroughly documented in World Wide Waste how tech damages the Earth-and what we should be doing about it. It is not just the acres of discarded computer hardware conveniently dumped in Third World countries. Every time an email is downloaded it contributes to global warming. Every tweet, search, check of a webpage creates pollution. Digital is physical. Those data centers are not in the Cloud. They're on land in massive physical buildings packed full of computers hungry for energy. It seems invisible. It seems cheap and free. It's not. Digital costs the Earth.

Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation

Transform: A rebel’s guide for digital transformation
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2016
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1782807381

"Are you an optimist? Are you a rebel? Do you think that because of digital technology, power is shifting away from organizations towards citizens and customers? Are you a digital change agent? Do you want to transform your organization? Then this book is here to help you"--Back cover.

Sustainable Content

Sustainable Content
Author: Alisa Bonsignore
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1632998831

Our digital lives have a significant carbon footprint Welcome to the digital age, which isn’t the sci-fi utopia we were promised. Our lives are increasingly digital, yet most people never consider the energy it takes to store, deliver, and consume the masses of data required to make the internet function. Whether we’re content consumers using retail websites and banking apps or content creators making video calls or posting on social media, the energy used for digital content has a shocking carbon footprint. Sustainable Content explores how we can measure and mitigate these environmental impacts. It delivers a foundational knowledge of sustainability, the effects of content creation and consumption, and why all of this increasingly matters to business management and the planet as a whole. Author and content strategist Alisa Bonsignore has built a career out of helping companies design sustainable content, and in this book, she shares her insights on: • Assessing the environmental impact of our data • Measuring emissions of any form of digital content, from emails to video meetings • Understanding the accelerating impacts of AI • Adding value at work with a sustainability focus • Identifying solutions for change • Mitigating the carbon footprint of data by creating more sustainable content Sustainable Content is an approachable and actionable guide for thoughtful content creation and consumption. Together, we can improve usability, reduce costs, and boost audience satisfaction.

Top Tasks: A How-to Guide

Top Tasks: A How-to Guide
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2018
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1916444601

Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.

The 2030 Spike

The 2030 Spike
Author: Colin Mason
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136555110

The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear; we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe. Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, The 2030 Spike serves as a guidebook for humanity through the treacherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization. This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.

Falter

Falter
Author: Bill McKibben
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1250178274

Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And then, drawing on McKibben’s experience in building 350.org, the first truly global citizens movement to combat climate change, it offers some possible ways out of the trap. We’re at a bleak moment in human history -- and we’ll either confront that bleakness or watch the civilization our forebears built slip away. Falter is a powerful and sobering call to arms, to save not only our planet but also our humanity.

The Uninhabitable Earth

The Uninhabitable Earth
Author: David Wallace-Wells
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Science
ISBN: 052557672X

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

Data Ethics

Data Ethics
Author: Katherine O'Keefe
Publisher: Kogan Page Publishers
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-06-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1398610283

Data-gathering technology is more sophisticated than ever, as are the ethical standards for using this data. This second edition shows how to navigate this complex environment. Data Ethics provides a practical framework for the implementation of ethical principles into information management systems. It shows how to assess the types of ethical dilemmas organizations might face as they become more data-driven. This fully updated edition includes guidance on sustainability and environmental management and on how ethical frameworks can be standardized across cultures that have conflicting values. There is also discussion of data colonialism, the challenge of ethical trade-offs with ad-tech and analytics such as Covid-19 tracking systems and case studies on Smart Cities and Demings Principles. As the pace of developments in data-processing technology continues to increase, it is vital to capitalize on the opportunities this affords while ensuring that ethical standards and ideals are not compromised. Written by internationally regarded experts in the field, Data Ethics is the essential guide for students and practitioners to optimizing ethical data standards in organizations.

Laudato Si

Laudato Si
Author: Pope Francis
Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2015-07-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1612783872

“In the heart of this world, the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is always present. He does not abandon us, he does not leave us alone, for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward. Praise be to him!” – Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ In his second encyclical, Laudato Si’: On the Care of Our Common Home, Pope Francis draws all Christians into a dialogue with every person on the planet about our common home. We as human beings are united by the concern for our planet, and every living thing that dwells on it, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Pope Francis’ letter joins the body of the Church’s social and moral teaching, draws on the best scientific research, providing the foundation for “the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” Laudato Si’ outlines: The current state of our “common home” The Gospel message as seen through creation The human causes of the ecological crisis Ecology and the common good Pope Francis’ call to action for each of us Our Sunday Visitor has included discussion questions, making it perfect for individual or group study, leading all Catholics and Christians into a deeper understanding of the importance of this teaching.

Bright Green Lies

Bright Green Lies
Author: Derrick Jensen
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Total Pages: 419
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1948626403

“This disturbing but very important book makes clear we must dig deeper than the normal solutions we are offered.”—Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia Works "Bright Green Lies exposes the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of leading environmental groups and their most prominent cheerleaders. The best-known environmentalists are not in the business of speaking truth, or even holding up rational solutions to blunt the impending ecocide, but instead indulge in a mendacious and self-serving delusion that provides comfort at the expense of reality. They fail to state the obvious: We cannot continue to wallow in hedonistic consumption and industrial expansion and survive as a species. The environmental debate, Derrick Jensen and his coauthors argue, has been distorted by hubris and the childish desire by those in industrialized nations to sustain the unsustainable. All debates about environmental policy need to begin with honoring and protecting, not the desires of the human species, but with the sanctity of the Earth itself. We refuse to ask the right questions because these questions expose a stark truth—we cannot continue to live as we are living. To do so is suicidal folly. ‘Tell me how you seek, and I will tell you what you are seeking,’ the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said. This is the power of Bright Green Lies: It asks the questions most refuse to ask, and in that questioning, that seeking, uncovers profound truths we ignore at our peril.”—Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of America: The Farewell Tour