Interspecies Ethic

In probing the relationship between humans and nature, two major exhibitions question the very foundations of design practice.

- Avinash Rajagopal

What was the environmental impact of writing this article?

Some considerations are obvious. Humans reached into the earth to extract ores that had to be pulverized, refined, smelted, melted, and then cast or drawn to make the thousands of metallic parts for my laptop. Petroleum gushed through pipelines somewhere (maybe even as a war or two were fought over the oil) to end up not only as the plastic keys on my keyboard but also the fuel consumed by the truck that ferried my laptop to me. I’ve accounted for the power that flows into my laptop, guiltily noted the fluorescent light over my desk, and considered those appliances’ energy sources, renewable or not. Then there’s the energy that fueled my thoughts and my typing fingers—derived from plant parts cooked in a metal pan over burning fossil fuels. Even as my exhausted brain was trying to imagine the embodied energy of my poor frying pan, I discovered a fact that made me cry out loud. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have estimated that in order to create an algorithm like the one that puts a squiggly line under my misspelling of the word fluorescent, Google generated a footprint equivalent to the full lifetime emissions of five gas-guzzling, smoke-belching cars.