Chris Anderson, of Wired, made some bold claims the other day. He looked at Wired's activities, and claimed that it was more sustainable to publish on paper than on the web, and that, in effect, paper publication was a carbon sequestration project. Here's his argument:
1. Trees take carbon out the air. Carbon negative2. Sustainable forestry companies (the only kind we use) cut down those trees, and plant an equal number to replace them (trees absorb the most carbon in the young, high-growth period of their life. Update: see comments for more on this). Carbon neutral
3. The cut trees are turned into pulp and then paper in a decarbonized process. Mills are generally on rivers and the pulp process is driven by hydro-generated electric power. Additional power is generated by burning bark, and the carbon from that is usually captured and sequestered. Carbon neutral
4. We print and bind that paper into magazines, which are delivered mostly by the US Postal Service, which runs the same routes whether they're carrying our magazines or not. Since the printing plants tend to be away from urban areas and near rail distribution, they tend to be pretty efficient from an energy perspective. Slight carbon positive
5. ... Since our readers tend to be upper middle-class urban and suburban dwellers, they're almost certainly either recycling the paper or it's being properly landfilled. In either case, the carbon is sequestered, which is to say it doesn't get back in the atmosphere. Carbon neutral.
Now, I know and like Chris, and I've written for Wired, but the problems with this argument, as I'm sure Worldchanging readers will recognize, are many, ranging from the fact that no one currently practices truly sustainable forestry on an industrial level to some creative energy accounting -- accounting which leads to conclusions completely opposite to those reached by InfoWorld when they studied the issue in depth:
According to a 2002 study by the Energy Information Administration, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, the paper industry emits the fourth highest level of carbon dioxide among manufacturers, after the chemical, petroleum and coal products, and primary metals industries.Moreover... Time magazine found that an average issue was responsible for creating about a quarter pound of greenhouse gas emissions. Compounding the damage, weekly magazine subscriptions generate an average of 90 pieces of mail in the form of renewal notices, premiums, and the like, according to the U.S. Postal Service. Yet paper usage is just the tip of the waste-berg. Delivering tens of thousands of magazines from the publisher to subscribers’ mailboxes means adding more weight to the post office’s fuel-burning planes and trucks.
The debate in the comments on Chris' post is vigorous and worth reading through. Though (given what I understand about publishing) I think Chris is wrong, that's not what really left me questioning the exercise. What gave me pause was: Why doesn't Wired know it's own backstory?
This is Wired Magazine, after all, which markets itself as the house organ of the technological future, and the future these days (as Wired icon and Worldchanging ally #1 Bruce Sterling noted) is all bright green.
What's more, the tools of backstory discovery fit well in the hands of alpha geeks: they involve wonky data-crunching moves like footprinting and life-cycle analysis, information design-fu like eco-labeling, and the kind of behind-the-scenes technological revelations that literary geeks love to unveil in publications like Make. Wired, if it really still knows its territory, ought to intellectually own this stuff.
But Chris doesn't: he's clearly guessing, or at least arguing without real data. And that's weird for another reason as well. While assessing the footprint of many complex commercial activities is still not easy, publishing is, at least in comparison, an ecologically pretty straight-forward business. There just aren't all that many moving parts.
Nor is Wired a small company. It's part of Conde Nast, which in turn is owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates in the U.S. These are the kind of companies that certainly have the money to pay to document and understand the backstories of their products.
And backstories, though complex, are not rocket science. Based on my own conversations with both leaders within large companies and with the accountability activists watching them from the outside, if large businesses want to know the impacts they're creating, it's mostly possible to find out. For many processes, complexities still abound; some basic science remains to be done; and for some goods and services, the backstory is so damn Byzantine that dissertating PhD students could wander into them and never be heard from again -- but in most cases, I'm told, management-supported exploration into lifecycles and impacts, clear transparency standards and a little muscle can at a minimum bring to light the general outline.
And people want to know. Consumers want to know. Watchdog activists and certification organizations want to know. Regulators increasingly want to know (and given what we're coming to understand about the urgency of the moment, they're going to want to know a lot more in the very near future). Investors are beginning to understand that if they don't know, they're not investing, they're gambling. Smart companies should be in open communication with all of these groups.
This is not only good corporate politics, it's risk reduction and brand management. Learning the backstory can help a big organization figure out what it's doing that might soon get it in trouble, and thus avoid that trouble. And showing that you know what sustainability and responsibility mean and are willing to acknowledge where you fall short (and share a plan for getting there) can win you brand trust on the issue.
For the last two years, green has been the new black: style, some buzzwords and good intentions were qualification enough to declare yourself green. But we're about to see a green shake-out. We're moving into a time when it's not enough to call yourself green,or profess green or do little things that are perceived to be green. Instead, you're going to have to show that what you're doing is better, much better, better enough to make a radical difference, and documentable. A very large portion of what now markets itself as green isn't going to make that cut. It's going to be very ugly when the compost hits the fan.
This is particularly true in green media, where there's already something of a population overshoot, and where a great many new publications have very, very little real in-house sustainability expertise. (Combine that with the emerging backlash against lifestyle environmentalism, and I think we're going to see a real winnowing process over the next year, with the publications that can keep up with the pace of innovation doing very well, and many others which have relied on the same narrow pool of small steps and shopping ads going out of business.)
So, Chris, here's my challenge to you: Somebody's going to invent backstory journalism. If it isn't Wired, does Wired have any claim to being on the technological cutting edge any more?
Leapfrog Wired back towards the forefront. Get corporate to commission a major backstory effort, and tell the story of the magazine as an object. If it is the journalist's first obligation to education his- or herself in public, use the technical exploration of the myriad real-world unseen impacts of producing a magazine as fodder for a journalistic study of the meaning of those impacts, and of sustainability in the 21st century, and how Wired can be a 21st century publication. Announce your plan to make Wired the world's leading bright green magazine within five years and make reporting your progress a major feature in every issue and on the site for the next few years.
Show us that Wired still's got the vision to see the future.
