More Product, Less Pollution
Earlier this week the Coalition of Museums for Climate Justice (sounds a bit more pleasant than “Against Climate Change” I suppose?) posted a great meditation on air travel and its contribution to pollution (which I saw thanks to the great Eira Tansey). It’s inspired a long and meandering rumination of my own about the environment and our work.
Here in Canada our GLAM work covers a huge geographic area, and at ridiculous cost (“cheap flights from Iqaluit to Toronto start at $1,732,” proclaims the Expedia headline). Our national library and archives frequently hosts “national” symposia and other in-person events in places like Ottawa and Toronto, but has yet to livestream or provide other ways to access and participate in the events remotely.
Compare to the recent Ontario Digital Inclusion Summit, that livestreamed using Youtube (making rewinding and replay immediately available) and offered digital Q&A participation through a tool called Slido. Thanks to this, the Summit was able to include both far-flung participants from all ends of the earth, but also people who couldn’t attend the event due to mobility, cost, or scheduling.
Similarly forward-thinking, the aptly-named Access Conference for library technology livestreams its events, keeps up a steady stream of Twitter participation, and shares edited individual sessions and slides on Youtube and its website after the fact. It’s the smarter way to overcome Canada’s geographic divide, and to be inclusive to all types of stakeholders. And it’s vastly cheaper and less damaging per capita than flying around the country.
A certain quality of internet access is required to livestream events and to keep up with Twitter hashtag use on the fly, I know. Canada still struggles to provide basic internet connectivity to the vast majority of its northern and rural communities, especially in Indigenous communities - 18 percent of the population has no access to better-than-dialup internet. The nation declared in December 2016 that broadband internet is an essential utility “for quality of life” but won’t hit its target of 100% delivery until somewhere between 2026 and 2031.
This lack of residential service, of course, doesn’t mean that Library and Archives Canada can’t start offering livestreaming of its events well in advance of full market saturation - and I hope I never hear them argue this.
I’m sure there are, instead, a bunch of mitigating factors I can’t possibly understand or have explained to me because I’m sooooo far outside the world of LAC and its millions of restrictions. I’m sure federal government livestreaming has to, by law, provide simultaneous transcription and audio in both official languages, or something else totally prohibitive, and a million signed waivers from both presenters and audience members, and some sort of deposit requirement, and on and on and on. I’m sure it can’t cost just a few thousand to do properly with existing in-house expertise and existing in-house equipment. I’m sure LAC’s internet connection is so bad it can’t even provide wifi to conference delegates, let alone reliably stream audio, let alone video.
The last email exchange I had with a LAC staff on this topic was for the “Foundational Meeting” of the National Heritage Digitization Strategy - a new standard that sets digitization goals for every heritage organization across the country regardless of capacity. That was October 2016, and I was advised that “If there is sufficient demand, LAC will do its utmost to provide this service.” I asked the national archives listserv to weigh in and make “sufficient demand” known at the time, but apparently no action has been taken since. Which is funny, because I hear complaints about LAC’s initiatives being inaccessible to smaller, rural, and northern organizations basically all the time.
For an industry consistently denied opportunities by cost barriers, an industry with a consistent critique of being too top-down, large-organization-focused, and ignorant of the issues facing non-academic institutions, livestreaming events of national interest seems a no-brainer. National professional conferences, symposia, and committee meetings should all be included in this. (Someone with enough clout to sit on the latter will have to fill me in on how easy it is to Skype in to such meetings as a member, let alone an observer.)
We could, eventually, settle on one of many different models, from fully-virtual conferences and a mix of on-site and remote presentations, or local-hub conferences (satellite events for watching livestreams in groups, and having breakout sessions or collaborating digitally with other hubs) - such as what the Canadian Archives Summit did in 2014, which I would link to, if the links weren’t all broken already. Flying Less has a great FAQ (in a Google Doc) to help you think about ways to decrease air travel and increase remote participation.
Canada is the perfect country to pioneer such forward-thinking policies as nation-wide virtual events and reducing barriers to participation. Alongside broadband as a utility, can’t we conceive of virtual professional development as a nationwide right? Especially in heritage, where we already believe digital heritage is the way of the future - else why would we have an NHDS at all?
For now, let me end this section with a plea: tell your conference organizers to spend less time deciding where to host a conference to maximize attendance, and more time working out ways to attend remotely. I’d happily throw in a tenner for live access to my national conferences, especially the wonderful ACA Annual. For events around ideas with national reverberations, such as the NHDS, it seems like an obvious priority for federal funds.
**
It’s easy to use sticker-shock as a reason to cut down on needless expenses, and it’s an exciting bonus that reducing those expenses is also environmentally superior. But to me it’s equally compelling to talk about what changes we, in our little profession, can do to mitigate climate change.
Eira Tansey is at the forefront of this, leading Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change) and sharing useful resources wherever she shows up on the internet (and also walking the walk on other ethical issues by recently leaving Twitter, the hotbed of hate). I have been thinking of how to contribute to this discussion for a long time.
There’s as much reading about how climate change affects archives (emergency preparedness and disaster relief for heritage collections; institutions in high-risk regions; preservation environments in the time of climate instability) and how archives can affect climate change (utility consumption and sustainable operations; sustainable materials and buildings; efficient digital consumption and offerings; dealing with volatile storage media and disposal; renewable conservation) as well as how to archive and promote data and information related to climate change, which is especially relevant in an era of government censorship and cuts to environmental protection services and science.
One thing I hope to write in the future is a non-exhaustive list of ways archives and other heritage organizations can divest from corporations and vendors that contribute to climate change (such as banks that invest in oil pipelines, suppliers that aren’t using recycled materials where possible, etc.).
For now, I’m not in a position to do building or space planning, order LEED-certified HVAC and recycled-material acid-free boxes, or work with local scientists to do data-rescue initiatives. I am, however, in a position to research and write about two things relevant to my work and the profession at large: digital labour and digital consumption.
***
It’s indeed modest and necessary to claim that air travel for work and professional development is a brutal abuse of our environment and our budgets. By very minimal extension, we can see that car travel for work and professional development is the same. A car commute produces more than ten times the carbon-dioxide emissions of an equivalent public-transit trip.
In the archival industry, which is so very material-focused and place-based, it’s hard to imagine a career that doesn’t involve heading in to the office, sitting among the collections, supervising the reading room, setting up the computer terminals and microformat readers, giving tours and organizing exhibits, lecturing in classrooms, processing in the workroom, digitizing in the lab, and meetings, meetings, endless meetings. I realize that, but I also realize that as the profession transitions slowly but surely to more digital tools, digital work, and digital communication, opportunities are popping up all the time to think about ways to make our work more energy-efficient and less environmentally damaging.
Of course, I know plenty of library and archives workers who are able to take days at home - whether this is because part of their job includes professional-development and research time, because they work primarily on tech they can access remotely, or because they’ve organized their schedule to optimize a day for writing, editing, and emails. I can rattle off a quick list of tasks that can be done at least partially at home:
Virtual and phone reference, especially on institution procedures or web resources
Administration and coordination through email and phone
Lecture, tour, and exhibit planning
Research and policy-writing, such as on legislation or involving environmental scans
Writing and editing documentation
Marketing, social media, web copy
Web/systems admin, digital collections admin
Metadata, copy cataloguing, finding-aid writing and editing
Post-processing of digitization
Lots of meetings! So many meetings!
The obvious financial expense of using your home technology and utilities to do your job’s work will have to be reckoned with in your contract. And none of that will cut down on pollution - but saving yourself a gas-guzzling commute certainly will.
Desk shifts and tours aside, lots of people work better without social interruptions and casual chats around the watercooler, and when occasionally saved from the stress of deciding what to wear, at least a day or two a week (or month, or whatever works in your shop). The flipside is yes yes yes I know your IT department would never give you remote access, ever ever, I know.
I hope dearly that heritage institutions of all kinds will look clearly at such factors as their regional roads and bike lanes, walkability and public transit, housing costs relative to proximity, and relevant compensation (and office perks - including employee parking! Space on your land! That you could use to hold stuff!) in order to find ways to offer increased remote work for GLAM staff.
Then it’ll be up to GLAM staff to figure out if they can work productively from home - something that isn’t easy for everyone.
**
I’m relatively lucky in that I’ve captured for myself one of the few remote-work jobs in the heritage industry: a nonprofit software provider with a team entirely decentralized across the province. We work together with Skype, Google Hangout, shared documents, and plenty of emails. We get together once a year on the occasion of the Ontario Library Association SuperConference, as many of us as can be gathered; there are team members I still haven’t met in the flesh.
We’re able to support ourselves in this by working on digital solutions for a number of public libraries, archives, museums, galleries, historical societies, and other interest groups. Many of these organizations are simply too small to have the capacity for internal IT staff and stacks, so our process often involves shipping USB sticks and HDDs across the province for ingest, and arranging for the shipping of materials to digitization vendors elsewhere. Our process also often involves talking to municipal IT workers who are managing the unfamiliar world of digital heritage collections - a point of contact rife with opportunity and conflict, and one I’d love to be able to explore more in the future.
I believe strongly in a consortial approach for small organizations and want desperately to see our nonprofit grow in capacity and stature. I want this not just for my own prosperity (and because I have a job with a five-second commute and no dress code) but because it’s the answer to our problems both financial and geographical.
At one point I thought of having Iona’s job: the Archives Advisor for the province, driving from one border to the other to assist in training, project management, and emergency relief. I imagined driving a mobile digitization studio around in a suspicious white van to do processing right there in the parking lots of archives and libraries. It would take some math to discover whether one vehicle delivering digitization to a variety of organizations would be less energy-consuming than the equivalent in shipping costs and remote digitization. And hey, what if I put solar panels on the roof of the van? What if I converted it to biodiesel and ran it on food-frying oil from the many A&Ws on the road between institutions?
**
Working in digital means the actual energy consumption of what we do and what we offer is quite obscured, compared to the monthly electricity bill of a library branch. Unfortunately, this means obscuring the intense cost of web servers with 99.9% uptime and multiple redundancies.
A recent (and very impressive) look at the climate-change contributions of Amazon Web Services brings this into stark relief: AWS was predicted (in 2015) to use almost as much energy in 2016 as the entire residential sector of Seattle - 7.2 million megawatt-hours serving up data, producing 3.3 million tons of carbon dioxide. Converting land - to produce solar and wind power in server-heavy places like Virginia - is only going to offset one fifth of this pollution. By now, cloud hosting and services take up 2% of the USA’s total energy consumption.
These numbers scare me, but I lack the immediate capacity to translate them into meaningful comparisons. I don’t know how much energy my employer’s digital collections consume, and I don’t know what nationwide numbers might look like. I do think that sooner or later we’ll need a benchmark that measures financial cost, energy consumption, and pollution effects compared to access and download rates to decide whether or not to put stuff online, and whether or not to restrict access. I absolutely envision a future where digital collections are unavailable overnight and on weekends because the traffic doesn’t justify the cost of keeping the server on. Maybe the energy usage is negligible - but we don’t have the numbers to be sure, and at some point the carbon emissions will outweigh those pennies of actual consumption.
I have been thinking about digital consumption in heritage since I started hearing the dreaded phrase “blockchain in libraries.” A library school recently got a tidy grant to research the possible uses of consensus algorithms for libraries - decentralized linked metadata is an obvious one, provenance information for digital assets is another. Past that, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine any kind of “distributed authority” system that would benefit from power-chugging servers meaninglessly generating blocks to hold our not-all-that-often-used data or to arbiter our not-all-that-sensitive transactions. (We literally have TDRs for that.)
Most importantly, blockchain mining (or, the most popular algorithm anyways) is a huge energy sink, inspiring assholes everywhere to set up giant server farms in the Arctic just to keep their systems cooled, and hacking networked devices to utilize unoccupied memory. Bitcoin alone is a network of such consumptive scale that it out-emissions Ireland. Already. Renewable energy is an absolute, non-negotiable prerequisite to using blockchain technology for anything at all, let alone for anything as superfluous as library checkouts. Sorry, blockchain-in-libraries enthusiasts, but this is just another digital evangelism without ethical grounding. Moving fast and breaking stuff shouldn’t mean actually destroying the planet.
**
Digital Consumption For Archives is going to be a much larger and more exhaustive research project, perhaps not up to me to complete. A nice first step would be for things like the National Heritage Digitization Strategy to conceive of what total storage and bandwidth would be required were Canadian heritage organizations actually to get all these materials online. Or for organizations to start doing environmental audits, to make transparent their power consumption and where that power comes from, and to ask their contractors and vendors to be transparent as well. To always choose the sustainable option when it presents itself, to include sustainability in RFPs, and to provide the aforementioned flexibility to get your employees’ cars off the road one day a week.
However we do it, what we talk about when we talk about digital heritage needs to include the costs to our power grid and to our planet, and the costs if we can be smart enough to offset or reduce those emissions to zero.
