February 08, 2011 –
Tomlinson
CALIT2 affiliate Bill Tomlinson, informatics associate professor, delivered a plenary address last week in Washington, D.C. at a workshop that explored research challenges facing worldwide sustainability.
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Computing Community Consortium, “The Role of Information Sciences and Engineering in Sustainability” aimed to identify new research opportunities in the information sciences and engineering that address sustainability objectives.
Tomlinson’s talk, “IT and (Un)sustainable Cultures,” addressed core societal principles that he believes are the root causes of our greatest environmental concerns. Specifically, he said, industrialized civilizations’ emphases on growth and consumption are deeply unsustainable.
Profound transformations in personal, institutional and infrastructure goals will be necessary to support a more sustainable existence and IT can play an important role in this evolution.
He discussed the concept explored in his book, “Greening through IT,” that environmental issues occur on broad scales of time, space and complexity, but humans work best at narrower scales. “IT can help bridge this gap, enabling us to understand the complex chains of causality that underlie global climatic disruption, biodiversity loss, sea level rise and a host of other environmental issues,” he said.
IT is also implicated in the creation of the world’s current environmental problems, he said, calling it a “force multiplier” that allows people to accomplish more and more. One way to approach these problems is to explore the ways in which IT can help alter unsustainable cultural norms and provide acceptable alternatives.
For example, he said, IT systems can help support local sustainable agriculture, public health, education and nutrition. They can provide social support and identity via social networking, virtualized workspaces and other support networks. These systems can also help people learn more about the world and how to live sustainably in it.
“These are not new ideas,” he said. But in order to create necessary cultural change that can lead to increased sustainability, “we need more IT researchers to work on these projects.”
— Anna Lynn Spitzer
