Resolving the Technology Dilemma
Climate change and technology are intimately linked for the library community, because technology is where we are the most responsible for carbon emissions. Any attempt to define and implement a sustainable library or a vision of what sustainable librarianship should look like cannot be successful unless the challenges, both technical and ethical, that derive from the realities of carbon pollution are confronted head on. But doing so is deeply difficult, not simply because it is a big question to answer, but also because we have social norms that direct us away from this question. We live in a state of denial about the reality of the task in front of us. Kari Norgaard, a sociologist, looked at this question, the question of why we live in denial about what climate change means for us and identified how this process works in society.1 In her case, she was examining a small Norwegian town, but she also applied her analysis to the United States. What she found was that knowledge of climate change made people feel sad and uncomfortable. It evoked feelings of fear, guilt, and helplessness. It threatened their identity and their understanding of themselves as “a good person.” She also found that two different types of denial were in play. The first is literal denial and it is pervasive in the United States. Literal denial, the creation of it and how it is sustained, was well covered by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt.2 They documented the ongoing and alarmingly successful attempts by industry and their partners in free-market think tanks to sow denial and cast doubt on the established scientific consensus on climate change. As librarians, who have a strong history of respect for scholarship and academic honesty, literal denial is not something we struggle with in our own professional community. It is the second kind of denial, implicatory denial, that we face.
Implicatory denial was also the kind of denial that Norgaard found at work in Norway. In implicatory denial a set of facts are not in contention, rather it is the reaction to those facts, what those facts mean in terms of feelings and actions, that are at issue.3 Norgaard looked at how implicatory denial is implemented through norms and conventions and found that there were specific strategies at play. The first set of norms she identified were conversational norms, norms about what we talk about and what we do not talk about.4 In her research she found that there was no social or even political space to discuss climate change in the small Norwegian town that she used as a case study. It wasn’t an appropriate topic of conversation for small talk, it wasn’t on the agenda at local political meetings, because it was seen as a national issue, and in educational settings the expectation of optimism kept serious talk about climate off the table. The library community too has this norm. A search in LISTA reveals that when you search for “climate change” AND “United States” and cut out reviews, only 43 articles are returned since 2000 and hardly any of those actually talk about libraries and climate change. Conferences too fail to provide conversational space for discussions about climate change. Not once has there been a session at ALA Annual or Midwinter about what librarians can do to address carbon pollution in the information system, and no other conference that I am aware of has addressed the issue either. If there is an ongoing conversation about how libraries need to work to restructure the information system to adapt to a carbon free economy, it seems to be taking place very quietly and without widespread participation. Like in Norgaard’s Norwegian town, climate change is simply not a topic of conversation in our professional discourse. It is almost entirely absent.
Beyond conversational norms, Norgaard identified emotional norms that kept climate change off the agenda.5 As she put it, “Feelings such as guilt or helplessness are not only unpleasant to experience, but also inappropriate to reveal publicly; they are emotions that cultural norms bar from public expression.”6 Talking about climate change, in any way beyond the superficial, means talking about and experiencing emotions. It means revealing oneself to be not in full control of one’s emotional state, in that reacting to climate change is always, at its root, a moral and emotional reaction. As in Norgaard’s town, within the library community it means being seen as less than serious, because serious people do not talk about climate change, much less about doing anything about the problem. Talking about climate change is a marginalizing activity, one that situates the speaker outside the mainstream. In the library community, serious people talk about budgets, new technology, new products. They talk about open access and open source projects. They do not talk about the fact that all of that wonderful technology is also responsible for contributing to the atmospheric release of 20 million gigatons of carbon per year by the high tech industry.7 They do not talk about moral culpability and making decisions that account for the complex ethical issues surrounding climate change. The topic is too emotional, too distant from the concerns that we have defined as legitimate. It is simply not done in polite circles.
This brings us to Norgaard’s final explanation, norms of attention. Cultural norms of attention tell us what is important and what we should think about. They direct our attention toward or away from certain topics. Climate change is an area where our cultural norm is to ignore the topic within the context of our own work. Norgaard found that this was also the case in her town. Time and space played a vital role there, as they do for us. As a profession we are very future focused, but that future, the one we envision for ourselves, rarely extends out more than five years. Even when we talk of the distant future, we rarely go beyond 20 or 25 years. Our norms of attention also keep us tightly focused on the information realm, and not on the relationship between that realm and the wider world. We do not pay attention to questions of server hardware, energy use within the information system as a whole, or questions of our profession’s ethical duty to the larger world. When we do talk about ethics, we keep them firmly within the range of what is understood as information ethics, and not on wider questions of our responsibility to larger notions of justice. We have defined climate change as outside of our professional realm, as not our problem to address.
Norgaard’s work focuses on the why and the how of climate change inaction within society, but that is only part of the story. To work our way out of the problem, we also have to consider what about the problem itself makes climate such an intractable issue. What specific challenges does climate present that make us so reluctant to take it up seriously? Donald Brown, a climate change ethicist, has written extensively about the problem of inaction on climate. So has Stephen Gardiner, who produced a book titled A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, where he lays out an explanation for why climate change is so hard to fix. In his case, he was talking about the international and national institutions who are supposed to be addressing the problem, but it applies across all levels. He identifies three main barriers that make the problem hard to fix. The first is the “dispersion of causes and effects.”8 Because climate impacts are so distant from their causes, it can be hard to see the action, emitting carbon dioxide, as related to the impact, whether that impact is drought or flood or rising sea levels. This makes changing behavior especially challenging. The second barrier he identifies is what he calls the “fragmentation of agency,” in other words, the fact that no one person or group is responsible.9 Rather, it is the collective emissions that are responsible, which means that blame can only be incompletely and partially assigned. Because blame can only be partially assigned, changing behavior becomes more challenging. The third barrier is “institutional inadequacy.”10 Both at the international and national level, the institutions who should work to solve this problem are not structured to do so, lacking both legitimacy and authority. Repeated failures, from the Kyoto Protocol to the utter mess that was the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference have more than demonstrated that. We simply have no international governance in place that can manage the challenges that climate change presents. While Gardiner’s book is truly the best discussion of the problem of inaction on climate, he makes no real attempt to offer solutions. It is Donald Brown’s book, Climate Change Ethics: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm, in which a serious attempt at a way out of the problem is offered.
Brown’s book was inspired by Gardiner’s and takes up where he left off, with ethical explanations that point the way out of the “perfect moral storm.”11 Much of the book is dedicated to what national governments and international governance organizations should do and why they should do it, but he also addresses the responsibilities of subnational governments and other organizations. Brown dismisses the idea that climate change is solely the domain of national governments and international organizations, writing, “Given the magnitude of the emissions reductions needed worldwide to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change, the world is unlikely to make the huge reductions necessary to prevent dangerous warming unless all sub-national governments, organizations and businesses, and individuals accept their moral responsibility to reduce emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions.”12 He also points out, drawing on the work of Paul Harris, that much of the emphasis on state level actors has served as a distraction, directing attention away from those who do the bulk of the emitting. After all, while national governments certainly emit carbon as part of their own activities, the bulk of emissions come from businesses and other actors. Harris makes this point particularly well, stating, “Far from being a solution to environmental problems, international justice in the context of climate change has been at best a justification for giving developing states a bit more aid, which they deserve, but has if anything been a kind of ‘curse’ that has preoccupied diplomats and prevented them from seriously and fully discussing the role of people per se as causes of climate change, thus avoiding where the source of the problem really lies—with the people who actually cause the most pollution and are capable of reducing it.”13 Brown builds on this idea, concluding, “Because regional and local governments, organizations, businesses and individuals are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions that have caused, and will continue to cause, harm to others, all have responsibilities to limit their harmful emissions without regard to whether their nation has acted.”14 For us in libraries, this means that we do have a moral obligation to attend to the emissions that we rely on to do our work. It means that climate change is our problem and deserves our attention.
Before delving into the question of what to do, looking for a moment at the science behind climate change can give us a sense of the scope of the problem, of what the scale of needed change is to avoid catastrophic impacts. Bill McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article spoke to this issue in a particularly clear and unique way. He identified three important numbers for the climate movement: 2, 565, and 2,795. The 2 refers to the shaky but long-standing goal of keeping global temperature increases below 2°C.15 The 565 refers to the gigatons of carbon dioxide scientists say we can emit before we reach that 2 degree limit. Remember that every year we emit about 31 gigatons of carbon dioxide.16 This has historically increased by about 3 percent per year, giving us about 13 years left—if we want to burn through our carbon budget like a drunk shopper on Amazon. The 2,795 refers to the number of gigatons of carbon currently sitting on the books of fossil fuel interests. As McKibben puts it, “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate.17 Any hope that we can manage that without a widespread social movement and without everyone doing everything they can to transform our economy and our morality is optimistic to the point of delusion. In the words of civil rights activist turned climate leader and pastor Dr. Gerald Durley, “Our success rests on the willingness of all of us—all races, creeds, and walks of life—coming together with a single purpose.”18 This is our fight, because this is everyone’s fight.
What to Do
Accepting that climate change is our problem and that we do have an obligation to act to build an information system that is not dependent on carbon polluting infrastructure is the first step. The second is deciding what to do about the problem. The question of what to do as employees, in our own libraries, has already been covered in chapter 4, but that leaves us with the larger information system and what to do about those emissions. None of us wants to “throw the baby out with the bath water,” so we cannot simply turn our backs and do without this system. Instead, we must work for reforms. Fortunately, we have a toolkit to do that already, one that we have had years to refine and develop: advocacy and activism. Historically, we have had great success with these kinds of campaigns, as we saw in chapter 8. We can use those same techniques and build that same kind of relationship between advocates and activists to fight this fight too. We just have to make the decision to do so and to give it the same energy that we have given to the struggle for open access and open source software. By changing the terms of that debate, by incorporating a broader vision of sustainability into our existing movement for change, we can leverage the success we have had in one area to ensure that we are successful in the fight for clean technology too.
The fight for clean technology is different from our fight against the enclosure of the information commons in ways that deserve to be spelled out so that we can consider them carefully. First, as urgent as the battle against enclosure has been, that urgency pales in comparison with climate. Scientists tell us that we needed to have begun a massive reduction in our emissions decades ago. We have no real time left to dither on this one. The point at which catastrophic impacts become unavoidable may have already passed. There is simply no time left in this fight. At the same time though, while open access puts us at odds with our vendors, climate is an issue where we should be on the same side. Being powered by fossil fuels instead of clean energy is not fundamental to their business models. Our vendors are also facing rising prices for energy and climate impacts. They have no real reason not to convert to clean energy, especially if they can show their shareholders that their customers are serious about change. Even the monopolistic information vendors can join us on this one. If they choose, they can make the decision to invest in their own future by converting to clean technology and in doing so strengthen their companies. But this will cost money for them; there is no way to deny that. So they need our support. They need to know that this is important to us and that we will not back off until they can demonstrate that they have made real changes, not simply added a layer of greenwashing over their marketing.
This brings us to the biggest difference. A healthy and resilient information system is made up of all kinds of organizations, profit seeking firms, nonprofit organizations, cooperatives. There is room for a wide range of information vendors and a healthy system would have a good mix of all of these. The problem in the information system has been an overgrowth and a concentration of power by one segment. We need change, yes, but what we need there is a rebalancing, a reformation. The kind of change needed to get us off fossil fuels is going to require something more akin to a revolution. Not a political revolution, but something closer to a second industrial revolution. It will require a serious rethinking of what we use energy for, how we get that energy, and what costs we are willing to incur along the way. It requires us to begin thinking in starkly moral terms about things that have become second nature to us, things like driving a car or turning on a light. It will require us to forgo money that could be made by digging up and selling coal and tar sands. It will almost certainly require us to learn how to live on less energy, possibly much less energy. The difference in magnitude between the kind of change required to convert to a clean energy economy and the kind of change required to rebuild a healthy information system is enormous. But fortunately, we have allies across the information world and across the entire world. This is a much bigger fight, but there are so many more people fighting it with us. We do not have to go this one alone.
Library Advocacy Organizations
The movement for a clean energy and a fossil fuel free library and information system is only just beginning, but it has started. To build a successful movement, we will need to get both the large traditional advocacy organizations and smaller activist groups involved. We will probably need to form new activist groups as well. We have to open up a space within our professional discourse for conversation on the topic by holding conferences, making presentations at established conferences, and contributing to the professional literature. Incorporating climate into the discourse on the future of libraries and adding clean technology to the agenda will also require us to attract new members to these groups and build a new energy. It will require reaching out to those who have traditionally felt marginalized in the mainstream library community and encouraging them to raise their voices and insist on being accepted as legitimate participants. This is an enormous task, but we have a strong history of this kind of work to build on and well-honed tools available to us.
The library advocacy groups, ALA, ARL, and groups like SLA and AALL are well placed to contribute to that effort and to provide both venues and a certain level of legitimacy to the conversation. ALA has already started moving in this direction with the founding of the Sustainability Roundtable and the Council’s adoption of the Resolution on the Divestment of Holdings in Fossil Fuel Companies. The Progressive Librarians’ Guild has also adopted a version of this Resolution. In addition, there was also the Sustainability in Libraries online conference in 2012. So we are moving in the right direction as a community. But there is still much more we need to do to get a movement off the ground, into libraries, and out to our vendors.
As a first step in that direction, we could follow the lead of other professional organizations like the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics by adopting a strongly worded statement about the importance of solving the problem of climate change and mitigating the unavoidable consequences. Most of these statements follow a similar pattern. The American Public Health Association’s statement is a good example. It starts by acknowledging the problem, “Current best estimates project that global temperatures will increase by 1.8 to 4.0°C by 2100, and sea levels may rise 0.18 to 0.59 m or more this century, depending on ice sheet dynamics. Scientists calculate that significant reductions in GHG emissions must begin to take place within 10 years for humans to have a chance at averting dangerous climate change.”19 It goes on to call for specific actions that the public health community should undertake, including “advocate for mitigation and avoidance of climate change, track the impacts of climate change on human health, and assist with adaptation, to the degree possible, to those health effects caused by changes in climate that cannot be prevented. . . Acknowledge that freedom from serious adverse effects of global climate change qualifies as a basic human right as the APHA understands that term.”20 It also calls on public health professionals themselves to “adopt practices that minimize GHG emissions related to their activities.”21 Library organizations should adopt similar statements that could serve as a way for librarians both within their institutions and within the information system as whole to unify their responses. Just as we point to the ALA’s Right to Read statement and the Information Bill of Rights, a climate statement would provide us a set of professional expectations and obligations to follow in our own work. It could serve as the basis for advocacy with our vendors and with our home institutions. Alone, strongly worded statements cannot make any changes, but they can serve as the basis for action.
Before we turn to action, it is worthwhile to consider what our advocacy organizations could do beyond statements. Much like library directors, advocacy organizations face limitations on what they can do to encourage social change. They are obligated to work within the existing system to effect change and to be cautious of not offending their members and supporters. That said, they also bring to the table considerable organizational and mobilization strengths that can be brought to bear on social problems. One way to leverage this strength would be for the large advocacy organizations to collaborate and follow the model of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. The Presidents’ Climate Commitment has been signed by 677 college and university presidents and chancellors. Funded by Second Nature, a nonprofit organized to promote sustainability in higher education, the Commitment is intended to offer higher education institutions a way to both provide leadership and collaborate on climate issues. As the FAQ states, “The threat of catastrophic climate disruption, is not ‘just another’ issue. The scale and magnitude of addressing this common crisis in an effective and timely manner, through redesigning the basic mechanisms by which we meet our needs, requires purposeful collective action, and will require unprecedented modes of collaboration.”22 The Commitment itself begins by identifying the problem and its severity, “We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects.”23 Then it goes on to enumerate the causes and what must be done, “We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest.”24 It follows that with a multipoint plan that colleges and universities signing the Commitment agree to enact. For the library community, a similar Commitment could take two forms. One route would be to create such a commitment for library directors to sign about their own libraries. Alternatively, and I think perhaps more wisely, we could create a commitment for our vendors to sign. A model like this one would offer good opportunities for collaboration and cooperation for our vendors, the organizations themselves, and the movement for clean technology in libraries.
Library Activism
Strongly worded statements and promises to do better are not going to solve this problem by themselves. Rather their role is to help provide support for those, both in libraries and among our vendors, who are working for change. As we saw with the fight for open access, social movements need both advocates and activists working together to be successful. Neither alone can create social change. Fortunately, librarians have a long and proud history of social activism to draw on in this fight, to complement the work of our advocacy groups and to push them along in their work. From the refusal of Zoia Horn to testify against an antiwar activist to Ruth Brown’s loss of her position for her dedication to service to the African-American community to Juliette Morgan and her role in the Montgomery bus boycott, librarians have been active, as librarians, in every major social movement of the past century. Adding our voices and our bodies to this fight, and directing them toward our own emissions is both the right moral choice and one firmly based in who we are as a profession. But how do we do it? What steps do we need to take to build a strong activist movement for a clean information system?
Obviously, this is much bigger question than can be answered here and it is one that we need to come together as a community to work out. Many people will need to work together to plan actions and sort out a direction for a library based climate movement. As a start though, we can begin by lending our support to the existing climate movement. Nonviolent climate activism outside of the library world has been growing and showing increasing success in both delaying carbon-based infrastructure projects and raising awareness. Library organizations like Radical Reference are already offering their support to these groups, but we can do more by participating in these actions as a group, by coming out to marches and sit-ins as librarians and reporting back to the library community so that our actions have visibility. We are also well suited to join in and organize book bloc actions as part of marches and protests. Book blocs are a new nonviolent tactic that started in Europe and are growing in popularity here in the United States. The basic idea behind a book bloc is for people to lead marches with the covers of powerful books enlarged and turned into shields. As a tactic it communicates the larger ideals behind an action, while at the same time evoking a powerful connection with the love of literacy and reading that our own profession embodies. We can also create mobile libraries and join actions in the explicit role of librarian. By offering relevant literature, usually collected from sympathetic publishers and donations, we can be in the midst of an action doing what we do best, serving patrons. Actions like this can be combined with activism for public library funding and open access projects too. By showing up as ourselves and doing the work we do, we are contributing to the climate movement in the best way we can.
We also need to bring the movement home to the information system too. Organizing nonconfrontational climate awareness actions to coincide with major conferences and that target our vendors is a good starting point. We have done virtually nothing as a profession to communicate to vendors how important it is that they take responsibility for their emissions. A rally or other awareness raising action at a conference can serve as a first volley, a way of saying, “this matters to us and we need you to change.” By coordinating with advocacy groups and offering something like the Presidents’ Climate Commitment, we could offer them a framework for action that they can begin implementing. We can offer them a way forward out of this mess. Unless vendors see us out there, see that we are serious about the need for change and about our refusal to continue to participate in a system that causes grave harm, they will not change. The same goes for open access and open source projects, unless we work to put clean technology on the agenda, they will not have the support they need to follow through on creating a truly sustainable library. It is only by unifying our voices and raising them together that we can pull others along with us. Practicing sustainable librarianship requires us to do nothing less.
Notes
1. Kari Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
2. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, 1st US ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
3. Norgaard, Living in Denial, 10–11.
4. Ibid., 97–105.
5. Ibid., 106–12.
6. Ibid., 106.
7. “Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in the United States 2009,” US Energy Information Administration, Department of Energy (Washington, DC, March 2011).
8. Stephen M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Donald A. Brown, Climate Change Ethics: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).
12. Ibid., 196.
13. Paul G. Harris, World Ethics and Climate Change: From International to Global Justice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 93.
14. Brown, Climate Change Ethics: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm, 201.
15. Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, no. 1162 (2012), www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719.
16. Miriam Quick, Ella Hollowood, and David McCandless, “How Many Gigatons of Carbon Dioxide? The Information Is Beautiful Guide to Doha,” DataBlog, Guardian, www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/dec/07/carbon-dioxide-doha-information-beautiful#_.
17. McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”
18. Rev. Dr. Gerald Durley, “Why Climate Change Is a Civil Rights Issue,” HuffPost, Black Voices, www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-dr-gerald-durley/climate-change-civil-rights_b_3844986.html?.
19. “Addressing the Urgent Threat of Global Climate Change to Public Health and the Environment,” American Public Health Association, November 6, 2007, www.apha.org/advocacy/policy/policysearch/default.htm?id=1351.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. “Frequently Asked Questions,” American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, accessed April 24, 2014, www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/about/faqs.
23. “Text of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment,” American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, accessed April 24, 2014, www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org/about/commitment.
24. Ibid.