Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability

by Bill Tomlinson

Overview

How the tools of information technology can support environmental sustainability by tackling problems that span broad scales of time, space, and complexity.

Environmental issues often span long periods of time, far-flung areas, and labyrinthine layers of complexity. In Greening through IT, Bill Tomlinson investigates how the tools and techniques of information technology (IT) can help us tackle environmental problems at such vast scales. Tomlinson describes theoretical, technological, and social aspects of a growing interdisciplinary approach to sustainability, “Green IT,” offering both a human-centered framework for understanding Green IT systems and specific examples and case studies of Green IT in action.

Tomlinson descrobes many efforts toward sustainability supported by IT—from fishers in India who maximized the sales potential of their catch by coordinating their activities with mobile phones to the installation of smart meters that optimize electricity use in California households—and offers three detailed studies of specific research projects that he and his colleagues have undertaken: EcoRaft, an interactive museum exhibit to help children learn principles of restoration ecology; Trackulous, a set of web-based tools with which people can chart their own environmental behavior; and GreenScanner, an online system that provides access to environmental-impact reports about consumer products. Taken together, these examples illustrate the significant environmental benefits that innovations in information technology can enable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262288354
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/10/2012
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Bill Tomlinson is Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and a Researcher at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

What People are Saying About This

Nicholas Negroponte

Green is the new digital. IT is the macroscope needed to understand it. What feels counterintuitive at the beginning of this book is obvious by the end.

Endorsement

Green is the new digital. IT is the macroscope needed to understand it. What feels counterintuitive at the beginning of this book is obvious by the end.

—Nicholas Negroponte, Founding Chairman Emeritus, MIT Media Lab, Founder and Chairman, One Laptop per Child

From the Publisher

Green is the new digital. IT is the macroscope needed to understand it. What feels counterintuitive at the beginning of this book is obvious by the end.

—Nicholas Negroponte, Founding Chairman Emeritus, MIT Media Lab, Founder and Chairman, One Laptop per Child