Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability - Softcover

Tomlinson, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262517507 ISBN 13: 9780262517508

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Review:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0262517507
• ISBN 13: 9780262517508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 210