AltaMira Press
Pages: 246
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7591-0948-3 • Hardback • January 2010 • $152.00 • (£117.00)
978-0-7591-1933-8 • eBook • January 2010 • $144.00 • (£111.00)
Robert Rattle is an independent consultant working for NGOs, business and governmental organizations. For the last two decades, Rattle has conducted research and provided consulting services in the areas of sustainable development and sustainable consumption; ecosystems and human health; ecological economics; impact assessment; information and telecommunications policy; Aboriginal well-being; and globalization.
Chapter 1 Foreword: Global Social Narcosis at the Speed of Light: How the Internet and Communications Technologies are gobbling resources, eradicating cultures, and destroying the planet, and what can be done to stop the runaway train
Chapter 2 Chapter 1. ICTs and Globalization: Asking Important Questions
Chapter 3 Chapter 2. The Poverty of Affluence: Sustainable Consumption and Global Environmental Change
Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Virtual Morality: Globalization, ICTs, and Sustainable Consumption
Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Lulled to Complacency: ICTs and Energy and Materials Consumption
Chapter 6 Chapter 5. The Efficiency Paradox: Intensity and Consumption
Chapter 7 Chapter 6. From Social Meanings to Global Conformity: ICTs and the Global Commons
Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Pathological Tendencies: The Health Link
Chapter 9 Chapter 8. Incantations and ICTs: A Global Ideological Pervasion
Chapter 10 Chapter 9. Redefining Reality, Transforming Values
Chapter 11 Chapter 10. Global Transformations: Serious Considerations and Promising Opportunities
A timely, engaging read.... Highly recommended.
— Choice Reviews, August 2010
Computers, cell phones, and other novel information and communication technologies surround us, and will certainly shape our future. Can they help us move toward environmental sustainability, or will they make our impact on the environment worse? Computing Our Way to Paradise? offers the most comprehensive reply to those questions now available. It covers all the key issues, and, more importantly, it explores the big picture, the ways in which such technologies form part of our worldview, our capitalist economy, and our resource- and energy-intensive way of life. Computing Our Way to Paradise? reveals that only by understanding and acting on these fundamental matters can we fulfill the environmentally positive potential of our information and communication technologies.
— Josiah Heyman, director of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies, University of Texas at El Paso
This book amplifies the growing fissures emerging in our collective understanding of ICTs and how they can benefit sustainable consumption….This book is a timely and useful contribution to the debate on how we are to deal with unfolding social, economic, political and environmental chaos. It adds clarity to the unsustainable trends in consumer driven lifestyles, how ICTs drive them and how their extra-ordinary potential for a better future has yet to be fully harnessed.
— The Learning Edge, Fall 2010