THE GREAT GREEN NETWORK
Want to learn everything about ozone depletion or chat with
animal lovers from all continents? Just dive into the internet or, better yet, set up your own home page |
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BY PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT
As a group, environmentalists did not fall in love with computers the way scientists, MBAs and Nintendo-loving teenagers did. The big mainframes in the old days--IBM's generous contributions to environmental causes notwithstanding--all seemed to be working for giant corporations bent on cutting forests, paving wetlands or filling up the sky with hydrocarbons.
Even when computers got personal and started being named after fruit, they still came wrapped in creepy electromagnetic fields and required toxic solvents for the manufacture of their silicon chips. The so-called paperless office that was supposed to save trees by replacing printed documents with electronic data ended up producing more paper, not less. What was to love?
Then came the World Wide Web, the planet-circling communications grid that is practically as cheap and global as the water we drink and the air we breathe. Gaia herself couldn't have built a greener network. With nodes wherever a local environmental group could afford a PC and phone line, and a structure suited for mobilizing far-flung activists in a common cause, the Internet was ideal for thinking locally and acting globally to save the earth.
Indeed, a quick keyword search on the Web turns up an astonishing number of matches for such hot-button environmental issues as ozone depletion (41,110 Web pages), global warming (75,160) and pollution (354,580). Every outfit with an office and an acronym seems to have its own home page, from major organizations like the Nature Conservancy and Natural Resources Defense Council to the militantly small-bore New Jersey Heat Pump Council, Irish Woodworkers for Africa and Adopt-a-Cow.
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