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Last year we devoted much attention during our Green Web Foundation Fellowship to explore how education can help shape more just climate narratives that others will feel compelled to attain.1 We started with the premise that the climate crisis is not only a technical one to assess only through carbon emissions. It is also an existential one that brings up questions about our purpose as humanity and our relationship with nature.
Over the past months, I talked to friends and colleagues from El Salvador working in tech. I asked them if they knew the environmental consequences of their work and noticed that many of them followed similar elements in their career paths:
- Their work consists of specialized services such as computer programming or graphic design provided to companies overseas based in the Global North.
- They work primarily as contractors and believe that their decision power is limited. At the same time, their skills are highly specialized and make decisions over important aspects of the organizations’ business models.
- They have seldomly considered that their work has any environmental impact, or follows the requirements set by their companies or international regulations.
When researching the subject, I realized that it wasn’t just my perception: organizations from the Global North are increasingly hiring highly-specialized workers from developing countries as a way to cut operation costs,2,3 and perhaps unwittingly, to reduce corporate emissions, since this means that fewer workers are coming to an office and fewer offices are built, etc. I thought it was ironic to think of how now these individuals from the Global South, many of them highly specialized, are making critical decisions about the same technologies and services that are driving the environmental impacts in their own communities.
Digital systems are an increasingly important element in this mix because history is also happening in the digital realm while also enabling the devastation of natural resources and climate change. Given the fact that these digital systems exist for the purpose of managing information, the question of openness lies at the heart of the discussion: how we share knowledge shapes our narratives around digital sustainability. We must ask ourselves how we should view openness through a climate lens in an age of unrestrained technological growth.
This article expresses three areas in which openness can influence digital sustainability: the creation of personal consciousness and worldview, the collective and perpetual process of critical thinking, and the actions upon our reality that these dialogues can spark.