Carbon footprints in the sand: the growing divide between newsprint and digital delivery

Much as the twenty-four hour news cycle and the web have their benefits (the web's attention-span disorder promises a clean slate, or a high boredom quotient, ever more rapidly -- good news for politicians at least), the permanence of the printed word itself continues to inspire hope in some unusual corners -- Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, purchased the venerable Washington Post in a move that promises unexpected surprises in the new year. 

The information on the web can't be piled up for later reading-and-tossing quite like newsprint -- you have to go look for what you want on the web -- but on the other hand, the jury's still out on the environmental impact of pixel vs. newsprint. More than likely the Amazon/Post combine will ultimately seem a good advertising and marketing move for a merchandiser's future, rather than a valiant effort to maintain print media's status quo.

The New York Times recently ran an article in its Paper Cuts blog about the ongoing question of the web's environmental impact versus newspapers' "dead-tree existence" -- Nicholson Baker finds that electronic server farms may have a broader ecological impact than the processing of ink and newsprint, and existing research figures suggest a somewhat-frustrating draw about the relative impact of each.

Until the web can be piled up like the Sunday paper in black, smudgy drifts next to the Barcalounger, it seems like newsprint will survive in some form far more messy than Kindle, and more reliably necessary than cable news. Here's an excerpt from the Jennifer Schuessler article, which can be read in full at The New York Times.

Dave Eggers, the fledgling press baron behind The San Francisco Panorama, the much-ballyhooed (and drop-dead gorgeous) newspaper by the McSweeney’s gang, has been making the rounds with his full-throated argument that the future of the news business can be written not just in pixels but with old-fashioned paper and ink.

“There are a lot of things that newsprint can do uniquely well that the Web cannot,” Eggers recently told The Chicago Tribune. “The two forms could coexist, instead of the zero-sum situation that we seem stuck in.”

As it happens, The Panorama includes an apologia for its own glorious dead-tree existence, in the form of an essay by the novelist Nicholson Baker considering “the strange possibility that the transferring of information digitally is more environmentally destructive than printing it.” (Alas, and perhaps to the point, Baker’s article, along with most of The Panorama, is not available online.)

Baker, who is on record as loving Wikipedia and Google but not the Kindle, visits the Otis paper mill in Jay, Me., which was once the world’s largest but was shut down forever last spring. The shuttering of Otis may seem like good news for trees. But the biggest threat to the Maine woods, Baker suggests, isn’t logging. It’s the kind of low-density development that comes when the logging stops.

As Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, put it to Baker, “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will.”

As Baker reports, some 18 paper mills closed in the United States in 2009, with more than 34 paper machines permanently shuttered. Meanwhile, the growth rate of the huge server farms needed to fuel the Internet and related gadgets is “metastasizing,” as Carli puts it to Baker.

The carbon footprint of data center server farms — roughly equal to that of paper mills today — is set to double in the next five years. And those server farms are often powered by coal, which tends to be harvested in far less sustainable ways than wood pulp. ...

Right now, there are no good accountings of the environmental impact of pixels versus paper. Until we have a better understanding, Carli said, let’s stop green-bashing the print media.

“It may provide more benefit to the environment and society than you realize,” he said. “Print itself doesn’t have a larger footprint than digital.” Without better measurements, “you can’t really make a case either way.” ...

Still time: Gift ideas from the reviews at Bellemeade Books

Here is a last round-up of previously-reviewed holiday suggestions and interesting literary sites that are worth a browse for gift ideas. As always, these can be found by clicking on the links, and books can be purchased using the Amazon search box here on Bellemeade Books. However a reader celebrates the final weeks of a departing year have a good read, and enjoy best wishes for a successful and happy new year!

(Above) How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop: The Machine Speaks (Stop Smiling Books/Melville House Publishing) is a tech geek's wild ride through Dave Tompkins's ten-year research and interviews, taking tangent at every opportunity to weave together the improbable uses and history of this one technological wonder. Like most of the inescapable gadgets that come to permeate popular culture the vocoder is unrecognizable from its original form, much like the defense-industry origins of what became the internet which followed it in the 1940s. Now the electronically-altered human voice surrounds us, and How to Wreck a Nice Beach (the title is a phonetic play on the human ear's ability to recognize meaning in speech even in distorted form) is probably more history and detail than a casual reader might need, and Tompkins's writing style is that particular style of rock-music writing, the pop-baroque: Homer Dudley "invented the vocoder when he realized his mouth was a radio station while flat on his back in a Manhattan hospital bed, eyes on the ceiling, a goldfish as his witness."

The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again. Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all. As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In an unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression (City Lights, 2006, edited by Bill Morgan and Nancy Peters) is an especially timely read, collecting correspondence, reporting, magazine articles, and testimony excerpts surrounding the creation of the poem and the subsequent trial. There are some genuinely affecting early letters to friends (in one he addresses Kerouac as "Dear Almond Crackerjax"). It's difficult now to comprehend what an impact the trial had on American culture. It's equally difficult to imagine contemporary culture without judge Clayton Horn's decision, or justice Potter Stewart's words: "In the free society to which the Constitution has committed us, it is for each to choose for himself." Ginsberg was so uncertain of the trial's outcome that he spent most of the time out of the country, and as a result his letters to Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Corso, and many others are a written record of the trial behind the scenes.

Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV) is a continuing experiment in getting the word out -- literally -- by vending machine. Here's an excerpt from the post at maisonnueve: Inspired by the Distriboto machines she’d seen in Montreal, Toronto poet Carey Toane dreamed up the idea of a machine that would dispense poems. When fellow poet and fiction writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi got on board, they found themselves sourcing Wrigley’s Excel gum machines on Craigslist and 3 months later, in April 2010, launched Canada’s first mechanical poetry journal, Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV).“The idea came out of the renaissance in handmade, DIY self-publishing in Toronto and the larger lit community, with all the beautiful hand-bound chapbooks and letter press books just begging to be handled and cracked open and enjoyed for their tactile qualities as much as for their content. I covet these things,” Toane says.

Visions & Affiliations is a lavish and entertaining two-volume chronology of Bay Area poetry, and part of a continuing timeline, being compiled by San Francisco writer Jack Foley and his wife Adele. 

The force of creative chaos that runs through this Bay Area history from 1940 to 2005 is less an organizing principle than, in Foley's words, a human response that defined character: "As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality." His wife noted in an interview that while Bay Area poetry is covered extensively the book is broadly about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John. For an excerpt from Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline 1940-2005 there is more at Jack and Adelle Foley's web page.

"The Snowy Day" and other holiday books for kids

The holidays are a special treat for children. The excitement comes not just from the expectations of holiday celebrations but the extended break from studies and, over everything, the promise of snow. Here is a short group of books with a winter theme, a selection of books about winter celebrations -- not just Christmas, but Kwanzaa and the winter solstice too.

Above: The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats (Viking Juvenile) This classic picture book isn’t strictly a holiday book, but carries a timeless appeal for its depiction of the magic of winter. A young boy awakens to find that it has snowed during the night, and goes out to explore his city under its snowy white blanket. The story is told without text, making it ideal for pre-reading children, and is a trailblazer for its depiction of a young African-American child as the protagonist.

The Shortest Day: Celebrating the Winter Solstice, by Wendy Pfeffer (Dutton Juvenile). This book simply explains the phenomenon of the winter solstice, and how and why it came to be celebrated by peoples around the world. The solstice is described primarily in the context of the natural world, making this book widely appropriate for both freethinker and religious families of all denominations. Instructions for science activities and simple solstice celebrations are also included.

Tim and Sally's Year in Poems is a good starting place for young readers. It's a jaunty and colorful trip through the seasons and their celebrations, from the sighting of springtime robins to building winter's snowman. The joys of holidays from Independence Day to Halloween, and Easter to Christmas, are captured in original poems and illustrations. There's even a bit of pause for grown-ups in the onward rush of the year: "I meant to drive to work today" celebrates simply sitting on the porch and watching the passing parade of nature, even as the hours meant for work tick away. And children get their own summer daydreaming hour, too, with its important lesson of enjoying the seasons just for themselves. More information about the author, the illustrator, and the books themselves can be found at the Tim and Sally website: www.timandsally.com.

The Magic Tree House #29: Christmas in Camelot, by Mary Pope Osborne (Random House) Reading The Magic Tree House chapter books to children can be a wonderful way to introduce them both to the concept of longer stories and to the history of America and other cultures. For children already familiar with the Magic Tree House, it can be a special treat for them to experience a seasonal story set in the world of characters they know so well. In this tale, Jack and Annie must go on a journey at Christmastime to save Camelot from being forgotten forever.

Kwanzaa Kids, by Joan Holub and Ken Wilson-Max (Puffin) This lift-the-flap book is an excellent introduction to Kwanzaa for very young children. With its many Swahili terms and different traditions, Kwanzaa can be a bit challenging for children to learn about. This book cuts to the essentials, with each two-page spread giving a very short explanation about one of the Nguzo Saba – the seven Kwanzaa principles – and showing the corresponding candles on the kinara. The illustrations are bold and colorful, and help make learning about Kwanzaa easy and fun.