Computing Our Way to Paradise? - (Globalization and the Environment) by Robert Rattle (Hardcover)

About the Book

Computing Our Way to Paradise? challenges key assumptions concerning the role of Internet and communication technologies in globalization processes. The author argues that while globalization is predicated upon a strong, extensive, and interconnected network of products, proce...

Book Synopsis

Computing Our Way to Paradise? challenges key assumptions concerning the role of Internet and communication technologies in globalization processes. The author argues that while globalization is predicated upon a strong, extensive, and interconnected network of products, processes, and services, the real environmental and health benefits remain far from certain.

Review Quotes

A timely, engaging read.... Highly recommended.

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.

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.

About the Author

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.