A new trend for storing our data is emerging. Its known as Cloud computing. With the Cloud, our data is stored in highly efficient data centres that allow us to access our data from any internet connected device. Some services you may use that are built on this technology are:

• Google Mail & Google Documents
• Spotify
• Dropbox
• MobileMe
• Amazon.co.uk

Cloud computing has for the most part been seen as a greener way to serve and store data. It is all about efficiency. With a data centres built for one purpose we can achieve higher levels of energy efficiency and improved performance. The Cloud also benefits from scalability – a reason why it has become so popular among web start-ups.

On the face of it this all sounds very positive but I cannot help feel we are making the same mistakes that we have made in the past. Lets compare Cloud computing to Monocropping. With Monocropping we produce one single crop in abundance, that’s our data centre. We then ship that crop from the fields, to a distribution centre and from there to the supermarket. That is the internet. We then head to the supermarket and bring it home, that’s our ISP and home computer. So what is wrong with that? Surely this process is at the core of the internet?

The problem is that its completely inefficient. Lets pick on Spotify. Rather than have a song stored locally on my computer I have to stream that song to me wherever I go. The bandwidth and computing power required to do that for every single song I own would soon add up. Rather than the data travelling from the hard drive of my machine to the speakers, it has to travel half way across the planet. Any efficiency gain made at the data centre is instantly lost with the constant shipment of 0′s and 1′s to and from the cloud to my machines. Multiply this by every internet user and I cannot help feel the cloud (at least for some applications) is a step in the wrong direction.

All is not lost though. To improve efficiency of the Spotify example above we could all delete our digital music. This would instantly free up a huge amount of computing power and storage space. If this save of computing power could be put to good use (rather than end up as e-waste) we might just be onto something. Essentially we would have one library of digital music that the entire planet accesses on demand. I quite like that idea.

The problem is, we love our data. We are married to it. We make backups of backups and get extremely upset when it gets deleted. Cheap technology allows us to hoard and save anything we wish – no matter how pointless or redundant. On this computer I have files that are over five years old. I never look at them and yet I am compelled to keep hold of them (and back them up).

These questions need to be considered before we rush ahead at the rate technology carries us. Before every major technology shift we must ask if our climate and environment can sustain it. My CD’s are dusty, my cassette tapes are in the bin and in the end – its just music (to a fat cats ears).

I’m sitting at my desk looking at a magazine spread full of graphs. All these graphs follow a trend of low to high – ie the line keeps moving upwards. Think about life, it’s full of climbing graphs:

• Life expectancy – people are living longer, diagnosis and treatment of disease has improved
• Temperature – warmer temperatures should lead to more vitamin D!
• Wealth – we’re all getting richer which means we have the money available to consume more – holidays, food, property, clothing, cars, gadgets, fuel
• Population – we find strength in numbers
• Profits – more sales, more money, more staff, more offices, more investment, bigger bonuses, higher salary

If everything’s on the up, this can only be a good thing, right?

The problem with this trend is that’s just not sustainable. What goes up must come down. By striving to be always on the up, we are setting ourselves up for an inevitable down. There will be a point where this line is going to start falling again.

Take population growth as an example. In the early stages of humans ‘arriving’ on earth, the best way to ensure survival was in numbers. In the early stages, humans were just a tiny spec on the planet. We dug wells, harvested small areas of vegetation, channeled rivers, dug mines and used the resources around us to build shelter. The more we reproduced, the more resources we needed to sustain ourselves. We started to turn meadows into fields to grow food. We chopped down areas of forest and mined raw materials to build homes. Over time, fields have been concreted over to build an airports, housing and cities. And he we sit at the crest of the peak!

If we continue at our current rate of consumption, we are going to run out of land suitable for farming, land for building houses and vegetation to soak up carbon dioxide. But the problem is we can’t put anymore ‘in’ and as a result we can’t get anymore ‘out’.

So what should sustainability look like?

A straight line.

Why not a circle?

A circle in theory is the perfect image of sustainability. But, a circle assumes we can start again from the beginning – when we draw a circle, we are connecting one point to another, the end to the beginning. A straight line has a beginning but has the capacity to continue forever. In order for the line to stay straight, we must put in what we take out – and this is truly sustainable.

Continuing our thoughts on population, we must find a way to control the rate at which people are born. Without such measures, our planet will not have enough resources to sustain us all.

Whilst browsing through a recent copy of Adbusters (July/August 2009) in our local magazine shop, it fell open on a single page article entitled “thinking the unthinkable”. The article, written by Tim Jackson sets the tone for our Blog Action Day posts:

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2010.

This extraordinary ramping up of the global economy has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.

For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crisis aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our well-being.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People loose their jobs and sometime their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries.

But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less that $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems we depend on for survival. It has failed spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil; the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices; the degradation of forests, lakes and soils; conflicts over land use, water quality and fishing rights; and the momentous challenge of stabilizing concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally broken, in desperate need of renewal…

A message this clear needs little summary. Solving these issues must become a global priority.

We have spent a great deal of time looking for UK hosting that is either partly or completely powered by renewables and not found a good solution yet. For now we have to choose reliability over sustainability. All is not lost though, last month we purchased a very cool device called Watson, Watson is described as a “Home (or Office) energy monitor” and that is exactly what it does.

It may look a little bit like a coffee table that glows pretty colours but Watson is an extremely useful and clever device that monitors (and logs to your PC or Mac) your energy usage. It’s actually much smaller than it looks in the photo and has been sitting quietly in the office for last month recording our electricity usage. Before Watson we had no idea how much electricity we used or how much it was costing. The day it arrived we turned off every possible appliance we could get to and then slowly introduced each one, logging how much energy they use. By that evening we had already found two appliances that were consuming about 140W continuously (on standby) and that are now switched off at the wall when not in use. That alone should save us about £170 a year!

We now have an idea of how much electricity our local test server is consuming and which lights are best to turn on first. Each week we are looking at our logged data to see what days are the worst offenders and trying to figure what devices caused it… we are already up £2 on last week! We may not have green hosting (yet) but the toggle office is no longer humming all day (and night).