Link to slide deck here (Dropbox)

Human society can no longer treat the environment as a ‘free good’ to be exploited without consequences. As the limits to our consumption habits begin to materialize along the horizon, we must reconsider fundamentally how we think of ourselves in relation to the ecosystems we are destroying yet rely on so heavily for survival in order for our children to survive and thrive in a world worth living in. All of humanity will ultimately benefit from working to reshape our society’s functions to consider not only its efficiency but also its resilience in providing us with such security and comfort well into the future.

One of the major opportunities for positive change toward a more resilient society involves harnessing a better understanding of how the functions inherent in our local ecosystems can provide us with services that are often more beneficial than their man-made counterparts from an economic standpoint, which yields further incentive to restore and sustain the biodiversity that enables our ecosystems to provide us with these services, from the provisioning of food, water, timber and natural gas to the regulating of our air and water purity.

In order to harness such an understanding I’m proposing to create artifacts of a possible future of the global internet infrastructure that would, by design, close the perceived gap between the consumption habits of “end users” and the resulting impact on the environment. The landing stations for the submarine fiber-optic cables that carry our web traffic around the world would be reconfigured with new data transfer technology combined with extensive complexity and environmental research that would result in an web paradigm where web connectivity speeds are directly based on the biodiversity of the landing station’s local ecology. Not only would this have all internet users thinking and caring about their local ecosystems, but also of those in countries the world over.

The artifacts would most likely consist of mock advertisements that take place in major cities and on the internet. The ads would lead to a corporate-looking EcoNet landing page with further detail about the concept. Users engaged enough to have visited the site could perhaps also be provided with some sort of platform for feedback or discussion: a forum, an IRC, surveys, a “contact us” form, or even a temporary phone line with an operator listening to and recording incoming calls.

The implementation of ecosystem services into our infrastructure can result in a kind of environmental manipulation that can have unforseen consequences. Through these objects I’ll attempt to expose possible social, economic, or ecological downsides, attempting to provoke questions about what it means to intervene in such complex systems. For example, in “Ecosystem Services: From Concept to Practice” Jetske A Bouma and Pieter JH van Beukering state that “the key characteristic of ecosystems is that they consist of public or “common-good” resources.” So what does it mean to privatize these resources? What does it mean for the poor, who are more likely to rely on these common-good resources rather than societal infrastructures (like grocery stores or purified tap water)?