About a year ago, I was attending a panel at a conference where the panelists were discussing moving towards “green” offices, initiating recycling programs at your work place, strategies to adopt for lowering waste and consumption, and so forth. It wasn’t particularly enlightening — if being green is something you care about, all these issues aren’t new.
But one thing got my goat: one of the panelists was going on about “the paperless office” being a goal we should aim for. I wondered if she was aware that the goal had been left for dead back at the beginning of the decade.
After question time, I went up to the front and questioned the panelist. Doesn’t she think that aiming for an entirely paperless office would create even more of a barrier between humans and nature, because paper is one of those mediums that inspire, that can in fact link humans back to nature – which should be the goal for creating a sustainable way of living? It was a long and complex question, and I didn’t get a satisfactory answer.
The question has bothered me a great deal since. Whatever similar ideas I had before on the matter, it all came down to this fascination with how physical objects relate us to our world, the artificial boundaries we create that separate us from nature, how our senses are shaped by the way we live and how our cultures evolve.
So, this blog is not (just) about being green. Looks like it’ll be an interesting road of discovery and discourse ahead.