Introduction

The cover of the 15th anniversary (June 2008) issue of Wired magazine says it all:

In typical, edgy Wired style, several short commentaries explain how what we thought was good for the environment turns out to be all wrong. Organic food is often grown in energy-dependent greenhouses and requires extensive transport to market. Air conditioning generates less CO2 than does heating. Urban centers are more energy efficient than suburban sprawl. Old growth forests do not have the same carbon sequestration capacity as do younger forests, and “pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely due to the environmental cost of the 30 pounds of nickel in the hybrid's battery” (p. 163).

At the end of the section is a final, brief commentary titled “It's Not Just Carbon, Stupid.” It would be easy to miss after all of the photographically rich challenges to green thinking, but this short piece is essentially a rebuttal to the central story. The author argues that focusing solely on greenhouse emissions is not a realistic way to understand environmental problems and that such a focus “blinds us to more sustainable, and ultimately more promising, solutions.” Indeed, reducing humans' relationship with the physical environment to the cycle of a single gas molecule misses many of the political, social, and economic dimensions underlying predominant environmental narratives.