Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2009
Summary
In the beginning of 2007 – one and a half decades after the former environmental upsurge – environment is again high on the public and political agendas around the world, not in the least through Al Gore's media campaign around the Oscar-winning movie/documentary An Inconvenient Truth. At the same time the information revolution continues to amaze people and to change life of many of us – through Internet, through blogs, through time-space compression. But the two – environment and information – have hardly been connected. In the growing number of stories on the major environmental challenges planet earth is facing, information is not really among the exciting topics that easily find their way into the newspapers, prime-time news, or even academic literature. And the digitalization of our life, the acceleration of information flows, and the enhanced potentials of monitoring, tracking and tracing are not often related to environmental sustainability. And still, I will argue in this book, information – that is, its collection, processing, accessibility and verification – is becoming crucial in dealing with climate change, unsustainable consumption, biodiversity conservation and waste management, to name but a few. The information society is rapidly changing the conditions, mechanisms, resources, institutions and conflicts that are and will be involved in environmental governance. Old modes, resources, arrangements, concepts, and sites of power are increasingly being replaced by new, informational ones.
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- Information
- Environmental Reform in the Information AgeThe Contours of Informational Governance, pp. xv - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008