Page 68 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

52 R. MAXWELL AND T. MILLER

Action Network, the Chinese authorities restricted illegal dumping and
foreign imports of scrap into Guiyu. They also confined all e-waste pro-
cessing into a huge new industrial park there. The tragedy is that even if
people wanted to return the area to some agriculture, the odds are that
they’d only produce poisoned crops (Recycling Today 2015; Toxic Leaks
2016). This story is repeated throughout the Global South (Rams 2015).
Green NGOs must be proactive in their treatment of e-waste. That
means explicit guidelines for employees and associated activists and orga-
nizations. It means providing transparent reporting as unvarnished as they
would with green procurement practices. It means modelling for all green
citizens the routines of repair-reuse-recycle that define green institutional
behaviour. This not only helps reduce ecologically harmful aspects of
digital activism and the environment, it also expands the grounds on which
international and intergenerational solidarity can be identified and enacted.

CONCLUSIONS
More and more consumers are re-evaluating their love of digital tech-
nologies and starting to reduce the number of new gadgets they buy and to
recycle old electronics as another routine duty of environmental
citizenship. Environmental citizenship now informs broader efforts to
protect biophysical health from risks associated with toxic substances and
radiation designed into TVs, computers, and cellphones. Many states,
municipalities, national governments, and regional blocs have passed laws
that require safe disposal of e-waste as do a growing number of workplaces,
schools, residential buildings, and neighbourhoods where green is slowly
becoming the new normal.
All of us, through our teaching, activism and research, can contribute in
some way to these efforts to press for a culture of sustainability over the
prevailing one of consumerism—to advocate for a way of thinking and
acting that is based on the idea that the Earth has limited resources to
support human activities and limited capabilities to absorb and recycle our
excesses. A culture of sustainability is also built on an ethics of intergen-
erational care with the enduring solidarity that binds our high-tech des-
tinies to those of workers and the planet.
We should celebrate the organizations that have inspired so many green
citizens to become involved and stay engaged in greening life. There’sa
growing list: NGOs like GoodElectronics and the Silicon Valley Toxics