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ENVIRONMENT SUNDANCE CHANNEL: Robert Redford presents "The Green"
Robert Redford, looking only slightly weathered at age 70, is ever still the movie star. He continues: “The Sundance Channel’s new weekly night of programming,’ The Green,’ will inform and hopefully inspire you about our environment.” The series’ distinguished advisory board includes a list of dedicated doers: Yves Behar, Majora Carter, Laurie David, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And the focus of the series is not just “here are the problems,” but rather “what can I do to pitch in?” Enter Second Life. A new communication and collaboration medium that provides a forum to meet and discuss “what can I do” with Simran, and a way for The Sundance Channel to help showcase the series and raise public awareness. The weekly series includes ideas (see “Episodes”), profiles of ecoists (well-known environmental activists), and ecobiz (companies that have demonstrated a firm commitment to the environment). The ecoists include Robert Kennedy Jr., Daryl Hannah, Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece, Josh Lucas, Amber Valletta, Laura Dern, Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Morgan Feeman, and Tim Robbins. The Sundance Channel’s use of Second Life as a forum is only one way that Second Life is being used to increase awareness of environmental issues. Two sims, Meteroa and Svarga, provide innovative 3D interactive demonstrations of ecology, weather, and climate change, showing the power of virtual worlds for training and education. Meteroa was covered at length in the February edition of The Seventh Sun.  Svarga, one of the most fanciful and beautiful sims in Second Life (actually of historical importance in the development of virtual worlds and cited in Wikipedia), derives from the Hindu Sanskrit for “a set of heavenly worlds located on and above Mt. Meru.” According to Wikipedia, “It is a Heaven where the righteous live in paradise before their next reincarnation.” And it is the site of a functioning virtual ecosystem where life (flowers and bees) emerges and biogeographically disperses according to a carefully crafted cycle:
The cycle from seed to flower repeats again... and again... and again. Like real life. Avatar Laukosargas Svarog (known as “Lauk”), a two-decade veteran of the UK music and game industry, is the creative force behind Svarga’s artificial life experiment. She left the gaming industry for family reasons. As reported by New World blogger Wagner James Au, “The main reason I stopped is because I had a child,” says Lauk, “but I was also getting very disappointed with the lack of inspired work in the games industry.” Early on in the creation of Svarga, she noticed some limited forms of emergence (“the holy grail of artificial life developers,” according to Au) particularly in the development of her plant life. Svarga’s ecosystem is “very sensitive to very small changes,” says Lauk, “like if a gene emerges which gives a plant an extra seed in its lifetime, that can cause huge growth in its locale. And the opposite of course, one less causes thinning growth. I’ve also seen the same color become a dominant gene so all the meadow cup plants became blue once. Simple things like that emerge quite often.” And the bees. Svarga’s bees are obviously a critical point of failure in the ecological cycle. No bees, and no pollen gets dispersed. No flowers. Hungry birds. National Geographic News recently reported a very scary thing: something is causing bees to vanish in real life by the thousands. Right now. Today. An estimated 14 billion U.S. dollars in agricultural crops in the United States are dependent on bee pollination. “Researchers are scrambling to find answers to what is causing the commercially important honeybees to abandon their hives and disappear,” reports Stefan Lovgren. Clearly, Svarga’s little ecological demonstration has very high educational value. Just as Svarga’s virtual “ecological footprint” requires abstractions from the real world (bees, flowers, rain, clouds) to create a closed cycle, Second Life itself has an ecological footprint that requires its own resources. Blogger Tony Walsh points out in a blog entry posted at Clickable Culture: “I attended [The Green forum] because I wanted to know if Sethi was aware of the environmental impact of Second Life, an expanding virtual world that is served from thousands of computers to hundreds of thousands of computers. I’ve been wondering since last December about how much energy that degree of usage requires, because I might change my personal usage habits if it turned out I was wasting power.”
 Simran responded to Walsh that “we need to be thoughtful about how we consume, and what the larger implications of our consumption might be.” This obviously isn’t a criticism of Second Life per se, since any Web or other PC usage requires comparable energy consumption. However, it does warrant a closer look. According to Tufts University, the average desktop computer uses about 120 Watts (the monitor uses 75 Watts, and the CPU uses 45 Watts). Laptops use considerably less, around 30 Watts total. It would take 34,000-169,000 trees to offset the amount of CO2 required to run 500 computers around the clock. (See “Tufts University Computer Energy Consumption Calculations.”) If you make the case that Second Life can be used as a business communication and collaboration platform (and the emerging virtual world economy in general), it can be argued that the carbon offsets from reduced corporate travel over time (as new businesses come in world) make up part of the carbon budget required to use Second Life. Server and PC usage is offset by reduced travel. (Obviously this requires metrics from Linden Lab to prove, but it is a reasonable hypothesis.) This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t turn off your PC when you’re not using it (or your TV or electric lights or appliances for that matter). You should. And, remember that the growing server farms required to populate virtual worlds must be roughly 99.7% available, meaning that you can’t shut them down. (Without alot of very unhappy users!) Also consider, according to the Energy Information Administration, that the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil is expected to average over $66 per barrel this summer, compared with over $70 per barrel last summer, and to average about $64 per barrel annually in both 2007 and 2008. Electricity can be generated by a number of means (unfortunately mostly by polluting coal in the U.S today), while automobile and jet travel still require the use of increasing scarce and expensive petroleum products. So... bottom line... maybe working from home on your PC in a virtual world isn’t such a bad idea from an environmental perspective, particularly as new forms of renewable electrical energy become available to drive the server farms. Oil and coal are simply not options longer term as discussed at some length an episode of “The Green” called “Crude Awakening.” This episode is not for the faint of heart. So, as Robert Redford concludes before each new episode: “Tune in and take action. Let’s commit to that.”
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SUNDANCE CHANNEL —“Protecting the environment is a global goal that we all can work on together to achieve,” begins Robert Redford during every episode of “