Like, where do our tablets, smartphones, desktops, laptops, and game consoles come from? The box? The phone store? Sigh. It’s not good, y’all. For one thing, our tech is made up of different kinds of metals that must be extracted from the earth: iron, aluminum, magnesium, copper, silver, gold, graphite, and lithium, to name just a few. That mining destroys the ecosystem of the mined area and the area around the mining area, not to mention the communities living in those areas. It also requires tremendous amounts of energy to dig up and transport these metals, which releases tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. And then we dump our precious phones into a landfill two years later to get the newest model. (While we’d like to think we recycle them, overall, we don’t.) There’s an endless market for the newest, fastest, shiniest phone, so there’s an endless need for new precious metals, mining, and environmental destruction. (Side note: this is called planned obsolescence, in which companies intentionally make things to be quickly thrown away rather than fixed and used for a long time.) Another question we could ask:  Where are all our photos actually stored? Errrr . . . up in the sky? Our uploaded photos live in data centers (warehouses full of servers), along with our tweets, YouTube videos, Google Docs, and anything else in the cloud. These data centers require, yet again, a tremendous amount of energy to run. And much of that energy is produced by burning fossil fuels.

How Can We Be Mindful of the Environmental Impact of Our Tech?

Part of living mindfully means bringing awareness to what we buy, and this awareness feeds the desire to minimize the damage caused by our society’s unsustainable patterns of consumption. Here are a few things to consider and ways to take action:   Attention Hijacked: Using Mindfulness to Reclaim Your Brain from Tech by Erica B. Marcus. Text copyright © 2022 by Erica B. Marcus. Reprinted with the permission of Zest Books, a division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this text excerpt may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

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Erica B. Marcus November 16, 2022

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