Interview with Don Carli, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication.

Don Carli is Senior Research Fellow with nonprofit Institute for Sustainable Communication (ISC) where he is director of The Sustainable Advertising Partnership and other programs addressing advertising, marketing, corporate responsibility, sustainability, and enterprise communication. Don is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Program Affiliate Scholar, Sustainability Editor of Aktuel Grafisk Information Magazine in Sweden and a contributor to PBS “MediaShift.” Don has been a senior advisor Fortune 1000 companies and has been extensively quoted in major media on issues related to sustainability, advertising, media and green marketing.

GMC: The story of sustainable media is a bad news/good news story. The bad news is that the public’s concern about our forests and the environment is justified. We do have a significant problem. The good news is that the solution lies in rethinking our use of pages and pixels to learn, collaborate, communicate, and make informed media supply chain choices.

We’re being bombarded, everyday, with catch phrases like “think about the environment before printing this email,” or “switching to e-billing saves trees.” Is the use of digital media really saving trees?

DC: I think that we’re presented all too often with forced choices, and frankly, in many cases, false dilemmas. Digital media and information technology are actually contributing to deforestation in very direct ways that most people are unaware of.

Print media is not perfect by any means. Forestry and the papermaking industry have enormous strides to make in improving the ways in which they use energy, materials, and address sustainability in their business practices.

Despite the fact that it has been given such a free ride as being categorically green, the use of digital media has extremely significant environmental impacts too. In particular, because so much electricity is derived from coal-fired power plants, digital media has a direct impact on deforestation as well.

GMC: Could you talk more about the public’s concern about the environment and our forests as a significant problem? How paper and online media contribute to that problem?

DC: The first thing to realize is that we should be concerned about the state of our forests. We should be concerned about deforestation; these are extremely significant global issues.

Forest cover in the United States has, in fact, increased over the past 100 years. Although some groups will argue that their definition of a forest doesn’t fit the criteria of sustainability; in other words, a monoculture plantation is not seen as a forest, where as old growth is.

The fact of the matter is that overall forest cover has increased in the United States, and sustainable forestry has increased, both in the US and worldwide. We should be concerned about deforestation, but we should also be very much aware of what is driving deforestation.

Frankly, hamburgers and condominiums are doing more to drive deforestation, as is coal-fired power, than papermaking or print media.

GMC:  You’ve used a term called “gray energy” when you talk about electricity and coal-fired power. Please explain that more fully.

DC:  Gray energy is another way of describing the embodied energy in a product; that is, the energy that was required to make it.

In the sense of a digital product, for example, the computing devices, the information technology, the network infrastructure, don’t grow on trees. Somebody had to crack open