"Companies with a stake in the technology industry or that have staked on the Internet (ala Google or Amazon or any of the thousands of small ecommerce companies around the world) are likely to pluck multiple nuggets of wisdom from her book."
-- Heather Clancy, business journalist
What technologies do we need to solve the complex environmental, economic, social, and political challenges facing us today? As this thought-provoking book reveals, one tool for enacting change is already at our fingertips: the global network.
Consider the private domains of companies, governments, and institutions along with the public Internet: we have an immense communications network that connects billions of people in ways we never thought possible. In this book, author Sarah Sorensen clearly demonstrates why this network is the best sustainable technology available to help us tackle a wide range of problems.
If each of us represents a node on this network, then it's time we realize the potential we hold. The Sustainable Network is a call to action, urging individuals, governments, markets, and organizations to put the power of this network to good use.
Discover how the sustainable network connects us all, with examples of how it's already effecting change
Understand how this network magnifies the impact of even the smallest change and newest idea
Explore the role that various market and political forces play
Learn how the network can be improved to better address environmental, economic, and social conditions
Get practical advice that you or your business can follow now
The Sustainable Network demonstrates how we can tackle challenges, ranging from energy conservation to economic and social innovation, using the global network--of which the public Internet is just one piece. To help solve a myriad of problems today, author Sarah Sorensen points out that the best tool for enacting change already exists, lying literally at our fingertips. This book demystifies the power of the network, and issues a strong call to action.
The Sustainable Network
For the first time see your relationship with the global network
Can you really save the planet by using the Internet more? The quick answer to that question is yes. The thoughtful answer is explored in The Sustainable Network, which takes a look at the role the Internet and all the other networks that connect the world’s computing devices have on the way we are living our lives, conducting our politics, running our businesses and impacting our planet. The network offers us a sustainable platform for change, but to use it to its full advantage we must understand it; we must understand how it works, how it’s integral to our daily lives and how its potential can be tapped more effectively to tackle our toughest environmental, social, economic and political problems. Here are four things you can do now to support a sustainable network:
The network is more than just wires and cables; it’s the answer to our future
Evaluate and recognize the impact of networks on your life today. The Internet has more than likely changed your relationships and many ways that you go about your daily life. It’s important to recognize, in real terms, both the possibilities and holes created by the network in your personal, civic and business activities. Take stock of the new prospects it’s created, new challenges you face, and the level of your reliance on it every day. The goal is to identify how you want to maximize potential and minimize risk.
Invest in the future to take advantage of the opportunities created by the network. Learn as much as you can about what the network really is. You should be able to define it (broadband, 3G, smart grid, etc.) and link that to your future opportunities. Learn how to use new network tools to establish connections to information and people, to give you access to the resources you need to make informed decisions. In business, evaluate your infrastructure in terms of scaling and new requirement adaptability. Investment, time and financial, is critical to participating in the digital world.
A sustainable earth involves everyone, connected and informed
Protecting your personal information, intellectual property and digital assets. It is critical to be aware of the risks you are taking when sharing information and resources online. There are precautions and security measures you can take to maintain the integrity and confidentiality of your online activities. Risks in the digital world need to be understood before they can be combated, and it’s important to understand the tradeoffs, strengths and weaknesses of the digital world as an alternative to the physical one.
Test new ideas. Look for additional ways you could leverage the network to achieve your plans, improve economies of scale or reduce your impacts. Examine your mindset, regulatory landscape, business culture, process and policy environment and ask whether they support change. The more willing a government, business or person is to take a look at the way they normally operate and identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, the better the chance they will be able to effectively leverage the network and new technologies to solve problems and accelerate success. It’s critical to identify and then clear the hurdles and embrace necessary changes to keep up in this fast-paced world. Thinking and answering these broad questions in our own, individualized terms will enable us to find our place in this global network. And then together we can develop more sustainable environmental, economic, social and political models. The Sustainable Network sets out to help each of us understand the network and its role in our lives, so we can nurture our relationship with it–our individualized and collective futures depend on it.
Photos courtesy of Kate Richards.
About the Author
Sarah Sorensen is the principal of Sorensen Consulting, a sustainability and strategic communications consultancy. She spent eight years at Juniper Networks in a variety of product and corporate marketing roles. During her tenure, she created and managed the Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability strategy and was a founding member of the company's Green Taskforce, which is responsible for driving energy efficiency initiatives within the engineering and product teams. She also managed Juniper's business announcements, crisis communications and public sector outreach, and spent half a decade marketing the company's security technologies. A graduate of UCLA (1996), where she majored in English and was a member of UCLA's Division 1 women's soccer team, she has focused her efforts in branding, marketing, communications, and public relations for both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. She has developed and written dozens of white papers, byline articles, and presentations on and about the networking and security industries.
Sarah Sorensen grew up in the Bay Area watching the technology transformation emanating from the Silicon Valley. She went down south to attend the University of California at Los Angeles and to pursue a career in sports marketing. However, the pull of home was strong, so she returned to northern California and started a surprisingly equally exciting career in high tech. Working alongside technology visionaries, who were gracious enough to bring a non-engineer into their world, she discovered she loved conceptualizing technology and translating its value and benefits into terms that could be understood by all. It was in this vein that she set out to write her first book, The Sustainable Network, which she hopes will demystify the network and help everyone understand the role it's playing as we collectively tackle some our hardest environmental, social, political and economic problems. When not working, she loves her life with her husband and their two kids.
This review is from: The Sustainable Network: The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet (Sustainable Living Series) (Paperback)
If you want to better understand how the global network works, this book will interest you. If you want to know the implications of the network and how it may answer the world's problems, this book will disappoint you. The supposed point of the book--how the global communications network is the best sustainable technology to address the world's problems--is lost in a mountain of details about how the network operates. Throughout my excruciating experience reading this book, I kept asking, "Why do I need to know this?" I now better understand the path an email takes after I send it. So what? How does this help me understand how to use the global network to address society's problems? I did find useful suggestions for action included at the end of a few of the chapters. But any of the chapters that addressed the supposed premise of the book dealt with issues at a superficial level. I was hoping that this book would provide a thought-provoking read. Instead, I experienced reading this book as a mind-numbing chore.
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This review is from: The Sustainable Network: The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet (Sustainable Living Series) (Paperback)
How did we get here? This book is an attempt to bring you up to speed on what's happening in the interconnected world. For the "newbie" it is an excellent resource for educating one about the internet, how it works, how it is shaping our lives, and the dangers we face because we are interconnected more than we've ever been.
The author is a former employee of Juniper Networks, a major producer of the routers and switches that make up the "guts" of the internet. As an "insider" she has many helpful discussions about the many factors that shape the internet we use, its strengths and adaptiveness, its ability to survive major attacks, and its weaknesses that may place the data we transmit over it at risk. The book serves best as an omnibus of content for most any question you ever had about networks in general and THE network in particular.
The subtitle is "The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet." The implication I read is that through the networks we've created we'll be able to save our planet. That is a moot point. While the Internet is rapidly becoming the medium of choice for information sharing, it doesn't come without a price. As she states, the servers, routers, and switches that send information on its way require a steady stream of electrons for their operation, and at current rates of expansion, it is not clear that we'll be able to afford the electrical power plants that will continue to allow that expansion. This is one of the few books I've read that has addressed this particular energy problem in some depth.
A sampling of chapters that address current issues include:
What's So Smart About an Energy Grid?
Is Broadband Really That Important?
Net Neutrality
Political Sustainability
Rocking the Vote
Antisocial Network Engineering
Government's Role in Protecting the Network's Integrity
21st-Century Warfare: Cyberattacks
The Health Net
Not by Accident: Social Networking
As a prototypical nerd, I hope that she's correct in suggesting the Internet may be a major means of "saving" the planet, i.e. The Sustainable Network may become a model for the "Sustainable World." My nightmare is that human nature will remain rigidly rooted in its prehistoric "small group" past, and we'll continue to make decisions for the benefit of our small group, but decisions that lead to the degradation of the planet.
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This review is from: The Sustainable Network: The Accidental Answer for a Troubled Planet (Sustainable Living Series) (Paperback)
I am not in the tech industry but I am a big user and fan of technology. This book is a great examination of the profound impact that technology (the "network", wireless, etc.) has on our lives...It's really fascinating to have the author examine the environmental, political, social, and economic implications of the network. This book is great follow up reading to Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded"...The Sustainable Network was highly educational and very interesting.
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