Practicing what we preach

Recently I attended a very large academic (geography) conference in Seattle, Washington. Thousands of people were in attendance, and I'd like to point out that many of the innumerable sessions focused on some aspect of the environment, climate change, sustainable living, etc. Why is this significant? Mainly because of the hypocrisy of it. Thousands of people flew from all over the place to attend, and thousands of programs, each 386 pages long, produced from 'mixed sources' were printed and distributed, only to be used for a few days and then discarded in some place or another. I felt it was really a shame that we weren't acknowledging the impact that we ourselves were having on contributing to environmental degradation, as we were in the midst of talking about the responsibilities of governments, corporations and individual citizens in reducing their environmental impacts. It made our concerns seem superficial. How can we criticize anyone else when we can't get our own organizations to undertake even the most simple of changes.

Leaving aside the issue of the transportation costs of attendees, and the impacts derived from all those sheets and towels washed in hotels, I just want to concentrate for the moment on the issue of the programs. All attendees at the conference would have had access to the internet, the program was available online beforehand and during the conference, including any changes. At any given hour on any given day of the conference, there were 87 sessions running concurrently. Of course, an individual would only be able to attend one, perhaps two (or up to 5 if they were willing to keep getting up and leaving sessions after each speaker). That means that all the rest of the abstracts for that hour were of no use to them. Multiple that by 9 hours a day for 5 days by 5000(?) people and that is a hell of a lot of wasted printing and paper! Online there was a possibility of building your own program, I think this is definitely the way forward. For each of the days that a person was attending (and I doubt many people went to sessions every day for 5 days), they could build themselves a program and if needed print that out, or just write down the details in a notebook (as I did). I've sent this suggestion to the Association of American Geographers and I hope that they do something of this sort for the next meeting. To transition to this system they could have a limited number of paper programs available in strategic locations around the conference, or even one per room, that people could consult in between sessions to see what they wanted to go to next. There was free wi-fi so people could look up the program on their various devices and the conference organizers could have provided a few computer stations where people could go to access and print parts of the program if they needed to. I hope this happens sooner rather than later.