What can the Digital Era teach us about Sustainability?

Gone are the days where we could brainstorm over the paper. Like a distressed lover peeling away the petals of roses, authors, creative geniuses, artists, and students in the past peeled away papers of their notebooks for perfection. We went through many kilograms of notebooks, textbooks, and reading material. But is this impossible in today’s day and age where every tree matters and deforestation has crossed all bounds, pushing us on the verge of dystopia.

This is just an example, but like paper, our oil, coal, soil, water, and air are also tethering towards a sad demise. Why? Due to our overuse of course. Humans fail to look beyond the greed of the present to understand the need for our future. But thankfully even when it seems like we have mutilated the environment to the point of no return, there is a silver lining. Hope glimmers in the form of smart digitalization of our lifestyles. 

How? Well, let’s take for example the brighter side of changes brought in by coronavirus pandemic. Large multi-storied offices that need millions of kWh of energy every week to sustain its centralized cooling/heating, lighting, water/food supply and more have shut down for a while. Millions of people have stopped traveling to work every day and consuming millions of tons of fuel. Ancillary services, recreational services, air transport, etc. have also ceased. Work from home has become an opportunity to save millions of dollars and employees have been rewarded with flexible work routines to manage time and improve focus. The same with university and school students. 

The consumption of paper per person has also dropped drastically over the past decade. Textbooks and notebooks have evolved into presentations, digital documents, online surveys, and more. Also, there has been a paradigm shift towards ordinary people trying to open up to more sustainable forms of energy consumption by opting out of buying permanent assets like cars and houses. Many governments in the world and the state governments in our country have banned plastic permanently. 

So all we can say right now is that with Digital Lifestyle transformation, we might not immediately see a sustainable change but we are definitely walking towards one.