Regarding deforestation, it seems less digital media's direct blame, and more a national and state-level issue of how we run our power grids. Coal's a nasty piece of work anyhow - the radiation they emit, along with the pollutants they generate, are enough to make even an ex-nuclear submariner acquaintance of mine shudder, and the guy's outright blase about anything short of actually being in a reactor without a suit. We should really, really be making effort to moving away from that technology anyhow.
However, e-waste? That's legitimate. The EU's e-waste regulations goes some way in at least limiting the environmental damage, but it's a far cry from enough. DARPA's callout for more energy-efficient computing devices helps, but pretty much the only argument in favor of electronics, in terms of how "green" they are, is that while they're more energy-intensive to make per unit, they make up for it in terms of information density and reusability by the order of quite a few magnitudes.
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Regarding deforestation, it seems less digital media's direct blame, and more a national and state-level issue of how we run our power grids. Coal's a nasty piece of work anyhow - the radiation they emit, along with the pollutants they generate, are enough to make even an ex-nuclear submariner acquaintance of mine shudder, and the guy's outright blase about anything short of actually being in a reactor without a suit. We should really, really be making effort to moving away from that technology anyhow.
However, e-waste? That's legitimate. The EU's e-waste regulations goes some way in at least limiting the environmental damage, but it's a far cry from enough. DARPA's callout for more energy-efficient computing devices helps, but pretty much the only argument in favor of electronics, in terms of how "green" they are, is that while they're more energy-intensive to make per unit, they make up for it in terms of information density and reusability by the order of quite a few magnitudes.