Today the government of the UK encouraged citizens to delete old emails to save water. The offending bit is near the very end. Is this as daft as it seems? Yes, yes it is.
The photo above shows some tiny little mushrooms that I spotted growing in one of the planter beds on the deck, likely Leucocoprinus birnbaumii. As those mushrooms like the ground to be at field capacity in order to fruit, it means I overwatered the vegetable plant above them. Likely, by one or two tablespoons.
I have a corpus of email going back decades. It consumes 90 GB of data on my server — that’s likely more than you have. Yet maintaining that corpus, growing since the 1990’s, has consumed less water that it took to grow those little ‘shrooms.
If you were to go right now and delete your old emails off whatever server on which they’re kept (unless you self-host) you would almost certainly use more water to delete them than it would take to just leave them on the server for another ten years.
This is just part of a disgusting tendency for institutions to try to blame individual actions for their own systemic failures. Picking up your trash won’t solve the pollution problem created by heavily government subsidized petrochemical industries creating long-lasting, cheap garbage (even if the government hires a Sicilian-American actor to play an Indigenous American to tell you so). Homelessness is not the result of too many people who just don’t have the gumption to get off the streets. People cannot be held individually culpable for their illnesses when government-subsidized and large, powerful corporations push junk food and tobacco relentlessly while suppressing information about the likely effects of their choices. But that’s what we do.
—2p