Which is better for the environment, analog or digital?

[Frank Petronio]

With all these self-proclaimed environmentalists here, shouldn't be immoral to use the imaging method that produces the most harm?

If I follow the logic that driving an electric or hybrid vehicle is more environmentally sound than driving a gas-powered vehicle, then shouldn't I also be using a digital camera so I avoid the pollution and waste associated with analog photography?

And shouldn't Polaroid and Fuji Instant be super-ultra-permanently banned simply because of their wasteful packaging?

[Gem Singer]

Frank,

Is this a trick question?

[Peter De Smidt]

Driving an electric or hybrid may, or may not, be more environmentally friendly that a traditional gas automobile. Sure, comparing the use of fuels to move the car might favor the electric or hybrid, but you need to take into account all that goes into these cars as well, such as the very large batteries in them, the production of which have substantial environmental impact, or at least so I've read.

Film photography, at least BW photography, can be done with pretty innocuous components. For example, a phenidone + ascorbic acid developer should have very low toxicity, as can a citric acid stop bath.

Just like a hybrid car, it's true that digital cameras don't use up a lot of resources to go about their task, but they do use considerable resources in their production. I have no idea what the relative impacts are, but it's certainly not a simple question. In any case, many of us use film cameras that are decades older than we are. I doubt I'll be using my D200 5 years from now.

[Sirius Glass]

That is easy. Analog is better for the environment. You would not believe the environmental poisons that are byproducts of producing the focal plane arrays and electronics. Then a few weeks after one buy a new model, it becomes obsolete because the same manufacturer has come out with a newer model ==> the old camera gets dumped in the land fill to poison the land around the land fill and its watershed.

Do you have another question that can set off flame wars? ;)

[Frank Petronio]

Frank,

Is this a trick question?

Sure, I am poking fun at Prius drivers and elitist environmentalists. But it is also a serious question and deserves consideration too.

For example, clothing manufacturer Patagonia does an evaluation that considers and weighs every aspect in the chain of making and owning one of their products, as best as can be determined. That means considering the chemicals used to grow or make the fibers, the fuel used to transport the components, the environment impact of the machinery used to knit the goods, the conditions of the factories... and many more factors.

Add to the equation the product's life cycle. Is it durable and fashionable enough to use for years and years? Can it be recycled?

So while it may be nearly impossible to do an accurate environmental audit comparing using a Nikon D7000 versus a Hasselblad versus doing Wet Plates... it would be interesting to hear your gut instincts and hunches.

My opinion is that given the state of electronics manufacturing, buying a nicer digital camera has almost negligible impact, and if you get a better quality, higher end one, and actually use it a lot over a longer than average period, that is the least damaging. I know electronics manufacturing generates a lot of harmful waste and worse, but since it is already going on regardless, one chip is what, 0.000001%?

Granted, most people shoot a multiple of 10-1000x more digital images than 8x10 film, but if you shot 8x10 at the same rate as digital you'd clearly be a ecological disaster.

[Marko]

Sure, I am poking fun at Prius drivers and elitist environmentalists. But it is also a serious question and deserves consideration too.

And well you should poke fun at them. The first generation Priuses are still not old enough to hit the dump yard and I suspect opinions will start shifting once they do. I always have two groups of questions for Prius advocates:

1. Do you really know what kind of materials do your batteries contain and what will it take to properly dispose of them once they reach the end of useful life? Do you know what kind of damage they can wreak on the environment if they leak for any reason?

2. Do you know what what does it take to manufacture an electromotor in your car? Did you ever hear of Rare Earths and how they are obtained?

I haven't met a single Prius driver and/or advocate who had a single answer to any of these questions.

[mdm]

And there is the rub.

1. An 8x10 camera lasts generations, as do the lenses. No problem here.
2. Its a good day when Clyde Butcher exposes one sheet of film, even if it is very big. Most large format photographers use very little film, and therefore create very little problem. Most print even less, and most of those are probably printing digitally anyway, even Clyde Butcher, so the point is moot.

Go for a long drive with your plastic digital, and plastic phone, in your plastic car, full of rare earth and heavy metals, and listen to some plastic Trentemoller and think about your plastic life with its little plastic ideals piped to you prepackaged through through a plastic screen. Then breath a little of the plastic air in your fake plastic shit hole and think about how lucky you are.

[Frank Petronio]

....I haven't met a single Prius driver and/or advocate who had a single answer to any of these questions.

That's like the windmills. While the farmers are happy to lease their land for a tidy profit, not much consideration has been given to what you do with 300-foot tall rusting towers in twenty years when they reach the end of their useful life. Those 120-feet propellor blades can hurt.

[mdm]

You put them back on the same truck they came in on, and the farmer is left with a network of nice roads all over his hill, which makes it very easy for him to plant trees and collect cabon credits.

[Oren Grad]

The discussion wasn't terribly enlightening last time around (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?t=57121)...

[Heroique]

If ecological health is the aim, “analog or digital?” is a poor initial question to ask.

Better to ask, “How can local labor on local resources serve local needs in a healthy way?” and then try to put one’s personal photography – analog or digital – into this context.

Doing so might even lead to: “Photography or not?”

[jb7]

Small format Landscapers are the worst for the environment-
traveling millions of miles into unspoilt wilderness every year.
The smaller the format, the more people travel with it,
although the smaller the format, the less people have Photography as a primary aim...

Home portraitists and still lifers are probably the most benign.

I've often wondered how Vegans could bring themselves to shoot film,
although that's a tenuous environmental link...

Can you get vegetarian film?

[deadpan]

Can you get vegetarian film?

I seem to remember Fuji were working on an agar solution for film many years ago, but i'm not sure anything came of it....?

[Bob Kerner]

My guess is that film leaves a bigger carbon footprint than digital. While the digicams may have a lot of toxic components, they are manufactured once, go to market and are used. Yes, they probably go to the dump quicker than an 4x5.

Lets look at film. Scary chemicals to make it. Chemicals to process it. Chemicals to print it etc etc. We all get that. But what about the carbon used to ship it to our homes or drive to the store to purchase it? And the carbon to send it to the lab (or ship the chemical to our homes)? And the sturdy packages that Praus uses to mail it back to you.... It seems that there's alot more "stuff" and movement associated with film than with a digicam.

With a digicam and CF card, I may never need to buy anything else or go to a lab. I know people who never print their digital images, they just put them on their computer (yes, more carbon expenditure to make a computer,but that probably is equal between film and digital photographers since we all need computers to come here and answer these questions).

The only conclusion to be drawn from analyses like this is that we should sell all our stuff, stay at home and make drawings on the sides of our caves. And develop at home rather than sending film to Rochester to be developed ;)

And now onto our next question: Hardtop or convertible for 8x10 landscapes?

[SamReeves]

Carbon footprint my ass. Cows create more farting carbon than developing 4x5 film.

[Bob Salomon]

Compare how many analog items require HazMat shipping vs digital items. How many OSHA requirements must an analog lab meet vs a digital lab?

[Brian C. Miller]

Oh, get some real art going, and burn down the rain forests!

Making a wee bitty little picture is for pansies! Get out there with a flame thrower and make some real angst! Like that forestry worker who burned her ex's letters to get some closure... (Colorado, 2002, link (http://www.gadling.com/2007/06/12/five-famous-forest-fires/))

Bob, I love the hazmat requirements. When I found out how much packaging it takes to ship glacial acetic acid, I wondered if it would be saner to sell it as concentrated white vinegar, with a Heinz 57 label on it.

[Drew Wiley]

It's all about how you distribute and hypothetically contain the waste. If everyone
wa driving electric cars, where is all that electricity coming from? Burning dirty coal? Film involves the mfg of petrochemicals, but so does drinking bottled water and just about everything else you come into contact with nowadays. In fact, water
and soda bottles probably factor millions to one against what film mfg does. All the film I have shot in my life probably doesn't take up as much cubic feet as a couple of thrown-out old computer monitors, which contain all kinds of toxic stuff my film doesn't. E-waste is an enormous problem. Just ask any landfill. Here you're not even allowed to put it into the same dump. This is really one of those "Which came first, the chicken or the egg" questions. No easy answers.

[Sirius Glass]

Lets look at film. Scary chemicals to make it. Chemicals to process it. Chemicals to print it etc etc.

Actually NOT! Kodak, Fuji, Ilford have taken all the toxic chemicals such as cadmium out of film years ago. The few remaining toxic chemicals have been reduced to the point that if you check with your local EPA, you can put most of them down the drain. That leaves the silver which can be retrieved from hypo with numerous devices including steel wool so that the silver can be recycled.

Before you blow out fumes :eek: , do some due diligence and research exactly which chemicals your local EPA requires special handling. You will find that you have to shoot a lot of film to make up for the electronics, batteries, and plastics in just one digi-snapper that will be thrown away for a new model in a few years.

It sound like you are so enthused with embracing what ever is the newest and latest, that you have disengaged logical and scientific thinking. I hope that is not true and you just wanted to brag about your latest digi-snapper.

What was that I said in post #3 about inviting flame wars? ;)

Steve

[Bob Kerner]

It sound like you are so enthused with embracing what ever is the newest and latest, that you have disengaged logical and scientific thinking. I hope that is not true and you just wanted to brag about your latest digi-snapper.

What was that I said in post #3 about inviting flame wars? ;)

Steve

I'd have to say that the last sentence comes across as a tad obnoxious, Steve. I'm not sure what I wrote that would prompt that type of response.

But I would agree with your last sentence in the sense that the thread is provocative.

As for your second paragraph, actually I have and my local town wants photo development chemicals (even stuff for personal use) brought to its chemical disposal program.

[reyno bundit]

i offset my carbon footprint by making carbon prints, damn it i should get a refund

[Nathan Potter]

I have been involved with waste stream studies for recycling of city trash in the past. As one delves into the details and tries to track the environmental impact from birth to death, various comparisons become incomprehensibly complex. The entire sequence of electronics vs analogue film is even more complex when considering an environmental impact. The best that can be done is to speculate along the lines of what we are doing here.

There is an enormous amount of chemistry that goes into the manufacture of digital cameras including a fair amount of noxious materials. The physical waste stream is frequent and substantial in quantity.

Film cameras end up much less as waste but a lot of wet chemistry is used in processing and manufacture.

In both film and digital manufacturing there is a great deal of recycling of process chemistry in order to achieve a competitive position. It may be that the peripheral equipment that is needed to produce a print (computer, printer, scanner, etc.) would throw the balance of adverse environmental impact toward the digital technology. I dunno.

Nate Potter, Austin TX.

[Marko]

It sound like you are so enthused with embracing what ever is the newest and latest, that you have disengaged logical and scientific thinking. I hope that is not true and you just wanted to brag about your latest digi-snapper.

What was that I said in post #3 about inviting flame wars? ;)

You said precisely NOTHING in post #3. Post #3 was posted by Peter J. De Smidt.

You created post #4, though and in it you said:



That is easy. Analog is better for the environment. You would not believe the environmental poisons that are byproducts of producing the focal plane arrays and electronics. Then a few weeks after one buy a new model, it becomes obsolete because the same manufacturer has come out with a newer model ==> the old camera gets dumped in the land fill to poison the land around the land fill and its watershed.

Do you have another question that can set off flame wars? ;)

A few weeks? Really? Besides losing track of your own posts, are you sure you're not exaggerating some? :rolleyes:

It is exactly this kind of silliness that makes all of the remaining film shooters look at least a little looney and creepy. And turns away for good even people who would be intrigued by the historical process of using film and maybe even be attracted to it in the end, if it weren't for this kind of shrill rhetoric.

You guys keep bitching and whining about some world-wide sinister marketing plot to drive people away from film and kill it, but it is in fact you who do the most of it (driving others away, that is) by turning everything into a sort of anti-technology Jihad and clobbering every discussion about it with all that nonsense. THAT is why you are being considered modern-day Luddittes, not because you are using film.

Perhaps you should remember that no Holy War - Jihad included - in history has ever been won. If for no other reason then because there is typically no need for it until it has already been lost.

[Drew Wiley]

Well Marko, I finally discovered something you and I have in common - typographical errors! What is a holly war? Sounds like a thorny issue to me.

[Marko]

Drew, it is touching to know that you care (about whether we have something in common), but I don't really.

As I told you a while ago, please feel free to ignore me and I will happily return the favor. In fact, I am more often than not quite happy to do it anyway if you would just be kind enough to not mention my name.

Thank you.

[Drew Wiley]

Agreed.

[rdenney]

Compare how many analog items require HazMat shipping vs digital items. How many OSHA requirements must an analog lab meet vs a digital lab?

You mean going into the factory or coming out of it?

It's quite a valid question, and would take very significant and probably intractable analysis to determine the true costs.

But the answer is not in a comparison of technologies, but in a comparison of volume of use. The fact is that film is already a niche activity of very low actual total consumption while digital photography is the preferred medium of the masses. The masses will not switch to film, and film users could not produce a noticeable effect at any level or in any direction by switching to digital. I doubt that any significant number of people who use film could be able to count the cost of their computer in that analysis, either, because they would own the computer anyway. But it is sort-of fun to watch forum participants insist on including the computer in the analysis.

The question ends up being whether amateur and art photography of any type is environmentally defensible. Given that any hobby activity produces waste products, one could argue that hobbies should be outlawed. And wealth is a problem, too. People scratching the dirt for bare subsistence don't produce much pollution because they often don't survive long enough to. There is no end to it, if we can't agree to simply minimize unnecessary consumption and waste in whatever activity in which we engage.

On the subject of the Prius, I've thought for a while that they misspelt the name. I don't think they really meant for that "R" to be in there.

Rick "who has never (yet) heard a Prius owner describe their ownership without a rather unpleasant dose of self-righteousness" Denney

[Sirius Glass]

You said precisely NOTHING in post #3. Post #3 was posted by Peter J. De Smidt.

You created post #4, though and in it you said:

A few weeks? Really? Besides losing track of your own posts, are you sure you're not exaggerating some? :rolleyes:

I would stand corrected, but I am sitting at the computer at the moment.

Of course I am exaggerating to get the point that we do not need yet flame war on analog versus digital.

Should I mark my statements with [Sarcasm On] and [Sarcasm Off] labels, or just let the readers figure it out themselves? :confused:

Steve

[Thad Gerheim]

Which is better for the (environment) scotch or bud light? Really, what are you arguing here? Is drinking large format going to give you more Karma than posting pixels? I hope so! They say ground water is being polluted with caffeine and pharmaceutical drugs. I'm guilty! I think we're looking at triage now, and should be thinking about saving habitat and trying to slow down species extinction which will lead to our own. I think lifestyle, the home you live in, energy used, travel, where your food is grown is way more important than if your sequestering carbon in your tripod or scotch.

I use a 14 year old 4x5 Toyo and drive a 1991 Honda civic with 250,000 miles on it.

Thad Gerheim

[Marko]

I would stand corrected, but I am sitting at the computer at the moment.

Of course I am exaggerating to get the point that we do not need yet flame war on analog versus digital.

Should I mark my statements with [Sarcasm On] and [Sarcasm Off] labels, or just let the readers figure it out themselves? :confused:

Steve

Well, OK, I will admit I didn't mark the part you quoted with sarcasm tags either... And I agree about not needing another flame war...

But I was quite serious with the rest of my post. The rhetoric has become way too shrill and way too ridiculous lately, as if someone has suddenly decided APUG's gonna change course and dumped all their trademark lunacy here.

In other words, I would love to be able to discuss large format and other attendant issues here without some busybody or the other getting all worked up because someone mentioned the d-word. Just as I would like to be able to discuss digital- and film-related issues in their own respective venues without having every single discussion turn into a screaming obscenity match.

I really don't care if someone has dedicated their life to lovingly handcrafting traditional silver-gelatin prints that have never faced anything digital or if someone is stitching and tweaking their work in Photoshop to their heart's content. I don't want to know what do they think about the other's chosen workflow either.

I want to know how each one of them is accomplishing their own best work and I want to learn from them, both, without anybody telling me which way is kosher and which is not.

In other words, can't we stop all this silliness, including the supposedly witty little jabs in signatures and start practicing and discussing photography? We just might end up learning something from each other and end up with more good practitioners of both ways...

[Mike Anderson]

...
On the subject of the Prius, I've thought for a while that they misspelt the name. I don't think they really meant for that "R" to be in there...

:) Funny.

...Mike

[Ben Syverson]

In other words, can't we stop all this silliness, including the supposedly witty little jabs in signatures and start practicing and discussing photography?
This coming from the guy who only responds to Film vs Digital threads... ;)

[jnantz]

they are both bad for the environment ...



Actually NOT! Kodak, Fuji, Ilford have taken all the toxic chemicals such as cadmium out of film years ago. The few remaining toxic chemicals have been reduced to the point that if you check with your local EPA, you can put most of them down the drain. That leaves the silver which can be retrieved from hypo with numerous devices including steel wool so that the silver can be recycled.

Steve

steve

my bet would be most people here just pour their fixer down the drain
without a second thought, when i did a poll on another site close to 70% said they
did just that ...

[Sirius Glass]

In other words, can't we stop all this silliness, including the supposedly witty little jabs in signatures and start practicing and discussing photography? We just might end up learning something from each other and end up with more good practitioners of both ways...

Yeah man, like can't we all just get a bong?

By the way my car is a hybrid, it burns gas and ... oil! :D

[Marko]

This coming from the guy who only responds to Film vs Digital threads... ;)

Not quite true, I apparently respond to trolls too... ;)

But I also like to post an image or two occasionally. If you try it yourself sometime, you might see mine in some of the same threads.

[Ben Syverson]

But I also like to post an image or two occasionally. If you try it yourself sometime, you might see mine in some of the same threads.
Like most of us on LFF, my shooting and scanning activity goes in waves... I didn't realize you were so mindful of my output! I'm flattered.

[redrockcoulee]

The most environmentally friendly for almost all aspects of life are those that do not waste. Driving a fuel efficient car on every little errand and leaving it idiling while in a store will be worst than driving a gas guzzler only on a few occasions.

Printing off countless prints just to see what they look like in either the darkroom or on an inkjet printer is not environmentally friendly at all. On could always get an envrionmental audit done so that you know for your own situation which is best, or just be reasonable with what you do.

[Robert Hughes]

Is DDT harmful to the environment? Recently I've heard that various worldwide malaria prevention groups have been advocating the return of DDT - for indoor use only.

The big mistake people made in the 50's and 60's was that they sprayed the stuff by the ton, all over the fields, swamps and forests, getting it into the water supplies and wreaking havoc with the wildlife. Used indoors (in much smaller amounts), DDT still proves effective in controlling malaria mosquitoes, without the widespread damage as a side effect.

The same argument could be made for photo chemicals, which nowadays are pretty tame anyway.

Is digital clean? Digital ain't clean, and some of those chemicals used in manufacture were way worse than fixer. I remember, in the 1980's, IBM used a million pounds of chlorinated fluorocarbons (CFC's) a year to wash circuit boards; the cleaning machines had hoods over them, dumping the volatile chemicals up the stacks. All those CFC's went up into the stratosphere, contributing to the ozone hole, which is still there AFAIK. And the Hudson River still has PCB's on the river bottom from General Electric dumping it in years past.

[Drew Wiley]

I'm adjacent to one of the most monitored watersheds in the nation. Back in the film
heyday an official with the EPA told me that darkrooms weren't even on their radar,
or even commercial photo labs, because the footprint was so small compared to other
potential contaminants. Guess what the no.1 culprit was? Simple Green. It's marketed
as nontoxic, so everyone flushed it into storm drains, but it's a powerful surfactant that, in very tiny quantities, kills just about every kind of marine life imaginable - coats
the gills of everything from shrimp to salmon and suffocates them. So here's a popoular category of product marketed as "green" that is anything but. But they did
monitor hospital X-ray rooms to make sure silver recovery devices were in place.

[Kirk Gittings]

I'm adjacent to one of the most monitored watersheds in the nation. Back in the film
heyday an official with the EPA told me that darkrooms weren't even on their radar,
or even commercial photo labs, because the footprint was so small compared to other
potential contaminants. Guess what the no.1 culprit was? Simple Green. It's marketed
as nontoxic, so everyone flushed it into storm drains, but it's a powerful surfactant that, in very tiny quantities, kills just about every kind of marine life imaginable - coats
the gills of everything from shrimp to salmon and suffocates them. So here's a popoular category of product marketed as "green" that is anything but. But they did
monitor hospital X-ray rooms to make sure silver recovery devices were in place.

I had a thrilling job a few years ago shooting a city sewage treatment plant for an engineering group and I asked a similar question. The director said they did not believe photo chemicals were a major problem-that all the known commercial labs were part of their supervision program. He said that someone, he wouldn't say who, flushed chemicals periodically that killed all their good bacteria that they used to treat the effluent and that they were narrowing down their search for the offender. He said it happened about twice a year and they believed it was some kind of a metal coating business. That was all he would say.

[Robert Hughes]

As recently as the 1990's, authorities in Japan were telling schoolchildren that plutonium is safe enough to eat (http://www.speakoz.com/english-directory/lesson-plans/plutonium.html).
http://www.speakoz.com/english-directory/lesson-plans/mrpluto.jpg

Then, in December 1995 the the plutonium-fueled Monju prototype breeder reactor (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant)in the Fukui prefecture broke and caught fire, complete with toxic fumes leaking out into the atmosphere. It didn't go over very well with the local populace, but 15 years later they've started it up again. And everybody's happy being Green!

[BetterSense]

I wouldn't pretend to know what is good or bad for the environment, because the metric seems to change depending on who you are asking or what environmental tragedy we are trying to avert this decade/generation. In my estimation, arguments over relative environmental impact are basically religious, and have very little objective grounding. My mind is consistently blown when I hear people tout the exact opposite of my conception of environmental, and often manage to wrap it up into a semi-consistent framework that just happens to be permissive in ways that benefit their class/race/generation, while condemning actions that they don't personally value. Fact and science rarely enter in any case.

For example, some have some kind of romantic attraction to 'organic' farming. Telling them that organic farming uses more chemicals, more land, burns at least 5 times more fossil fuels, causes more soil erosion, and contributes to higher food prices which can literally cause people to starve, doesn't seem to bother them, because they have this strange neo-primitivist dogma of 'natural' is better, even when it's worse for the environment according to many other measures that other people might use to make the exact opposite argument. I just picked one thing. You can take literally any argument over environmental impact and argue it from both sides. It always boils down to what you personally value, and the things the arguer personally values are always taken to me more important.

Maybe I'm biased by reality because I work in semiconductor manufacturing, but I think that electronics are horribly bad for the environment and I think that consumer electronics companies do a very thorough job of presenting a very sterile and modern image while leaving the belching fume stacks, truckloads and trainloads of toxic chemicals, megawatts of electricity, and literal rivers of fresh water they consume totally off the radar of their customers. I find it amusing, and simultaneously depressing, how the mainstream consumerist culture manages to moralize and shun random actions ostensibly because of the health or environmental impact, while gleefully and usually obliviously awarding its own vices and impacts a kind of moral amnesty.

[Robert Hughes]

Maybe I'm biased by reality because I work in semiconductor manufacturing, but I think that electronics are horribly bad for the environment .
I would wager that a significant motivation of the Globalization movement was to offshore those nasty electronics polluters and their effluents to someplace else like China, where the 1,300,000,000 people living there won't mind a little Hell in their tea.

[Drew Wiley]

I thought offshoring e-waste was illegal for the whole country. It certainly is here,
but organized crime has gotten involved and allegedly something like 90% of it does
end up in China and Bangladesh with terrible health consequences. Sixty Minutes did
a pretty interesting expose of the trade. I know of one legal recycler out in the desert
in this state. Unfortunately, I already know more than my fair share of the dirty little secrets of the tech industries around here - certainly doesn't mean they're all irresponsible, however. Some are very thoughtful. Organic dyes are used in all kinds of
things, and cumulatively, film would represent a very very small amount in the overall
picture. The hazard eco present by nail polish is vasty greater.

[rdenney]

I thought offshoring e-waste was illegal for the whole country.

Even without organized crime, most of the electronics are made over there, so the byproducts of manufacture, which I think was what was being referred to, are there in the first place rather than being exported.

Rick "battery manufacturing particularly uses and discards heavy metals and other nasty stuff" Denney

[Drew Wiley]

Rick - some of the worst pollution with heavy metals in this country occurs at mining
sites, many of which are abandoned. Saturday I was trying to get a good angle on
one with the 8x10 but it didn't work out. Will have to go back with the 4x5 and a very
long lens for the right perspective. An abandoned gold mine and tailing pond with remarkable (if unhealthy) colors of who knows what. You see some of those in the San Juans in Colorado too, and a number of other places in the West.

[Thebes]

My film cameras average about 40 years old.
Reduce reuse recycle.

Of course that simple mantra is now being overpowered by more profitable but infinitely vaguer dictates.

[Vaughn]

Greenland has deposits of rare earth metals, which are high demand -- but they will not mine them (at this time, anyway) because they are laced with uranium. They have a law on the books banning the mining of uranium.

[Heroique]

A lot of global talk going on. So grand, so well meaning. Is anyone else getting dizzy?

Makes me curious if not thinking globally might win your neighborhood some special attention – and motivate concrete actions tailored to improve your small-scale interaction with it. (I mean everyone here, including me.)

Someone here might even have changed a photographic habit to do that, without once giving a thought to global statistics, mass behavior, and world-wide trends. Perhaps they succeeded because they weren’t distracted.

All species fail eventually, but this makes me think of the planet’s other animals who enjoy healthy, interactive relationships w/ their immediate habitats in spite of being quite unaware of the territory outside of it.

[Drew Wiley]

Vaughn - there's quite a fight going on in Greenland right now between those who want to keep it pristine and those who want to open up the land and waters to exploitation and a fast buck, including offshore drilling. Those protective laws might not
last. More or less due to "climate change" (am I allowed to say that?) and the rapidly
expanding footprint of ice-free areas. Ellesmere Is is another increbible area which I
hope doesn't get messed with, but thawing there could actually impede access, because they use snowmobiles to get up the fiords much of the year, at least until
the waters have fully thawed. My nephew spent quite a bit of time climbing there,
and the last thing one wants is thawing rocks overhead. There are towers there twice
as high as anything in Yosemite.

[Gary Tarbert]

This is a no contest , Before digital consumed the market i was happy shooting with a
camera that was in excess of ten years old , because i did not require any of the automation provided by the later offering . Because as long as your technique was sound and you invested in the best glass you could afford your images were as good as anybodys, Now this is not the case you change your camera every few years because digital improvements are at the film plane or sensor plane to be more accurate.
Then there is consumption of cards the next faster write rate etc etc , Digital has turned us into more prolific consumers of goods , just to keep up with the Joneses . Cheers Gary

[Robert Hughes]

Heck, my digital camera is almost ten years old...

[jnantz]

let's not forget the nasty stuff they did in gasworks.
nothing like so much cyanide in the ground the grass is blue
( not in kentucky ) ...

[onnect17]

You should save a copy of this excellent discussion before somebody complains to the moderators. And of course, I'll not post any comments. Oops, just did!