The ecologistics of carbon tracking: Environmental accounting software and industrial media practices

Abstract

Environmental monitoring and sustainability efforts are increasingly entangled with commercial and industrial software programs. Professionals working to make environmental changes within their industries must articulate their claims in relation to the existing workflows and operational capacities of digitized industry. The use of software to track and quantify embodied carbon costs across the life cycle of timber buildings illustrates this new paradigm of ecologistics, where optimization across supply chains and environmental objectives meet. Describing architects and engineers in the Pacific Northwest of North America who are working to lower the embodied carbon of the built environment, the article theorizes their use and development of software to this end as engaging in a kind of distributed industrial rhetoric. It details how some of these people understand the constitutive impossibility of reducing either ecological complexity or environmental politics to this calculative register, and how, as a result, they self-consciously develop environmental accounting methodologies to transform (rather than merely index) current practices. Neither the logics of capture and interoperability nor normative environmental goals are decisive here. By looking at how they interact, I highlight the role of commercial digital software in structuring how environmentalism is expressed and the role of subjective socioecological concerns in the development of new data infrastructures and methodologies.