THE UNSEEN LANDSCAPE: ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS OF THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE AND THE FOUNDATIONS FOR AN ETHICS OF DIGITAL SUSTAINABILITY

Samenvatting

The rapid expansion of the digital universe—encompassing data centers, network infrastructure, consumer devices, and emerging technologies like AI and blockchain—presents a profound and under-examined environmental crisis. This paper argues that the environmental ethics discourse has largely overlooked the materiality and ecological footprint of the digital ecosystem, focusing instead on traditional domains like wilderness preservation and pollution. We systematically outline the three primary environmental costs: the immense energy consumption and carbon emissions from digital infrastructure, the resource depletion and toxic waste associated with hardware lifecycle, and the ecosystemic alterations enabled by digital monitoring and control. Critiquing the prevailing anthropocentric and efficiency-focused narratives of "Green IT," we posit that these approaches are insufficient. Instead, we construct a multi-pronged ethical framework for digital sustainability, integrating an extended ethic of responsibility that encompasses global and intergenerational justice, a revitalized material virtue ethics for the digital age, and the application of the precautionary principle to technological innovation. By synthesizing insights from environmental philosophy, science and technology studies (STS), and political ecology, this paper provides a foundational ethical imperative: to render the digital universe's material impacts visible and to govern it not merely for human convenience, but within the ecological limits of a finite planet.