What Grows in a Silicon Forest?: Environmental Amnesia in High Tech Expansion

A lecture by Melissa Gregg, Professor of Digital Futures in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute & University of Bristol Business School.

This event is part of the MCCS Community Lectures series, hosted by the School of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. It is open to all staff, students and members of the public.

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This talk introduces some of the lesser known environmental factors involved in high tech expansion and the techniques adopted by industry to play down hazards for ongoing political subsidies. Taking the examples of Aloha and Hillsboro, two of Intel’s Washington County campuses outside Portland, Oregon, archival materials dating from the first wave of silicon manufacturing highlight the cosy patriarchy that allowed business interests to trump concerns of local host communities, predating the pro-active community engagement activities adopted by corporate responsibility programs today. Digital photography maps of the region show how high-tech investment began a progressive erasure of quality farm land that is accelerating in the present.

Intel is one of several high-tech firms to have progressively developed sustainability reporting standards that obscure the direct impacts of manufacturing outputs on soil, air and waterways, and the consequences for local communities when electricity and water use come under pressure due to new industrial applications. With the growth of AI workloads, these physical impacts now include an increase in data centre build outs, and Oregon is currently third in the world for operational IT workload. Emphasis on reducing carbon emissions to achieve “Net Zero” targets for corporate social responsibility narrows the terms on which environmental harms can be measured to self-serving industry standards, even before the Trump administration alleviated any expectations to adopt EPA or ESG regulations.

Extrapolating from Oregon, this talk illustrates how corporate sustainability techniques – in particular, the concept of “net positive water” – create consensus on which sustainability metrics matter, influence the reviews process for state-sponsored funding, and enable environmental amnesia.

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Melissa Gregg is Professor of Digital Futures in the Bristol Digital Futures Institute & University of Bristol Business School. Following an early career in Australian academia, she joined Intel US in 2013 where she led User Experience as Senior Principal Engineer in the Client Computing Group before building the first team focused on product carbon emissions reduction for the CTO. Her academic publications include The Affect Theory Reader (Duke UP, 2010), Work's Intimacy (Polity, 2011), Counterproductive: Time Management in the Knowledge Economy (Duke UP, 2018) and the multigraph Media and Management (Meson, 2021).

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