Building More Holistic View of Sustainable: Digital Project Planning at Green America

As the content strategist at Green America, the environmental and sustainability impact of our digital products is core to my calculation when planning new projects. But our definition for sustainability is much broader than commonly used.

Sustainability is not only about environmental stewardship, it is also about working conditions of the miners of rare earth materials in Bolivia, low-income neighborhoods still rebuilding in New Orleans, and paying it forward so the next generation has it better than us. It is a problem of how we run our projects and offices, of collective action to shape our entire industry, and of how our work shapes the the communities we work in.

And this shapes every decision from what software we use, to our server stack, to how we work with remote teammates, to how we sources branded t-shirts, water bottles, and conference swag. While we can’t get it perfect all the time, we need to make our decisions conscientiously to understand the tradeoffs we are making to mitigate what we can, and make decisions about what sort of businesses and services we support with our business to do our part to shape the economy and the society we want.

Biography

Bernard Yu is a[n] {content strategist|information architect|editorial process designer} at the intersection of scholarship, design, and public policy. They* specialize in editorial systems design for {journalism|academic publishing|environmental and social justice} to make {knowledge|complexity|the deeply interrelated wonders of the universe} {available|open|free} & {accessible|understandable|approachable}.

One day, they may grow up to become a scholar.