About Smol Earth Publications

Smol Earth Publications is an electronic community project dedicated to producing and distributing written material and low impact multimedia on the following inter-connected themes:

Increasing people's awareness of the large and rapidly increasing environmental damage being done by modern computing and the internet

Increasing people's understanding and appreciation of the natural world, fostering a sense of connectedness to it, and rethinking the relationship between it and human civilisation

Promoting the exploration and observation of nearby natural environments of any kind or size, with a minimum of modern technology, as an engaging and fulfilling way to shift your lifestyle in the direction of spending more time outdoors and offline

Exploring the conscientious use of computers and networks in practicing or spreading such a lifestyle, to figure out when they might help and when they interfere

Why we publish

In short, we're trying to use computers and the internet to teach people to be happy spending less time on computers and the internet, and to understand why doing so is important. We're well aware that this is a strange idea, that it it sounds self-contradictory, maybe even hypocriticial, but the Smol Earth project isn't a joke or a flight of whimsy or an empty exercise in aesthetics. It's a very carefully considered response to emerging ideas and practices in online communities we belong to and value. We know we're walking a fine line, but it's important to us that we try.

We want to celebrate and encourage efforts to reform computing toward being more sustainable, but we're acutely aware that this is just the first, and the easiest, step. We want people to understand that in the longer term, computing as most of us know it today can never be meaningfully sustainable, and that we need not just greener devices but far fewer devices, and very different attitudes toward them. At the same time, we don't think that computing needs to be urgently abolished today, and don't want people to feel guilty about using computers they already own: most of the ecological cost of existing machines has already been paid, so they should be put to good use. Perhaps the best use is for them to help us to find ways to feel positive about potential futures where screens and streams aren't at the centres of our lives. Perhaps the best thing to start bringing closer to the centres of our lives instead is deep engagement with the natural world. Not only does this reinforce our motivation to disengage from unsustainable computing practices, but once you develop the right mindset and have learned what to look for, you can enjoy spending time in nature even in the total absence of industrial technology.

What we publish

Some of the things we publish are:

Essays and stories and poems about nature and our place in it (we're fans of Thoreau, Leopold, Abbey, Naess and others)

Instructional material on interesting, rewarding, low-tech nature-related hobbies you can use to fill your offline non-screen time

Educational material on Earth sciences, ecology and related subjects

Watchdog journalism on environmental destruction caused by digital industries

Useful sources of abundant surplus computer hardware, and software you can use on it

Computationally non-intensive graphics, music, videos and games which are inspired by time spent outdoors or motivate people to spend time outdoors

Methods and findings from citizen science projects using discarded or homemade electronic equipment to observe the natural world in novel ways

We'll only publish multimedia content when it comes under relatively strict file size limitations, to encourage experimentation into doing more with less. Though we can't verify or enforce it, we ask our contributors to prepare their work using devices (computers, cameras, field recorders, etc.) which are at least 10 years old.

How we publish

We take care to publish online in a way that treats what many people think of as old computers, slow networks and small screens as first class citizens, because we know they are actually perfectly up to the job. We publish online in familar ways so that you can browse interactively and share links with friends, but we've also planning from day one for the smol.earth server to eventually go offline for good -- not because we want it to, we just know that's the eventual fate of every server and think it's weird to ignore this. Therefore we also compile eBooks and PDFs of our work which you can easily download to offline reading devices, and even print out on paper. Everything will be licensed to allow redistribution without asking permission or paying fees, so our work can be mirrored by anybody who wants to and you can leave print outs anywhere you think they'll find a good home. We take the "publishing" in our name seriously, and think it means something quite different from ephemerally hosting for a few years.