How green is this paper?

The increasing governmentalization and commodification of knowledge are putting intense pressure on scholars to write and publish more, and in accordance with conventions that are not of their own making, due to benchmarks of success set by the applied sciences that suit business and the state. These tendencies are also producing a potentially unsustainable environmental burden that may be increasing, not decreasing, as we move more and more into an online publishing world. This recognition leads to three provocations: 1) There is too much scholarly publication to keep up with, and too much pressure to publish; 2) The future of all academic publishing will largely be determined by the sciences; and 3) We must consider the relative merits of publishing electronically rather than on paper in terms of the environment—in other words, asking “how green is this paper?”