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Leaving Green Libraries Behind (09 of 10)

Ecological Justice

Ending the Hypocrisy of "Green" Libraries in the Global North

 

This note is part of a series that challenges the status quo of "green libraries," exposing greenwashing and tokenism, and exploring viable alternatives, such as minimalism, degrowth, upcycling, and "slow libraries." Check all the notes in this section's index.

 

Introduction

Let's be honest: the so-called environmental leadership of the Global North is built on exported sacrifice.

For all the speeches, green certifications, solar panels, and glossy sustainability reports, the uncomfortable truth remains — wealthy countries continue to pollute and consume at unsustainable rates while outsourcing environmental "solutions" to the Global South.

And libraries, despite their role as stewards of knowledge and progress, have not been exempt from this game of moral outsourcing.

While many libraries adopt "green" practices —recycling bins, carbon offset credits, solar-powered conference rooms— their ecological footprint is often embedded in the very same global systems of inequality they claim to resist. If libraries want to be serious about climate action, they need to stop parroting Global North environmental narratives and start confronting the uncomfortable truths that real ecological justice demands.

 

The Global North's Environmental Hypocrisy

Greenwashing is not just about branding — it's about geopolitical positioning. The Global North has spent decades producing the vast majority of global emissions, extracting resources, and exporting environmental degradation, while presenting itself as the pioneer of climate solutions.

From the carbon offset market to "green" tech supply chains built on lithium mining and exploitative labor, the very idea of ecological responsibility has been flipped on its head. It's no longer about reducing harm at the source; it's about maintaining comfort through distant, outsourced consequences.

This hypocrisy is institutionalized in programs like REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which allow countries or corporations to pollute more as long as they invest in tree-planting or forest preservation projects elsewhere — usually in Indigenous or rural territories in the Global South. The same logic has crept into cultural institutions, including libraries. Instead of reducing energy consumption or interrogating their role in the system, many simply buy their way into eco-respectability with credits and green building labels.

 

Libraries and the Silence of Complicity

Libraries, especially in the Global North, often pride themselves on being ethical spaces. But the ethics they defend are rarely decolonial, rarely rooted in material justice, and rarely accountable to the global systems that sustain them.

Energy-hungry data centers supporting digital collections, tech upgrades that require rare-earth minerals from devastated landscapes, and international partnerships that ignore asymmetrical power dynamics — these are not just oversights. They are symptoms of a deeper structural complicity.

If libraries want to claim an environmental role, they cannot remain passive participants in this extractive cycle. Ecological justice means facing the reality that the knowledge systems they rely on —the books, the databases, the infrastructure— are entangled with global labor and resource chains that are anything but "green".

 

What Would Ecological Justice Look Like in Libraries?

Ecological justice centers the principle that the costs and benefits of environmental decisions should be shared fairly — across nations, communities, and generations.

For libraries, this means rejecting superficial sustainability and embracing an ethics of solidarity. It also means educating users not just about climate change, but about who pays for climate "solutions."

Libraries can —and should— curate collections and host events that interrogate the North-South divide in environmental responsibility. Highlight authors, movements, and communities from the Global South that are resisting environmental exploitation. Expose the hidden costs of green capitalism. Create space for local dialogues that connect environmental justice to lived experiences — especially those of migrant, Indigenous, and working-class communities.

But education is only one piece. Libraries must also examine their own operations through the lens of ecological justice. Where does their energy come from? How are their digital services hosted? What materials are they consuming, and at what ecological and human cost? Are they reproducing the same global hierarchies that climate justice movements fight against?

 

Practical Shifts Toward Ecological Justice

Ecological justice isn't about perfection — it's about honesty, responsibility, and systemic awareness. Libraries can start by:

Libraries must stop equating environmentalism with branding — and start understanding it as a relational, global, and political struggle.

 

Conclusion: Choosing Sides

There's no such thing as a neutral environmental policy. Every action libraries take —every purchase, every design decision, every partnership— aligns them either with an extractive model or a regenerative one.

Libraries of the Global North cannot continue to posture as "green" while depending on the ecological sacrifice of the Global South.

Ecological justice demands that we stop hiding behind recycled aesthetics and start doing the work of dismantling the structures that brought us here. That means libraries must choose.

Complicity, or radical solidarity.

 

Readings

 

About the post

Text: Edgardo Civallero.
Date: 11.04.2024.
Image: "How Do We Begin To Center Environmental Justice in Urban Ecology Research?". En life in the City [Link].