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Rethinking Textuality in the Climate Crisis

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Review of Anne Baillot, From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2023. vi + 171 pp. ISBN 978-1-80511-088-0 (hardback), £49.95; ISBN 978-1-80511-089-7 (paperback), £19.95; ISBN 978-1-80511-087-3 (PDF), free download. Anne Baillot’s From Handwriting to Footprinting: Text and Heritage in the Age of Climate Crisis offers a timely and sharply argued inquiry into the environmental costs of textual production, publishing, archiving, and preservation. Interweaving digital humanities theory with environmental critique, Baillot asks how the infrastructures enabling access to textual heritage—whether in print or digital form—contribute to the climate crisis, and what can be done to mitigate their impact. By scrutinising the material underpinnings of textual access and preservation, Baillot calls for a re-politicisation of digital textuality in a time of climate crisis. The first two chapters build on Baillot’s long-standing engagement with Literary Studies and Digital Humanities, as she explores the materiality of publishing and archiving practices—their technical infrastructures, methodological assumptions, and the social relations they entail. In the third chapter, she shifts focus to the digital realm. Drawing on the making of the book itself as a case study, Baillot unpacks the carbon footprint of textual production and dissemination, including the environmental impact of server-based digital storage. This self-reflective approach enables a lucid critique of the illusion that digital textuality represents a linear progression towards sustainability. One of the book’s central tensions lies in the effort to reconcile technological innovation with environmental responsibility. While Baillot recognises that digital tools have transformed scholarly and cultural work—facilitating the preservation and dissemination of texts across time and geography—she warns against the unchecked optimism that often accompanies these shifts. Publishing digital infrastructures, she argues, are deeply entangled with extractive economies that deplete natural resources, generate e-waste, and exacerbate socio-environmental inequalities. Unpacking the microeconomies behind scholarly communication, she examines the energy demands of high-resolution scanning, cloud storage, and online dissemination, as well as the lifecycle of the digital tools involved—from servers to data centres. If Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of Media (2015) made visible the environmental harms of media technologies, Baillot applies these insights to the infrastructures of digital textuality, foregrounding the material and ethical dimensions of scholarly publishing. A particularly compelling aspect of the book is Baillot’s sustained critique of the notion that digital access equates to “access for all.” She highlights the structural inequalities embedded in digital infrastructures, showing how high-speed internet, costly hardware, and sophisticated platforms privilege wealthier countries and institutions. What emerges is a sobering picture of “access for the rich” (115), in which the environmental and financial burdens of digital dissemination fall disproportionately on less-resourced contexts (so called Global South countries). In this light, Baillot links the seductive promise of openness to the risk of digital bloat. While she does not dismiss open access, she argues for ecologically accountable models that prioritise sustainability over the unchecked accumulation of digitised text. One of the book’s most innovative contributions is its epistemological reframing of textual preservation. “My goal is to frame the question of access to text and of archiving textual traces in an epistemological context so that it can be redefined, based on the premise that we do not dispose of infinitely available resources” (113), Baillot writes. From this perspective, she advocates the strategic limitation of digital archiving: not every manuscript needs to be digitised, nor every edition preserved indefinitely. This ethical inquiry—what to preserve, what to let go—raises difficult questions often glossed over in publishing discourse. Baillot does not propose prescriptive checklists for green archiving, but calls instead for an ethical reorientation: a dialectic between preservation and destruction that resists digital hoarding while valuing textual heritage. Still, Baillot’s proposal for strategic limitation would benefit from a more explicit engagement with the politics of selection already shaping the archival field—choices historically driven by institutional, economic, and colonial legacies. What gets archived, and by whom, has never been a neutral process. The filtering of textual traces is already embedded in power structures, and while Baillot acknowledges this, it remains somewhat underdeveloped in the book’s otherwise rigorous analysis. Another important dimension of Baillot’s intervention is her call to reorient textual practices toward shared, low-energy infrastructures. Instead of privileging technological novelty, she advocates material accountability: decentralised, community-based approaches to archiving that resist extractive, large-scale models. This position resonates with Janneke Adema and Samuel A. Moore’s call in Scaling Small: Making Space for Epistemic Diversity (2021) to design infrastructures that support epistemic diversity and resist the drive to scale. Baillot also calls for a more radical shift in reading practices, drawing on historical precedents such as eighteenth-century reading societies to propose collective modes of access. Community libraries, digital commons, and cooperative platforms, she suggests, could significantly reduce the environmental burden of knowledge circulation. Her examples—such as platforms that host minimalist webpages or projects like COPIM that offer sustainable models of open access—ground the book in pragmatic, actionable strategies. The book’s greatest strength lies in its self-reflexive mode. Baillot does not speak from a distance; she weaves her personal and professional experience into the text. Her efforts to implement low-energy publishing practices during the production of the book itself—developed in collaboration with Open Book Publishers—give the argument material weight. Yet this is also where the book’s limitations emerge. While the critique of infrastructures is structurally situated, there is an occasional drift towards individual responsibility and practices—particularly within relatively low-impact sectors like publishing—without adequate comparison to higher-impact industries. Some comparative data or even a brief contrastive analysis would have strengthened her claim and highlighted the disproportionate burdens being placed on cultural producers. Still, From Handwriting to Footprinting stands as an urgent call for climate-conscious scholarship. It does not offer a universal solution, but rather a call to rethink our epistemic and infrastructural commitments. Baillot’s aim is not to scold, but to shift the conceptual terrain: to challenge researchers, publishers, archivists, and policymakers to align knowledge production with ecological responsibility. In this sense, the book is a crucial intervention in publishing studies and sustainability debates—one that compels us to reconsider how we value, store, and circulate knowledge at a moment when ecological accountability is no longer optional. References: Adema, Janneke, and Samuel A. Moore. 2021. ‘Scaling Small; Or How to Envision New Relationalities for Knowledge Production’. Edited by Andrew Lockett. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16 (1): 27–47. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.918. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.
DOI: 10.3998/jep.7637
Institution: Roma Tre University
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4409964593
FWCI:
Cites: 2
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Related to: 10