On the day that the Kyoto Protocol is going into affect, it seems fitting to
mention a few web design and hosting companies dedicated to promoting environmental
responsibility in cyberspace.

With a tag lines “Connecting people and planet”
and “websites powered by the wind,” Earthsite’s mission
is to offer “green marketing and design services with renewable energy hosting.”
This the first hosting service I’ve run across that uses renewable energy
to run its business, a choice that grounds cyberspace
in the realities of energy use and material design.

From this site
I linked to two San Francisco design firms, Conscious
Creative and Digital
Hive that both aim to integrate sustainable practices with the communication
design. Conscious Creative’s site has won the “Environmentally
Friendly Website Award” which recognizes
“websites that
have gone the extra mile towards making a real change
to our environment.”

What I find interesting about these companies is their efforts to define ecological
design not just in terms of the clients they tend to serve–environmentally
and socially conscious organizations–but also in terms of more material issues,
such as how they power their servers and what kinds of paper they print brochures
on.