Happy New Year! | Sustainable Content #50


Wishing you the best in 2026

Nobody wants to read a newsletter on January 2. Trust me, that's ok. I hope you've all had a little down time during the year-end slowdown and can approach 2026 with renewed energy.

And speaking of renewable energy... ha, no. Just kidding. We speak of nothing work-related until Proper January, after we've purged our inboxes of 2025's nonsense.

It's going to be another uphill year in the world of sustainability. I'm still pitching conference talks and new projects, most of which are met by blank stares and, "Does this even matter now?" Yeah. It does. Probably more than ever. I'm going to keep plugging away at it.

As always, if you know of an event looking for speakers, an organization in need of a consultant, or someone who would enjoy a book about sustainable content, you know where to send them.

"Are we expecting our teams to be constantly on from the crack of dawn until midnight? Let’s stop that nonsense right now. Ever since the first laptop went home from the office, we’ve been subject to an always-on culture. The ubiquity of smartphones has made it worse because everyone knows that the ability to check email, texts, and social media is right there in your pocket every night, weekend, and vacation."

 

Alisa Bonsignore
Sustainable Content: How to Measure and Mitigate the Carbon Footprint of Digital Data
Now available

What I've been reading

It's the end-of-year break. I've been reading fiction. (When I initially wrote the first draft of this newsletter, I stopped at that and forgot to write the rest of the paragraph. Hello, holiday brain!)

I've been rereading the Lady Hardcastle mysteries. I don't know why, but this is a variety of cozy mystery that I really enjoy, featuring two capable women. Lady Hardcastle was widowed young while posted as diplomats in Shanghai (I won't spoil the circumstances), and she and her lady's maid crossed land and sea to return to a "quiet life" in the English countryside.

Shameless and unsolicited cross-promotion of good stuff!

A lot of hard work went into the Web Sustainability Guidelines released by the World Wide Web Consortium. I'm lucky to have had the opportunity to work with this talented group of volunteers who want to make the web a better place.

📖

Sustainable Content

Buy the book

🎤

Speaking Engagements

Book Alisa for your event

🗒️

Consulting

Reduce your Scope 3 emissions

Some interesting tidbits about Sustainable Content

I stumbled across a website that shows all of the libraries that have my book. Los Angeles! London! Qatar! South Africa! It's wild to think that my book is available around the globe.

Want to read it yourself? Check with your local library or buy a copy of your own.

Alisa Bonsignore

Founder, Strategist, and Author

Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC

Talking about sustainable content: how to measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of digital data.

Read more from Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC
The dark blue-green sunburst logo of Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC

When planning doesn't work Would you believe that this newsletter used to have a carefully planned editorial calendar? Lately it seems like every time I start working on planned content more than 24 hours ahead of distribution, it's completely blown out of the water by some utterly batshit news revelation. What could possibly be worth saying here when [insert any one of 47,000 other things] is going on? This week, rather than having one overarching theme — which doesn't feel remotely...

The dark blue-green sunburst logo of Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC

How do we create a greener web? A funny thing happened after the last issue when I spoke about hope: I lost nearly 1/3 of my readers. I'm befuddled by this. Did those people previously think that a newsletter about sustainability would be pro-colonialism? Pro-authoritarianism?* Did they think that I was in favor of net zero accounting instead of actual reductions? If so, I've been doing a terrible job communicating in this newsletter. With that said, I'm going to try to bridge the massive...

The dark blue-green sunburst logo of Clarifying Complex Ideas, LLC.

What a year, eh? I had a draft of a newsletter queued up for last Friday and then... y'all, the news just did me in. We've got oil invasions and extrajudicial killings and cuts to social services and and and and. And that's just domestically? Honestly, what the hell do I say in the midst of that? I can tell you what other sustainability newsletters are saying. They're talking about hope. But they're talking about it like it's this wispy, ephemeral thing. Oh, sure, we're invading countries for...