Minus the scotch. A University of California (UC), Davis, English professor who studies literature about the environment went totally green for his talk at this year's annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Instead of flying to Edinburgh, U.K., for the 10 to 13 July conference, Timothy Morton mailed in a DVD of his lecture and took questions from the audience via videoconference after it was shown. "New technology gives us a chance to save energy and save money and reimagine in a good way what a conference could be," says Morton, who's pressing UC administrators to create a technological infrastructure-a la the online community Second Life-to support virtual conferencing. Morton thinks the discussion after his video speech on the implications of nature writing for cognitive science suffered not at all from his being thousands of miles away from the audience. But he did miss swapping gossip with colleagues during the meeting. And for the record, he says he would have done the same thing had the conference been in the French Riviera.
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