(Elise Amendola/Associated Press)

I am not an environmentalist. The family recycles and we have a composter, but I have an SUV. I bought it before Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth and environmental concerns became in-your-face issues. Having said that, I suspect most car owners, and even people who take public transit, burn up more fossil fuel than I do.

I work from home as a freelance writer, and have done so for almost 17 years.

Every day, I wake up, grab a mug of tea and commute from my bedroom to my home office. I haven't met most of my editors or clients. I file my work by e-mail and we communicate by e-mail unless an issue seems complex, in which case I pick up the phone. Occasionally, I attend initial client meetings, but they are rare. While I'd love to attend a meeting with my client in Belgium, I don't think that will happen any time soon.

In addition to freelance writing, I teach continuing education business writing and copywriting courses for the University of Toronto. Until last year, that involved commuting downtown one night a week. Not any more. All the courses I teach are now online. That means students and the teacher are not driving or taking transit anywhere.

All that being said, I do not have the world's most sophisticated technological set up. I have a phone and a three-year-old computer with a broadband internet connection.

If I can use this technology to successfully work from home — with editors, clients and students across Canada, in the United States and in Europe — then why can't more people in corporations, organizations and government offices do likewise? Why do they have to clog our highways every morning and afternoon to commute to work?

A number of years ago, management consultant and university professor Peter Drucker wrote, "Why would any company pay in salary and time to transport a 190-pound body, when all it needed was the body's three pound brain?" Was he just ahead of his time?

If he was, he's gaining supporters for the idea. While Daniel Pink does not think the office cubicle will disappear, he says there will come a day when far fewer people commute to central locations.

"Collecting people in giant office towers does not make sense economically and environmentally," says Pink, a business consultant and author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

A few companies pay lip service to telecommuting and virtual businesses, and they maintain pockets of employees in different parts of the country, or world. But in the downtowns of major urban centres, construction crews are still building skyscrapers for white-collar workers, many of whom commute from outlying areas of cities. Even if they take public transit, they often have to drive to and from transit parking lots. Such is the idiocy of urban transportation.

Take, for example, Change is in the Air: Toronto's Commitment to an Environmentally Sustainable Future, the city of Toronto's framework to tackle climate change. It contains 27 proposed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but pays next to no attention to reducing commuting.

In fact, it sees commuters as a revenue stream. The plan calls for annual parking or motor vehicle registration fees. And, of course, there is talk of road tolls. Instead of reducing, and where possible eliminating, the city's fleet of vehicles that run on diesel, the plan talks of converting them to biodiesel fuel. I suppose we can then wait several decades for scientists to figure out what environmental problems and cancers such fuels cause.

Sadly, in the information age, we are still thinking like an industrial economy where workers have to be in one place to turn out a product. Management is not able to let go of the notion that bodies gathered in one place equal productivity. That is no longer the case when it comes to most white-collar, knowledge-based and information processing work.

On-line collaboration applications can run on internal networks or be set up for access via the internet. They can be used to help teams or departments span distances common in today's far-flung, mobile workforce. Instead of relying on meetings, the telephone and e-mails to get things done, groups can meet in real time in a portal — an on-line web-based meeting room — and use text chat to discuss issues while sharing files or viewing presentations.

Web portals can also be used as a repository for all information pertaining to a project or department. Defined users can access the portal to discuss or review specific aspects of a project. Documents that reside in the portal can be locked while one person is updating them so that others will not end up working from old material, or members of a team can meet in the portal to collaborate on creating a new document or revising an old one.

In addition, companies can use web conferencing to conduct employee training, introduce clients to new products and offer customer support.

While e-mail and instant messaging (IM) are considered collaboration tools, online or web-based tools are an important part of this growing market. The value of the collaborative application market in Canada will reach almost $160 million this year, and grow to more than $180 million by 2010, according to a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) Canada report, Finding the collaborative opportunity in Canada.

Sounds impressive, but that is a drop in the bucket of what it could be if we took telecommuting seriously.

If the environment is a problem and if we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we will ban all but essential travel. We can start by emptying the downtowns of the world of white-collar commuters, workers who could be just as productive, perhaps even more productive, working from home.

This may seem like bad news for downtowns; however, Pink sees downtowns that are currently healthy, like those of most major Canadian cities, becoming centres of leisure, entertainment and art as people flock to condominiums and housing in the centre of cities.

E-mail, telephone, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and online collaboration tools are available right now to make it happen.

All we need is the will.

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