A data center in Prineville, Ore., is at the heart of a campaign waged by Greenpeace urging Facebook to lessen its environmental impacts.

The environmental group, along with about 500,000 Facebook users, is pressing Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook to switch to 100 percent renewable power to run its data centers. The Prineville facility—slated to be operational in 2011—would be powered by Portland-based utility PacificCorp, which Greenpeace says is powered disproportionately by coal.

In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dated Sept. 1, Greenpeace International executive director Kumi Naidoo said Facebook has “an essential role to play in helping to drive the deployment of renewable energy sources,” and that ignoring the company’s environmental impacts poses a risk to “its reputation and financial health.”

The organization says Facebook should commit to phasing out using coal-fired electricity to run its data centers; advocate for government policies that support renewable energy; and disclose its greenhouse gas emissions. Plus, Facebook should share its environmental policy on its website, Naidoo wrote.

Facebook broke ground on the Prineville facility—its first company-built data center—in January. In August, it announced it was doubling the size of the project to more than 300,000 square feet to accommodate the rapid growth of its membership, which now numbers more than 500 million people worldwide. The company has highlighted the energy efficiency of the facility’s design, which includes an evaporative cooling system, and says it selected the Oregon site in part because the dry, temperate climate would contribute to the center’s efficiency.

Facebook isn’t the only target of Greenpeace’s IT energy reduction efforts. In 2009, the organzation launched the Cool IT Challenge, to push tech companies to reduce their environmental impacts.

Earlier this year, at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, Paul Hawken challenged us to take a look at the use of the gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of the vitality of the world economy. After looking at some alternatives to the GDP, we drew the following comparison of two countries at different ends of the spectrum.