I talked about this a little bit in my blog post about Koyaanisqatsi, but I think the Kiosk deserves a post of its own. Lori and I have been working on designing a Sustainability Kiosk for the Sustainability Module for the Connected Communities Program. Many members of this class are also involved in this project.

In Professor Smith’s blog post he asked, “Can art save the world?” I still don’t know the answer to this but I think its a very good question of if all the media made about environmental issues and climate change issues is really doing more harm than good. Al Gore flies around on his private jet talking about global warming, but how many more fossil fuels is he distributing by getting his message out about not using fossil fuels? It’s difficult to say.

In building our Kiosk, Lori and I tried to be as sustainable as possible. Lori got the branches from the tree her family was cutting down in her yard at home. My task was to find a base for the Kiosk and I thought I would be able to find one at my farm at home. I wasn’t able to find anything that worked at home but when I went to Walmart when I got back there was a box that would be perfect from Walmart for just $6.74. Who could pass up the perfect base for $6.74? I sure wasn’t going to.

By buying that box at Walmart however, I did my sustainability module an injustice. That box was produced in an unsustainable manner and probably shipped from thousands of miles away. I could have gotten or made the same box myself, but it would have cost about 4 or 5 times as much. The conclusion? people are not going to be sustainable until it is convenient to to be sustainable.