Week 6 Recap

Joe Rosebro had a very engaging and informative dialogue with students and faculty. He talked about the work he currently does for Perfect Sky, Inc. and Green Car Congress, much of it for public policy, city mobility, and energy issues. This is one of the larger points he brought across, that a lot of issues regarding sustainability lead back to energy use.

Interestingly enough, Joe graduated from Art Center in Fine Art. He lived in Sweden for a year to study the European point of view on mobility and energy. He has gone down a long road of trying to define sustainability, and has found a suitable framework in The Natural Step.

Joe had two other broad issues he covered. One, if Art Center does not shift its core beliefs and attitudes towards its curriculum, Art Center will no longer be relevant [note: this is a very big thing! We're paying a lot to be here at this school, and if they're not preparing us for the competitive future, we're not getting our money's worth]. 

The second broad issue talked about was the need for sustainability to come from a change in behavior. An example of this is the Prius, a person may buy a Prius to cut their gas usage in half. The problem is that there is a lot of materials that were harvested from the earth to create the Prius.  How could a person have altered their behavior to cut their gas usage in half? That's the difficult part. There are many technologists working on the issue of sustainability, now we need more sociologists.