YakShaving

Link to Destiny (BTW, the tacky website makes me want to vomit– tries too hard to appeal to emotions and nostalgia). If it succeeds, it’s going to be the largest mecca of consumerism in the land that invented it.

Thanks to Barnard’s Retail Consulting Group, citizens in Syracuse, NY might soon have the largest megamall in the country. From what I gather, its a $25B project — involving 1M sq ft in retail and entertainment space, a waterpark, and 2 golf courses– but the green part is that its going to be powered entirely by renewable energy and be completely self-sufficient. The “green” megamall will be complete with biodiesel generators, solar panels, and even mini hydroelectric plants operating from snow from the roof.

The mall developers were trying to decide whether to make something financially successful or “do something right”. They finally came to the conclusion that they could do both; hence the green megamall was born. Prior to plans being made, developers met with scientists and realized that their costs over time would be reduced greatly by using alternative sources of off-grid energy. Green technology can raise the cost of the project by more than 30%, but this could pay for itself in less than 10 years.

I know this is somewhat bizarre to be creating a megamall that’s green, but its worth mentioning. Howie Hawkins, who’s the mayoral candidate from the Syracuse Green party suggested that the nature of a mall is anti-ecological as it depends on sprawling consumerism that exploits cheap labor and natural resources the world over. I agree with him, but I also agree with the president of the US Green Building council — who says they’ll build the megamall anyway, regardless if its sustainably built or not.

I have mixed feelings about the introduction of this megamall but ultimately my views are pragmatic and utilitarian– I’d prefer to see no megamall constructed but if it has to be, it might as well be green, right?

On the website, it also claims that operating without fossil fuels is just the start– that they’ll also reuse 100% of their water, recycle everything possible, use sustainably harvested wood, and the food sold in Destiny USA’s restaurants will be organically or locally grown. Not too bad at all, but I’ll believe it when I see it.

It’d be really something if they could dictate that stores would have to be “green certified” in order to open at Destiny USA (no clothes that exploit cheap labor, using 100% recycled post consumer content in packaging, etc.)– Though I doubt most would go through with that.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? One of my New Year’s affirmations and promises to myself are to be more diligent in spending time updating my blog. I dont know how many of you have offline blogging tools, but I’ll tell you the only thing they accomplish is to help one procrastinate in updating a post. And, when one has procrastinated long enough to actually make several revisions, check and then double check the contents of the post… the actual material is old hat. No one wants to read about my idea to create a search engine based on something I like to call “PageRank”… nor does anyone care about the one I had where I could create a social bookmarks manager based on a folksonomy….

I think its pretty easy to find the problem here. Heck, the title of this blog is called YakShaving– which if you’ll remember from before is when people like me who have situational ADD can’t decide what to do so they just do it all at the same time.

:: turning over a new leaf ::

mark my words: You’re going to need to set up an RSS feed to see all the content flying out of here!