Grief is an ongoing process that ebbs and flows depending on the day, the month, the weather, a random song, or the unexpected encounter with my mother’s handwriting in one of her sewing journals. Last September, in my essay In the Wake of Slow Care, I wrote about sitting with her in her final hours, bearing witness to her life through story and memory. I ended with the belief that grief asks us to sit with it, to appreciate the quiet moments when we are compelled to remember, to feel, and to listen.

In the year since, those quiet moments have taken new form. They have emerged through my participation in Story Cart: Attention workshops with Symphony Swan, a Milwaukee-based artist and community archivist. In these spaces, memory is not static or fixed; it is activated through looking, through storytelling, and most recently, through listening.

At the Stills in Milwaukee workshop last weekend, we practiced what Swan described as “listening as archive.” Each participant brought an object and spent five minutes describing it. Afterwards, photographer Terrance Sims photographed those participants with their objects. What began as a simple description unfolded into something more expansive. Objects became entry points, portals into memory, emotion, and lived experiences. Stories stretched beyond the material, connecting personal histories to broader questions about why we hold on and what it means to remember. Through listening, we activated memory.

My object was one of my mother’s favorite purses: a small black leather Coach bag she purchased thirty years ago. I started carrying it a few months ago. It holds my phone, my keys, my wallet, but also something less tangible. I remember her at my age, carrying this same bag. Now I carry it as a version of myself she will never meet. The object collapses time. It brings past and present into conversation, while quietly gesturing toward a future that feels both connected and incomplete.

But as I listened to others, I began to question the role of the object itself. One participant, in describing the difficulty of letting objects, and the memories attached to them go, said, “The memory has served its purpose.” Another asked, “If you let the object go, do you forsake the memories? Or can they be addressed in a new way?”

These questions lingered with me.

The essence of Swan’s listening as archive workshop reminds me of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images. In her work, Campt invites us to think about listening not simply as hearing, but as an attunement to the quiet frequencies of everyday life, the affective, often overlooked dimensions of experience that resist traditional forms of documentation. For Campt, archives are not only visual or material; they are sonic, embodied, and felt. They reside in the subtle vibrations of memory, in the pauses, in what is carried forward through attention rather than possession.

This framework shifted how I understand what I am holding onto. Perhaps the purse is not the archive itself, but one way into it. The archive lives in the act of remembering her, in the stories I tell, in the way I listen for her presence in my own gestures and routines. Space, too, becomes archival, holding layers of time that can be accessed not through preservation, but through presence.

I still have some of my mother’s things. But I have started to let others go.

Not because they no longer matter, but because I am beginning to understand that memory does not reside in objects alone. It moves. It surfaces. It listens back.

The views, information, and opinions expressed in Slow Digest do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System. The Center for 21st Century Studies supports scholarly debate about, and engagement with, the pressing issues of our time.

Work Referenced:

Campt, T. (2017). Listening to Images. Duke University Press.

The post Slow Digest: Listening as Archive appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

This special extended episode of 6.5 Minutes with C21 is co-hosted by Jamee Pritchard (C21 Graduate Fellow) and Anna Mansson McGinty (51���� Professor of Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies/C21 Faculty Advisor) in conversation with Milwaukee-based interdisciplinary artist whose work moves across screen printing, fiber, photography, and found objects to explore identity, belonging, and creative freedom. The focus of the episode is the layered relationship between artistic practice and slow care.

At the center of the conversation is Azzam’s articulation of art as both inquiry and offering, a method for navigating the complexities of being a Palestinian American, Muslim, and first-generation artist in a city shaped by segregation and uneven access to cultural institutions. Rather than waiting for entry, Azzam describes building her own pathways, most notably through , a collective that creates space for Muslim, Arab, and MENA artists in Milwaukee. What emerges is a model of creative practice grounded not only in expression, but in community formation and mutual recognition.

Azzam reflects on how slow care has shaped her creative process through less urgency, more attentiveness, and a willingness to let ideas unfold over time. As she explains, “Slow care is giving yourself permission to slow things down when needed… and being okay with the fluctuation of energy.” This ethos carries through her work, where complex political and personal histories are rendered with clarity and accessibility, inviting audiences to critically look, analyze, and reflect. This conversation offers a thoughtful meditation on what it means to create, to belong, and to care, slowly, deliberately, and in relation to others.

For more information and insight in Azzam’s mural art, see Slow Digest: Murals of Community Care, written by Anna Mansson McGinty.

The views, information, and opinions expressed on 6.5 Minutes with C21 are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System.

Notes:

Guest: Amal Azzam, Milwaukee-based interdisciplinary artist, co-founder of Fanana Banana

Host: Jamee Pritchard, Graduate Fellow, Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) 

Co-Host: Anna Mansson McGinty, Lead Faculty Advisor (C21), Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s & Gender Studies (51����)

The post Slow Digest: Amal Azzam appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

Created by Ladasia Bryant, this Story Cart Zine is a portable invitation to slow down. Within its pages is a series of creative, community-based exercises designed to help us notice, more deeply and more intentionally, the worlds we move through every day. These exercises are rooted in the idea that attention shapes how we experience ourselves and others and offer simple, grounded practices that reconnect attention to memory, place, and collective experience.

Inside, readers will find guided activities like sound-based listening exercises, neighborhood attention walks, beach-based storytelling prompts, and memory activation practices that use personal photographs as portals into lived experience. These exercises can be done alone or with others, requiring only minimal materials but inviting expansive reflection.

Rather than prescribing a single way of engaging, the toolkit opens space for noticing, remembering, and being present. It asks what becomes possible when we treat attention not as something to be captured, but as something to be cared for.

Upcoming Events

Volume 2 of the Attention Activism Toolkit will continue this work through new Story Cart: Attention workshops and community activations across Milwaukee. See below for upcoming events. For a full listing of C21 events, visit /c21/events/.

• April 1 @ 5:30pm-7:30pm: Cactus Book Club with C21: Attensity!
• April 7 @ 5:00pm-6:30pm: En-Vision Embodied Writing Workshop
• April 11 @ 10:30am-12:30pm: Story Cart with Symphony Swan – Stills in Milwaukee

The post A Story Cart Zine: Attention Activism Toolkit, Vol. 1 appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

On April 1, C21 will lead an edition of the Cactus Book Club focusing on the book  by The Friends of Attention. Attensity! expands upon the attention activist manifesto championed by C21’s partners at the , and it offers an opportunity for the attention activism-curious to explore why our attention matters, how to choose attentional agency over digital enthrallment, and why awareness is even better with friends.

Many readers will recognize the uneasy feeling that opens Attention! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement: the sense that something about everyday life—especially life online—has gone profoundly wrong.

We live in a moment when our lives are structured by the rhythms of digital capitalism: consumption, production, and endless circulation through feeds. The creeping awareness of the fragmenting effect, the digital environment in which we are perpetually immersed, has, at the time of this writing, accelerated to an unbridled gallop. The algorithms that typically dump run-of-the-mill commercial content into feeds everywhere are punctuated by images of oil raining down on an inferno in the Middle East, followed by what may or may not be an AI-produced video of a family of racoons jumping on a trampoline, followed by announcements that a film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel won Best Picture at the Oscars (too on the nose?). It’s one distraction after another.

Distraction from what?

(Yes, sure, ok, the Epstein files. But not just the Epstein files.)

The argument at the heart of Attensity! is that the consequence of this constant disruption and redirection of our attention is a growing sense of alienation—from our interior worlds, ourselves, and each other. Attention, the book insists, is not merely information-processing or screen-focused concentration. It is the fundamental act of giving our minds and senses over to something, whether it’s a difficult concept from a challenging book, a heartfelt conversation, or the precise texture of your dog’s fur when you know you are scratching his ears for the very last time. Attention is the connective tissue between ourselves and everything else—the natural world, lived experience, one another, and consensus-based reality.

If attention is the medium of human connection, then the stakes of the modern “attention economy” become clear. Over the past three decades, the authors of Attensity! argue, the drivers of digital capitalism turned attention into a resource to be extracted. Platforms convert attention into profit not only through advertising but through constant tracking and measurement. In this sense, the resource being exploited is not just our time—it is us: our thoughts, senses, emotions, and consciousness.

The Friends of Attention provocatively call this process “human fracking.” Just as industrial extraction industries burrow into the earth to capture energy resources, digital systems are inserted into human awareness to capture attention.

The authors substantiate their claims about human fracking with a distilled history of clinical science. Attention extraction, they argue, was made possible by the twentieth-century study of attention, which, funded by military, industrial, and advertising interests, focused on how humans function as components within large technological systems. Though the array of methods by which humans attend to things is vast and varied, one kind of attention drew the interest of industry—task-based focus. “Focus” became “attention span” when discussed in the context of temporalized, interrelated tasks. From radar monitoring during the Cold War to magazine readership metrics, focus became something that could be measured, optimized, and monetized.

Focus is a particular, definitive way of attending—one that can be taught. One that can be produced through personal discipline, sometimes to the detriment of other, less utilitarian forms of attention such as contemplative immersion or conviviality. Distraction, the supposed disruption of focus, is perhaps better understood as the exchange of one object of focus for another. Framing it as distraction both individualizes a systemic problem and imparts a sense that our distracted condition is inevitable. Our supposed “short attention spans” are part the power of the broader attention-extraction industrial complex. Forms of attention are learned, and the systems that capture or disrupt our attention are constantly teaching us how to attend.

Which means that attending can be understood differently, can be taught differently.

One possible remedy proposed by the Friends of Attention is attention activism: a collective movement to reclaim attention as a shared human capacity rather than a privately monetized resource.

Drawing parallels with the rise of labor and environmental movements, Attensity! authors suggest that our “psycho-sensory environment” deserves protection just as much as the natural one. If industrialization produced factories and the labor movement, digital capitalism has produced pocket-sized factories of attentional capture. It follows that the struggle for the right to free thought, free consciousness, is on its way, and only wants for willing midwives to guide its passage from the realm of could happen to happening.  

What might resistance look like? Attensity! offers some ideas, if not replicable models. Like most manifestos, it works best as a point of convergence for like minds, and as the basis for a movement’s beginning.

So what kinds of attention exist beyond the narrow forms measured by screens and metrics? And what kinds of worlds might become possible if we learned, together, to attend differently? We—you, I, and the fine folks at the Cactus Club, can start with these questions on April 1. I don’t know where these questions will lead, but I do know that questions are pathways, and a welcome alternative to the treadmill of doomscrolling.

The views, information, and opinions expressed in Slow Digest are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System.

Resources:

Cactus Book Club with C21: Attensity!

C21’s recommended local bookseller is . Mention Cactus Book Club at checkout to receive a 10% discount!

No time to read a whole book before April 1?

Fill in the gaps with the Strother School for Radical Attention’s   and their on Apple Podcasts.

The post Slow Digest: Attensity! appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies, an exhibition by artists Nathaniel Stern and Sasha Stiles, was featured on . This installation was on view at Kenilworth Square East Gallery in February.

The post Art in the News appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

In this episode of 6.5 Minutes with C21, graduate fellow Jamee Pritchard interviews Milwaukee-based sculptor and UW-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts lecturer . Dillon’s artistic practice explores memory, connection, and liberation through wood, rope, and found materials. In his work, wood symbolizes the human body, rope represents unseen tensions, and found objects speak to the cultural imprints carried through everyday life.

Dillon’s sculptures, including the award-winning , reflect on both personal experience and broader social perceptions. He explains that the piece was intentionally designed around a simple visual metaphor:

“I was trying to keep the concept really simple and exemplified with each piece. The top of the sculpture is an old Milwaukee window frame that’s green. Beneath it is a red beam support, like the kind you’d place under a cracked beam to hold up a house. The base is a mound of dark soil that, when the sun hits it, actually sprouts.”

The materials carry symbolic weight. The old window frame represents earlier generations and long-standing ideals in Milwaukee. The beam support signifies the act of holding something up, while the soil suggests the possibility of new life.

“And so oftentimes we think of the old supporting the young,” Dillon says. “But I was also thinking about how the young need to support the old, specifically within Milwaukee.”

Central to Dillon’s practice is the idea of “slow care,” which he describes as being fully present and attentive within the creative process.

“I’d say slow care is being present within yourself,” he explains. “Oftentimes I get caught up in my mind, racing thoughts pulling me this way and that way. But when I’m working, I kind of shut that off and let my body do the processing.”

Rooted in Milwaukee’s diverse communities and shaped by his experiences navigating different cultural and racial spaces, Dillon’s work invites reflection on how care, attention, and memory shape both art and everyday life.

The views, information, and opinions expressed on 6.5 Minutes with C21 are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System.

Notes:

Guest: Mich Dillon, sculptor and lecturer at 51����’s Peck School of the Arts

Host: Jamee Pritchard, Graduate Fellow, Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) 

The post Slow Digest: Mich Dillon appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

The book talk is on April 17 at (274 E Keefe Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53212) from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The post Save the Date: Book Talk on Black Feminist Resistance appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

This week, through a collection of recommendations from C21 staff, we explore how media, whether essays, films, environmental writing, or fiction, can become a companion in understanding what “slow care” means in a world that often demands speed, productivity, and resilience at all costs. Each contributor offers a work that lingers, asks us to pay attention, and reminds us that care, personal and collective, is a sustained, deliberate act. Together, these pieces form a meditation on how we might nurture connection, hope, and presence amid the complexities of contemporary life.

• Katie’s Recommendation: Laurie Penny, “,”��The Baffler, July 7, 2016

This article re-frames self-care as a responsibility rather than yet another manifestation of the production-consumption cycle that so often defines life in our contemporary capitalist milieu. It’s a few months shy of one decade old, and it’s crossed my mind every few months for at least that long.

In the first half of the 2010s, I was one of the “anxious millennials” the author describes, and took terrible care of myself both in the name of productivity and in the name of the “fetishize(d)…abject hopelessness” that I misguidedly believed was my lot as a person with a conscience. The words that impacted me in 2016, and catalyzed a changed attitude and eventually changed behavior, come a few paragraphs in: “The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis…caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle.” The year I read this essay was the year I started making regular doctors appointments and checked my credit score for the first time.

Re-reading it now, just two sentences in, “The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity,” is an experience made all the more eerie considering that the current high-profile proponents of “clean eating, healthy living” and “personal productivity” are, respectively, vaccine skeptics and business leaders who promote AI with an evangelical fervor (while appearing ambivalent about the role of humans in an AI-driven economy).

This essay was, and still is, a refreshingly sober take on self-care, made all the more necessary by the cultural, social, economic, and political forces at work today.

• Chloe’s Recommendation:  (2023), directed by Wim Wenders

When asked for a media recommendation that encapsulates this year’s theme of “slow care,” I decided on a film that has stuck with me over the past two years: Wim Wenders’ 2023 film, Perfect Days. The film finds beauty in the mundane rhythms of everyday life, lingering on moments of routine and quiet attention. Accompanied by a classic rock soundtrack that feels both tender and deeply comforting, Perfect Days offers a gentle viewing experience capable of lifting one’s spirits and invites reflection on self-care and the value of slowing down. 

• Ceceilia’s Recommendation: by Aldo Leopold 

Aldo Leopold is a true Wisconsin GOAT, and I would recommend Sand County Almanac to anyone interested in conservation. The collection of essays chronicles a year of Leopold’s observations on his Sauk County farm and completely changed the way I see the world. You can read the whole text at once, or month-by-month if one so prefers to take it slow. The work is a classic within modern environmental literature and conservation philosophy. Leopold has a poetic way of writing, and this text hits particularly hard if you have ever spent an extended period of time in our state’s natural areas. 

• Jamee’s Recommendation: by Brad Manuel

Back in November 2024, I wrote a Slow Digest essay called Slow Reading When the Sky is Falling: A Testimony to Dystopian Fiction. As the title suggests, I discuss my mission to become a slow reader, someone who luxuriates in the pages of 500-600-page tomes that speculate on how the world will end and how people will respond to that catastrophe. As I write in that essay, my love of dystopian fiction comes from “being wrapped up in its darkness and despair as its characters try to survive a post-apocalyptic world.” My love for the genre also comes from the underlying hope and optimism that weave themselves throughout the story.

Slow care, to me, is about personal and collective survival and how each of us has a part to play in caring for ourselves, our communities, and our sanity, especially in times of grief and turmoil. My slow care recommendation is The Last Tribe by Brad Manuel, a book that sticks with me for its simplicity and slowness. The author emphasizes the best parts of human nature and how people not only survive, but also re-learn how to care for themselves and their community after a global pandemic. A handful of survivors must find food, shelter, and water while processing the grief of losing family, friends, normalcy, and security in their existence. We see each character’s perspective as they contemplate the next steps of their survival. There are no government experiments gone wrong, no ill-will among survivors, and barely any violence in the story. The story is about resilience, hope, individual and collective action in the midst of rebuilding society.

The views, information, and opinions expressed in Slow Digest do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System. The Center for 21st Century Studies supports scholarly debate about, and engagement with, the pressing issues of our time.

The post Slow Digest: Slow Care in the Media appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

Find the article here:    

Cho is a professor of fiber arts at Peck School of the Arts. As an artist, she engages in a conversation with nature that results in various visual formats, including fiber construction, quilts, collage, woven pieces, sculpture, photography, drawing, and installation. She transforms gathered natural materials, recycled materials, and low-value materials into works of art.

The post Kyoung Ae Cho’s “Slow Art” Featured in TextielPlus appeared first on Center for 21st Century Studies.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days, used for tasks like writing emails to creating images and powering research. But behind the convenience is a growing question: What does all this computing cost the planet? As concerns about energy use, carbon emissions, and sustainability continue to grow, the environmental impact of AI has become a hot topic. In the Q&A that follows, two C21 Graduate Fellows — Yuchen Zhao and Ceceilia Loeschmann — go head-to-head, taking opposing sides on whether AI is an environmental problem…or part of the solution. 

Q1: How does AI impact the environment? 

Yuchen: Gibson’s Affordance Theory, introduced in 1979, proposes that environments are full of affordances, action possibilities available to an organism, relative to its capabilities. He argues that what we perceive first are affordances, the “values and meanings” built into an environment, what it offers us “for good or ill.” From this perspective, AI changes the affordances of our socio-technical environment: it doesn’t just sit there as “new technology,” it opens up new possibilities for perception and action. It lets planners and researchers “see” patterns and scenarios that weren’t perceptible before, which can support more efficient, less wasteful decisions. AI affords new ways of seeing environmental systems. We can detect patterns in air pollution, water quality, or land use that would otherwise remain invisible, and that can reshape how planners, policymakers, or communities act. That gives governments, NGOs, and communities an earlier warning and more precise targets for intervention. It can also enhance efficiencies. United Nations Environment Programme, for example, uses AI  when oil and gas installations vent , a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.  In cities, AI-enhanced tools can help planners simulate different land-use or transit scenarios and choose options that reduce emissions and protect vulnerable communities. 

So I don’t see AI as simply “good” or “bad” for the environment. It’s a technology that introduces new environmental risks and new environmental affordances. The key question is how we steer it: can we design and regulate AI so that the dominant uses are those that support decarbonization, environmental justice, and better decision-making, while actively working to shrink its own material footprint? 

Ceceilia: AI technology, particularly generative AI technologies (such as ChatGPT and Claude), harms the environment in several ways. When we think of AI and the environment, we generally envision AI data centers. These data centers are specialized facilities that train and run AI models using specialized Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and/or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) within servers.  They require a huge amount of electricity and water in order to operate.   

Researchers from the  say that a single medium-sized data center consumes around 300,000 gallons of water a day, or about as much as 1,000 U.S. households.  found that the rapid growth of AI data centers is projected to consume 731 to 1,125 million cubic meters of water annually by 2030. This massive consumption is driven by the evaporative cooling systems that are often used to cool the processor chips within the data centers. The water for these cooling systems can come from either potable (drinkable) or non-potable freshwater sources, depending on the location of the data center. Many data centers operate where water is scarce, due to lower land costs, which causes a range of problems. Often the costs for cooling these data centers fall on local communities through  and infrastructure strain. Locally, there is currently  in the Wisconsin Assembly proposing water recycling and utility rate requirements for data centers. Wisconsin has recently emerged as an area for data center development due to the state’s access to water and available land.  

Powering data centers and generative AI models also requires a large amount of electricity. According to , data centers accounted for 4% of total U.S. electricity use in 2024. The  found that a typical AI data center consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest ones under construction today are estimated to consume 20 times as much. Additionally, some data centers  or even  for backup power to meet the immense energy demands of running AI models, which contributes to noise and air pollution. Theres also the negative environmental impacts that come from creating TPUs and GPUs, which require  Overall, the current path that AI technologies are taking is not environmentally sustainable.   

Q2: Can AI play a role in fighting climate change? 

Yuchen: Yes, especially if we treat AI as an affordance for better environmental governance rather than as a panacea. In environmental monitoring, AI systems can process huge volumes of data from satellites, drones, and ground sensors to give a much more accurate, real-time picture of environmental conditions. This affords quicker, more targeted actions—for example, predicting floods, tracking air pollution plumes, or detecting illegal land-use change. 

In cities, AI-driven urban decision support systems can help optimize traffic flows, building energy use, and infrastructure planning, allowing planners to test low-carbon scenarios before they are built.  In Gibson’s terms, AI enriches the environment with new informational structures that afford more sustainable decisions—if institutions actually pick up and use those possibilities. The problem is not that AI can’t help; it’s that governance, equity, and policy frameworks often fall behind the technical capabilities. 

The same AI infrastructure that powers chatbots can also afford large-scale efficiency gains in the background of everyday life. For example, Google reports that just , including fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps and its Green Light traffic signal optimization, helped avoid an estimated 26 million metric tons of CO₂ in 2024—more than double Google’s own total emissions that year. 

Ceceilia: Yes, if the tech giants behind these AI technologies can successfully transition toward sustainable energy, and if regulation frameworks can be put into place. Companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google have all set climate goals, hoping to achieve net-zero emissions within the next couple of decades. But these goals aren’t met. For example, Google’s total emissions have actually grown in the last few years, partly due to the company’s expansion in AI, as admitted in their  The company reported a growth of carbon emissions by 51% since 2019, but  say the real number may actually be as high as 65%.  

Q3: How does everyday AI use contribute to energy consumption? 

Yuchen: Everyday AI use does require energy. Each chatbot query, image generation, or AI-assisted email runs on servers in data centers. But I think it’s more useful to see this not just as “extra consumption,” but as an investment in systems that can dramatically reduce energy use elsewhere. It opens up possibilities for more efficient action by offering lower-carbon choices: routing computation to cleaner grids, using more efficient models by default, or nudging users toward high-impact uses (like environmental monitoring, planning, and public services) rather than pure convenience or novelty. 

For instance, AI already sits behind tools many people use every day, like navigation apps that suggest fuel-efficient routes or real-time transit options. When millions of drivers follow routes that reduce idling and congestion, the net effect can be lower fuel use and emissions—even though each routing request uses some electricity in a data center. Similarly, AI systems embedded in smart buildings continuously adjust heating, cooling, and lighting based on occupancy and weather. That means everyday AI decisions in the background can trim energy use in offices, campuses, and public buildings far more than they consume. And AI-based environmental monitoring, like air-quality alerts or flood-risk dashboards that people check on their phones, relies on data centers too, but supports earlier, more targeted responses that protect both people and infrastructure. 

Everyday AI use has an energy cost, but if we design and govern these systems with sustainability in mind, the actions, from more efficient mobility to smarter buildings and infrastructure, can produce net reductions in energy use and emissions that outweigh the footprint of individual queries.  

Ceceilia: This depends on the type and size of the AI model an individual is using on the day to day, and what they are asking AI to do.  A survey done by the  says that 73% of Americans would be willing to let AI assist them at least a little with their day-to-day activities. Depending on what these billions of people are asking, on what AI platform, one query can be more energy-intensive and emissions-producing than another. 

The  recently released a study that shows using OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 model to generate a 100-word email requires 519 milliliters of water and requires 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. That’s slightly more than one water bottle of water, and energy equal to powering 14 LED light bulbs for an hour. 

According to another analysis done by the , generating a single standard-quality image (1024 x 1024 pixels) with Stable Diffusion 3 Medium uses an estimated 2,282 joules total. The same report estimates creating a high-quality five-second video on one of the best AI video models can consume over 3.4 million joules. That’s equivalent to running a microwave for over an hour.   

But, before these models can even fulfill a request, they need to be trained. The same Washington Post study found that Meta used 22 million liters of water training its LLaMA-3 AI model — that’s the volume of 8.8 Olympic-sized swimming pools!  

Q4: Is there such a thing as “green AI”? 

Yuchen: I’d say “green AI” is possible, but it’s not automatic. AI doesn’t become green just because it’s “clever”; it becomes green when we deliberately change how it’s built, where it runs, and what we use it for. 

On the technical side, green AI means, as  defined,  incorporates sustainable practices and techniques in model design, training, and deployment that aim to reduce the associated environmental cost and carbon footprint: designing models and infrastructure to use less energy and cleaner energy: more efficient algorithms, smaller or better-optimized models instead of defaulting to the biggest ones, data centers powered by renewables, and careful scheduling of workloads to times and places with low-carbon electricity.  

There’s already work on “energy-aware” training, model compression, and reporting the carbon footprint of major training runs so that researchers can compare impact, not just accuracy. the most promising approaches include algorithm optimization, hardware optimization, data center optimization, and pragmatic scaling factor reductions, etc. 

Equally important is the purpose of the AI system. An AI tool that helps a city cut building energy use, optimize transit, or target climate adaptation funding has a very different environmental profile than one used only for generating endless novelty images. “Green AI” isn’t just about efficient chips; it’s about prioritizing high-impact, climate-relevant applications while pushing companies to shrink and clean up the underlying infrastructure. 

So yes, green AI can exist—but only if we treat low energy use and real-world climate benefits as core design goals, not as an afterthought. 

Ceceilia: Right now, we have no largescale “green” AI.  There is a possibility of this if data centers moved away from  and were instead powered by renewable energy sources, . However, these sources take time to build and can’t keep up with the current AI boom. For example, the  states that widespread commercial nuclear reactors are not likely to arrive until the 2030s.  

Additionally, there are currently  requiring data centers to disclose their water and energy consumption. This lack of standardized reporting makes it difficult to assess progress towards sustainability goals. 

Theres also a lack of business incentives, as put by : 

“We’ve built and paid for a global economy that spews out planet-warming gases, investing trillions of dollars in power plants, steel mills, factories, jets, boilers, water heaters, stoves, and SUVs that run on fossil fuels. And few people or companies will happily write off those investments so long as those products and plants still work. AI can’t remedy all that just by generating better ideas. To raze and replace the machinery of every industry around the world at the speed now required, we will need increasingly aggressive climate policies that incentivize or force everyone to switch to cleaner plants, products, and practices.” 

Q5: How does AI change how we imagine the future of the planet? 

Yuchen: We increasingly use AI to see the future through simulations, visualizations, and stories. Those AI-powered visions are starting to shape what we believe is possible, urgent, or inevitable for the planet. On one hand, it feeds a story that technology will save us: glossy visuals of smart cities, perfectly optimized energy systems, and climate models that can predict everything. On the other hand, it also fuels a darker imagination—of endless data centers, runaway consumption, and automated systems deepening surveillance and extraction. So AI doesn’t give us one future; it sharpens the contrast between competing ones. 

For me, the hopeful side is that AI can make complex climate futures more visible and concrete. When AI helps us simulate flood risks in a neighborhood, map heat islands, or test different transit and land-use scenarios, it turns abstract climate data into something people can see, argue with, and plan around. It can support more informed, participatory decision-making—letting communities explore “what if” questions about energy, housing, and adaptation in ways that were previously only available to specialists. 

Despite the underlying risks, whether AI expands or narrows our imagination still depends on how we choose to use it. If we pair AI with climate justice movements, local knowledge, and public debate, it can help us imagine futures that are not only more efficient, but also more equitable and livable. If we don’t, it can just as easily reinforce old patterns in a faster, more obscure way.  

Ceceilia: AI is currently accelerating ecological harm and worsening climate change. Unfortunately, unless proper sustainability measures and regulations are put into place, I do not see much of a future for our planet. Especially because it has been put into the hands of tech giants, who seem not to be concerned about the laypeople of planet earth. Take OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for example, who has said that  Altman also believes that concerns over AI’s water usage are   

Besides the future of our Earth, we are beginning to see the negative sociocultural implications of AI. For example: 

• A  have been tied to AI adaption, in which human workers are being replaced with machines 

• An  also showed consequences have been found regarding AI’s impact on student learning 

• As more people use AI to generate images from models trained on copyrighted works, real artists are  

• Additionally, AI chatbots have also been linked to causing  in users 

Now that you’ve heard two sides to the same question – what do you think? Is AI an environmental problem, or a miracle solution? 

The views, information, and opinions expressed In Slow Digest do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Center for 21st Century Studies, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, or the University of Wisconsin System. The Center for 21st Century Studies supports scholarly debate about, and engagement with, the pressing issues of our time.

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