The Viridian Design Movement started eight years ago, focusing on global warming and how do we get people to realize it’s happening. I was an original member. Back then, global warming was a fringe issue indeed and the group was and is an eclectic bunch of visionaries, geeks, designers, etc. from all over the planet.
There have been 487 newsletters on the listserv and numerous contests over the past eight years. Yesterday our Pope Emperor and chief instigator, (sf author Bruce Sterling) announced the obvious, that the war is over and we won.
We are winning because we were ahead of the curve: we Viridians were an avant-garde who understood, almost ten years ago, that something like this was bound to happen. That does not make us the proper people to actually carry it out. First, we don’t have the scale, the resources, or the ability. Second, and let me be very clear to you here: the primrose path to sustainability, even it is construed as sexy, trendy and stylish, will be dark and thorny. Behind Corporate Green is its darker, bloodstained cousin, Khaki Green, and we’ll be seeing a lot of that. Sustainability will be a comprehensive revolution in the tenor of daily life. There will be blood on the hands of the people who bring it about. Not because they are bloodthirsty. But because there is so much blood.
Yes, what happens when one area runs out of water and there’s no longer enough water to grow crops. Especially if, say, a somewhat nearby area suddenly has more water and the land becomes more fertile. Political unrest and war can and will be the outcome.
Genuine climate mayhem is underway. It is intensifying fast. People are going to die: of heat, of disease, freezing, starving, drowning and dying of thirst. Not in mere tens of thousands as they did in the Paris heatwave, but in hecatombs. We have a global climate crisis. A real one, not a futurist speculation. People are going to make agonizing sacrifices in increasingly frantic efforts to ameliorate that and redress that crisis. Then, next year, they will discover that the situation is vastly worse than then imagined, and the spillage of blood and treasure and sacred honor that they thought would surely help is a fraction of what was necessary.
Nevertheless, the frog will jump from that hot water. We are winning.
From the fringe to mainstream in eight years, the global warming movement is now front and center and being taken seriously planetwide. Even Dubya The Denier now (grudgingly) admits it’s a problem.
We have much to do. All of us. Yes, Sterling is right, to stop this will require huge scale and the resources of the huge corporations and governments. We can do it, we must do it. The politics of global warming will now be a major theme here at Polizeros.
Jump, froggie, jump.