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Viridian Victory

I've been managing the Viridian Design Movement's web site since Bruce launched the movement around the turn of the century; I should note his latest Viridian Note declaring Viridian Note 00487: We Are Winning">victory. This is note #487 after around seven years, and in those years the environmental movement has clearly grown, evolved, and incorporated elements of futurism and design. There's a whole new approach, epitomized by Amory Lovins, Worldchanging, et al, that focuses on solutions over the handwringing of late 20th century environmental fatalism.

In the Viridan Manifesto, Bruce said

"Number One. Perhaps most importantly, this movement has a built-in expiration date. The problem with previous art movements is this unexamined assumption that they have discovered some eternal cultural truth, and that they will therefore go on forever. In point of fact, no matter how much truth they discover, movements never do last very long.

"So, this is where our movement gets it built-in expiration date. The date is 2012, a date in the Kyoto accords, when people are supposed to be engaged in a serious decline in CO2 emissions."

In this latest Viridian note, he says

(((We Viridians have beaten that clock. There is no need to wait for distant 2012 to declare victory in our war to make green trendy and to create "irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade." Green will never get any trendier than it is this year. The atmosphere upgrade is on the way. That process won't be pretty, but it's going to happen.)))

(((The 2012 deadline for Kyoto is already a dead letter, because Kyoto was far too weak and too slow. We are going to see a series of monstrous efforts by large enterprises: private, local, state and national, to save whatever can be saved of the previous natural order. The primary motivator of this effort will be fear. The climate is changing much more quickly and more severely than anyone suspected it would. A rapid, ruthless, headlong clean-tech techno- revolution – in fact, a series of them – is the only global option with a ghost of a chance to save our smoldering planetary bacon. That's coming; it is under way.)))

((When the Davos Economic Forum steals your clothes, there's no reason left to wear them any more. We are winning. The Great and the Good agree with us. They're more scared than we ever were.)))

Early in this latest note, Bruce says "This is number 487. I doubt we will ever reach 500 of these." I suppose we'll maintain the Viridian Design site, at least for a while, as an historical archive.

jon posted this at 9:47 AM
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