I write novels. At least, that's most of my revenue stream. I define myself as "an artist whose theme is the impact of technology on society." That means I'm a science fiction writer. And a pop science journalist, and travel writer, and corporate futurist, and sometime art critic, and an electronic civil liberties activist, and a guy who runs two or three Internet mailing lists. One of them is about 21st century design practices. It's my "Viridian List." That's why I'm here.

Back in 1994, I wrote and published a science fiction novel called HEAVY WEATHER. It was a dark novel, set in the 2030s, exploring a worst-case scenario for the Greenhouse Effect. Writing that novel got me pretty well up-to-speed on environmental climate issues. In the summer of 1998, I stepped out on my porch in Austin Texas and noticed an awful smell. The sky was steely gray. Chiapas was on fire. The plume of smoke from burning jungles stretched from southern Mexico, through Texas, all the way to Chicago.

I spend a lot of time spotting trends. I study trends. I take notes, I compile clippings. There are a lot of interesting problems in the world. But I have a principle: if a problem's on my own doorstep, I take action. And if I can smell it in my own home, it's out of hand.

The Greenhouse Effect is not a political problem. Nobody ever asked us to vote to set the jungles of Chiapas on fire. I didn't see any plebiscites on doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and turning my sky steel gray. This is a design problem. It's a basic problem of the basic design of industrial civilization. The Greenhouse Effect not a quick, vivid, apocalyptic problem, like, say, a nuclear exchange. This is a slow, chronic, degrading problem, like alcoholism. It's about chugging blindly away, barrel after barrel, and case after case. It isn't the next drink that kills you. It isn't the next day. It isn't a sudden major coronary. But you're living in denial. Your liver goes, and your brain goes, and your wealth goes, and your dignity goes, and your future goes. And you find yourself waking up sick and dirty in your own spew. That's the Greenhouse Effect in a nutshell.

To combat this, we need a better sense of engagement with our technological artifacts. We need better taste and more good sense in our technologies. These activities are firmly placed in the realm of design. We need to make clean things delightful and trendy, and we need to stigmatize the crude and filthy technologies of the 20th century. The year 2000 is an ideal time to do this. There won't be many such cultural opportunities for genuine novelty in the planet's rapidly aging populace. The year 2000 is a golden time for designers to make loud demands and issue bold, visionary, esthetic dictates. There is public demand for this, and that demand should be met.

Of course there will be a natural backlash around 2003, when the media will be full of rueful retrospectives saying that "nothing much has changed and the much-ballyhooed 21st century is just like the 20th," but you should enjoy the ballyhoo till the backlash. When it's Mardi Gras, put on the funny hat. After the backlash, there will come another opportunity, but heaven only knows when it will come, and what it will look like. Opportunities like 2000— a genuine opportunity to draw two red lines under the past and bury all that is dead within us— this kind of opportunity is rare and should be prized.

I suspect I'll be involved in design propaganda for maybe 4 or 5 years. As an artist who's into techno-change, I see that my cutting-edge interests tend to last about that long by their nature. If civilization isn't making a visible dent in the Greenhouse trends by that time, it'll be time for me to give up my interest in design, because the design world will have proved itself useless. I'll probably be moving much closer to my many friends in the military, the police, and the planet's various emergency management services. Because it's not certainly going to be a designer's world if the Greenhouse Effect gets out of hand. It's going to be a cruel, disturbed world with a lot of evacuation camps, barbed wire and bayonets. A world much like Serbia, where power plants are blown up wholesale, in undeclared wars and welters of mayhem. A cruise missile is just a rich guy's truck bomb.

My best tactic as an environmental design propagandist has not been lectures or moralistic scolding. People don't react well to these. I'm trying to concentrate on the "Viridian imaginary product."

We folks in the Viridian Green movement don't design any actual products. We don't have the capacity, the talent or the hardware. Mostly, we imagine cool, green, futuristic sci-fi products that we would like to possess. Products like the "Viridian Alcohol Cellphone." This imaginary phone has a small alcohol-powered fuel cell instead of today's crappy, short-lived phone battery. You refuel the phone from single-malt whiskey bottles out of first-class air flights. If you need a drink after a particularly stressful phone call, it's always right there at hand.

We're imagining the possible publication of an entire catalog of Viridian imaginary products. They'd be promoted and talked-up just like actual products, but today's consumer can't buy them, because they are products of a cleaner and more advanced civilization than the one today's consumer has the current misfortune to dwell in. We see this Viridian sci-fi vaporware as a novel and effective consumer-activist tactic. It's a subversive tactic that makes the entire spectrum of today's consumer products look and feel tacky and inferior. Which they are.

The aim of this Viridian design movement is to be socially and commercially assimilated as quickly as possible. We want our design principles to become the invisible, taken-for-granted truisms of the coming society. We don't care who gets the credit or who gets the money. We have a single unifying grand strategy: less filth in our air.

I think this is going to happen. Not because I make it happen personally by issuing wacky manifestos, but because, for some reason, the things I think are cool almost always become major social trends. It may be a historical accident or the way I've been placed generationally, but this has happened to me so many times that I'm used to it, and I have great confidence in it. "Cyberpunk," for instance, my science-fictional literary movement of the early 1980s, was all about saying "I'm a hip young dude empowered with a computer, and I'm not down with the stuffed-shirt gray flannel suit guys from the three-initial agency." Nowadays we have IBM ads in WIRED magazine showcasing IBM professionals who have shaven heads, earrings and little tiki necklaces. That was the eventual outcome of my "cyberpunk movement:" not another disenfranchised arty bohemia, but a fin de siecle nouveau-riche class.

I have no problem with that outcome. I'm not a professional hipster. I am a futurist, and for some reason I happen to be the storm-bird of major trendiness. Beating the Greenhouse things requires huge sums and tremendous post-industrial power. We are talking about repealing the grand technosocial effect of John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Oil, autos and electric power. These guys made three tremendous fortunes, and three titanic industries. They are classic American twentieth-century cultural heroes, and they are the three godfathers of the Greenhouse Effect. We have got to go head to head with their industrial legacy, and defeat them across the board, with an advanced, better-designed new world, that is cyber-bio Green.

I'm a science fiction writer, which means that I'm full of self-educated cracker barrel bullshit. But I'm also a journalist, so I know how to get my facts straight. My facts and my sources aren't full of bullshit. This is a serious and dead-real global problem that requires immediate and sincere engagement. By the time the crisis is accepted and dealt with, I'll have moved on to something fringier and more futuristic. I won't be around.

But if the Greenhouse Effect isn't dealt with, most of us won't be around.

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© 2000 High Ground Design. Reprinted from www.2011_highgrounddesign.com