Perverted by Language

Cleaner air thanks to dork designers?

After a summer that featured melting polar ice caps, forest fires in Los Alamos, and 112-degree September days in Texas, impending environmental apocalypse seems like more than the bad trip of the burn-out next door. And whether you take Election 2000 as Texas Oil Baron vs. Mr. Earth-in-the-Balance or as Republocrats vs. Greens, the environment is the issue over which the candidates differ the most. Sure, the terms of debate are the same as always (right?): make the money or save the trees? Keep the Filthy Five's jobs or shut 'em down for good? Less government or more? On one side lies conservatism, on the other environmentalism. Right?

Viridian (bespoke.org/viridian), a self-styled, non-partisan "design movement" conceived as an Internet mailing list by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, thinks not. They're techno-futurists rather than state-of-nature nostalgics, they're middle-of-the-road bourgeois sitting at home with their databases, not radicalized kids out marching on Beinecke. And for better or worse, they're not regulatory-minded Great Societarians—they're information-age capitalists, albeit ones whose profit motive is calculated in terms of greenhouse emissions as well as dollars and cents. From Sterling's mission statement: "It's not that we're going to pick big public fights with spiritually motivated Greens and other illuminated hippie types. This is useless and a waste of time, like beating up Quakers and the Amish. We're simply going to serenely ignore them, the way everyone else does."

Judging from Ralph Nader's crowd at Battell Chapel on Wed., Oct. 4, Sterling is overstating things. But his reworking of environmentalism at least deserves attention. Viridian design fits into Viridian environmentalism the way logos fit into late capitalism—make it pretty and memorable, and people will covet it. If people covet it, they will buy it. If the product is one that happens to save the earth from greenhouse emissions (Viridian's main target), so much the better. Thus, Sterling sponsors design contests for Viridian couture, sleek energy meters that any hipster would covet, and eye-catching greenhouse disaster symbols, all of them intended to aestheticize environmentalism for mass consumption. People tattoo themselves with the Nike Swoosh—why not Viridian's cute micro-organism "Big Mike"?

Of course, Sterling wouldn't be a sci-fi writer if he didn't have time for gizmo-nerdery and apocalyptica. The Viridian list is awash with reports from the Green future: mad cows being turned into fuel, fuel cells the size of pencil erasers, piezoelectric shoes that convert steps into usable energy. Sterling's language is dystopic. "Our society runs on fossil fuel," he said. "We have a substance-abuse problem with carbon dioxide. This is a seemingly abstract issue now, but it's going to get very, very much livelier once we start having evac-uation camps and dustbowls and so on. At that point, anyone who isn't talking about the Greenhouse Effect is going to seem very 20th-century."

Viridian believes in redemption through the system at hand. To Sterling, Big Oil is not inherently evil, just outdated—Green comes next, by necessity. Solar moguls will out-earn oil barons, wind derricks will replace oil rigs. Fortunes will be made off Green, and Sterling hopes to make that prospect as attractive as possible to those with the cash to pay for it. He even points to Texas, oft-cited as the most polluted state in the nation, as an exemplar of his Green-future, because of its "most-ambitious renewable energy program in the nation," signed by George W. Bush, DC '68.

Science fiction, science fact? The recreation of Green for a free-tradin', 'net-surfin' world? I'm not entirely convinced by, nor comfortable with Sterling's vision. Ultra-consumerism and capitalist efficiency may make a show of morality, but it's only a show, a fad at best and a return bin item at worst. We shouldn't stake our future on being stylish, because what happens when Viridian makes their Edsel? Individualist, consumerist, gadget-worshipping futurism shouldn't distract us from the guarantees that old-style regulatory environmentalism provides.

However, the frozen terms of environmental debate don't seem to be getting us much of anywhere, or exciting much of anybody—Earth Day, anyone? A recent Connecticut Green Party rally on the New Haven Green attracted a crowd consisting of little more than a few stoners waiting for Max Creek to noodle the night away. Gore's "environmentalism" is often pandering to big industry—without Sterling's Green x-ray vision. If this is what environmentalism has devolved to, maybe I will take a pair of Air-Piezoelectrics, thanks.

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