This brings me to Worldchanging, the book that arrived last spring bearing news of an environ-mental paradigm so shamelessly up to the minute, it almost blew out all my green circuits before I could even get it out of its stylish slipcover. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. It’s also the name of the group blog, found at Worldchanging.com, where the material in the book originally came from. Run by a future-savvy environmental journalist named Alex Steffen, Worldchanging is one of the central hubs in a fast-growing network of thinkers defining an ultramodern green agenda that closes the gap between nature and society—big time. After a good solid century of well-meaning efforts to restrain, reduce, and otherwise mitigate our presence here on planet Earth, they’re saying it’s time for environmentalism to do a one-eighty. They’re ditching the long-held tenets of classical greenitude and harnessing the engines of capitalism, high technology, and human ingenuity to jump-start the manufacture of a dramatically sustainable future. They call themselves “bright green,” and if you’re at all steeped in the old-school “dark green” worldview (their term), they’re guaranteed to make you squirm. The good news is, they just might free you to think completely differently as well.

Worldchanging takes its inspiration from a series of speeches given by sci-fi author, futurist, and cyberguru Bruce Sterling in the years leading up to the turn of the millennium—and from the so-called Viridian design movement he gave birth to. Known more in those days as one of the fathers of cyberpunk than as the prophet of a new twenty-first-century environmentalism, Ster-ling nevertheless began issuing a self-styled “prophecy” to the design world announcing the launch of a cutting-edge green design program that would embrace consumerism rather than reject it. Its mission: to take on climate change as the planet’s most burning aesthetic challenge. “Why is this an aesthetic issue?” he asked his first audience in 1998 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts near my old office at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Well, because it’s a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that’s why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide.”

Explaining the logic of the bright green platform, Sterling writes:

It’s a question of tactics. Civil society does not respond at all well to moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who are perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming generations by massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they’re not the solution either, because most human beings won’t volunteer to live like they do. . . . However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive, glamorous and seductive. The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering. Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green. These flavors of Green have been tried and have proven to have insufficient appeal. . . . The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A Viridian Green, if you will.

Sterling elaborates in a speech given to the Industrial Designers Society of America in Chicago in 1999:

This can’t be one of these diffuse, anything-goes, eclectic, postmodern things. Forget about that, that’s over, that’s yesterday. It’s got to be a narrow, doctrinaire, high-velocity movement. Inventive, not eclectic. New, not cut-and-pasted from the debris of past trends. Forward-looking and high-tech, not William Morris medieval arts-and-craftsy. About abundance of clean power and clean goods and clean products, not conservative of dirty power and dirty goods and dirty products. Explosive, not thrifty. Expansive, not niggling. Mainstream, not underground. Creative of a new order, not subversive of an old order. Making a new cultural narrative, not calling the old narrative into question. . . .

Twentieth-century design is over now. Anything can look like anything now. You can put a pixel of any color anywhere you like on a screen, you can put a precise dot of ink anywhere on any paper, you can stuff any amount of functionality into chips. The limits aren’t to be found in the technology anymore. The limits are behind your own eyes, people. They are limits of habit, things you’ve accepted, things you’ve been told, realities you’re ignoring. Stop being afraid. Wake up. It’s yours if you want it. It’s yours if you’re bold enough.

It was a philosophy that completely reversed the fulcrum of environmental thinking, shifting its focus from the flaws inherent in the human soul to the failures inherent in the world we’ve designed—designed, Sterling emphasized. Things are the way they are today, he seemed to be saying, for no greater or lesser reason than that we made them that way—and there’s no good reason for them to stay the same. His suggestion that it’s time to hang up our hats as caretakers of the earth and embrace our role as its masters is profoundly unnerving to the dark green environmentalist in me. But at this point in history, is it any more than a question of semantics? With PCBs in the flesh of Antarctic penguins, there isn’t a square inch of the planet’s surface that is “unmanaged” anymore; there is no more untouched “natural” state. We hold the strings of global destiny in our fingertips, and the easy luxury of cynicism regarding our creative potential to re-solve things is starting to look catastrophically expensive. Our less-than-admirable track record gives us every reason to be cautious and every excuse to be pessimists. But is the risk of being optimistic anyway a risk that, in good conscience, we can really afford not to take?

Sterling’s belief in the fundamental promise of human creativity is reminiscent of earlier de-sign visionaries such as Buckminster Fuller. “I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe and that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless,” Fuller wrote in I Seem to Be a Verb in 1970, the same year we had our first Earth Day. “I seek,” he declared simply, “to reform the environment instead of trying to reform man.” Fuller’s ideas influenced many of the twentieth century’s brightest environmental lights, including Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and the online community The WELL, an early precursor of the internet. Brand took Fuller’s approach and ran with it in the sixties and seventies, helping to spearhead a tech-friendly green counterculture that worked to pull environmentalism out of the wilderness and into the realms of sustainable technology and social justice. “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it,” he wrote in the original 1968 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, and he’s managed to keep himself on the evolving edge of progressive thought ever since. Brand went on to found the Point Foundation, CoEvolution Quarterly (which became Whole Earth Review), the Hackers Conference, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. As he gets older, he recently told the New York Times, he continues to become “more rational and less romantic. . . . I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind.”

Many remember the Whole Earth Catalog with a fondness reserved for only the closest of personal guiding lights. “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along,” recalls Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. “It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” For Alex Steffen, it’s the place “where a whole generation of young commune-kid geeks like myself learned to dream weird.” And at Worldchanging, those unorthodox green dreams have grown into a high-speed Whole Earth Catalog for the internet generation, every bit as inventive, idealistic, and brazenly ambitious as its predecessor: “We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done,” Steffen writes in his introduction to Worldchanging. “We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only function in areas of chaos and corruption, but also help transform them. That alone is a task of heroic magnitude, but there’s an additional complication: we only get one shot. Change takes time, and time is what we don’t have. . . . Fail to act boldly enough and we may fail completely.”

Another world is possible,” goes the popular slogan of the World Social Forum, a yearly gathering of antiglobalization activists from around the world. No, counters Worldchanging in a conscious riff on that motto: “Another world is here.” Indeed, bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions. As Sterling said in his first Viridian design speech, pay-ing homage to William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.”

Of course, nobody knows exactly what a bright green future will look like; it’s only going to become visible in the process of building it. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide is six hundred pages long, and no sin-gle recipe in the whole cornucopia takes up more than a few of them. It’s an inspired wealth of information I can’t even begin to do justice to here, but it also presents a surprisingly integrated platform for immediate creative action, a sort of bright green rule set based on the best of today’s knowledge and innovation—and perpetually open to improvement.

To start with, Worldchanging’s core principles are based on the concept of the ecological footprint. “Ecological footprints give us a metaphor for understanding our impact on the planet and the meaning of sustainability,” Steffen writes. “They boil that impact down to a single number and measure it in terms of land area.” Your ecological footprint represents the amount of land required to provide you with absolutely everything you consume, both directly and indirectly—from your water, shelter, and electricity to the food you eat, the truck that took it to the grocery store, the gasoline the truck burned, and even the roads it drove on to get there. Divide the planet into six and a half billion or so equal pieces and you get what’s called a “one-planet footprint,” which is each person’s fair and sustainable share of a finite resource base. Here in the West, our footprints are more like five or ten times that size, and the bright green bottom line says we’ve got about thirty years to get that number down to one.

Lest you think you can achieve this roughly eighty or ninety percent reduction of your demand on the planet’s carrying capacity by swapping out your light bulbs and spending extra on organic groceries, forget it. Buy yourself a Prius, put up some solar panels, clothe yourself in vegan leather—no matter what, you can’t shop your way to a bright green future. At Worldchanging, they call this the “myth of individual lifestyle responsibility.” Small steps are good, Steffen says, but they won’t get our ecological footprints anywhere near the one-planet standard because they won’t transform the severely unsustainable systems and infrastructures our lives are utterly entrenched in:

We don’t need more recycling, we need a completely different system of closed-loop manufacturing, and no matter how many cans I crush, my personal actions at the consumer level are of very little importance in getting us there. Even millions more eco-consumers will not get us what we need. What we need instead, it seems to me, is a global movement of smart people who understand the systems in which we’re embedded, are actively pursuing better models which could replace them, and are clever as heck about communicating visions for doing so to their fellow citizens.

Canadian ecologist William Rees, who coined the term “ecological footprint” in 1992, agrees. “We’re all on the same ship,” he told the Vancouver Sun recently, “and what we do in our individual cabins is of almost no consequence in terms of the direction the ship is going.” (In the meantime, we still have to buy stuff anyway, and the bright green ethos suggests spending less time sweating the little things and more time strategizing your bigger purchases to support emerging innovation and help leverage markets toward sustainability.)

When it comes to changing the structures and systems that are the real lynchpins of one-planet living, Worldchanging takes its lead from two of the most celebrated exponents of bright green environmentalism to date: Virginia architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. For over twenty years, these prescient pioneers of ecologically intelligent design have been doing their best to make twentieth-century industry and architecture obsolete by eliminating the concept of waste from buildings, manufacturing processes, and material flows. “Achieving a sustainable system of consumption and production is not a matter of reducing the footprint of our activities on this planet,” Braungart insists, “but transforming this footprint into a source of replenishment for those systems that depend on it.” He and McDonough have a simple revolutionary dictum—waste equals food. Every structure, process, and product they design is anchored in closed-loop cycles that use materials of only two kinds: “Biological nutrients” are biodegradable materials that can be safely discarded when their life cycle is complete; “technical nutrients” are nonbiodegradable materials like metals and polymers that can be reused indefinitely in industrial chains. Everything else gets phased out as fast as possible, and a world where that standard was being met would be a world where landfills and pollution were relics of history. To get there, we need the freedom to analyze every stage in the life cycle of every product and service we utilize, and that means new levels of transparency and accountability up and down the marketplace.

As revolutionary as the shift to a cradle-to-cradle design paradigm will be, it’s just one part of a bright green future. That future will also be significantly more urban. “Manhattanites use fewer resources and less energy than anyone else in America,” writes Steffen—even people living in super-efficient green homes in the country. In fact, urban density is not only one of the best drivers of sustainable consumption but one of the best strategies for preserving wild nature as well. Rejecting the lavish inefficiency of the suburbs and learning how to integrate densely orchestrated urban communities with agricultural greenspace and healthy natural habitats will be essential to building a one-planet society. “The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities,” wrote Stewart Brand in MIT’s Technology Review:

My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it.

Everywhere that we see the rural-to-urban demographic swing around the world, Brand ex-plains—about two hundred thousand people a day leave the countryside for life in the city, and the planet just passed the fifty percent urban point this year—birthrates plummet and population growth stabilizes. That’s good news for developing nations being crushed under economic, environmental, and social pressures never before seen on Earth, because hand in hand with the challenges of urbanization comes an unprecedented explosion of opportunity. According to Steffen, the bright green vision of sustainable development is one that treats “entrenched social and sustainability difficulties as problems capable of solution through the conscious and context-sensitive application of innovation.” But those solutions won’t come from the developed world, he cautions. They will be created “on the streets of developing-world cities, by a younger generation just now coming into its own. They don’t need our answers; they need the tools for finding and sharing their own answers.” To that end, Worldchanging advocates open-source models of design, copyright, and licensing that encourage collaboration, maximize the appropriateness of solutions in local contexts, and allow for uninhibited retooling of technologies to keep pace with evolving realities on the ground. They also call for “leapfrogging” expensive first-world infrastructures and going straight to cutting-edge technologies in developing nations, skipping land lines for cell phones and power poles for solar cells. The more we knit the whole world together in open and accessible webs of information technology, they believe, the more the precarious tension “between urban possibility and urban collapse” will swing in the direction of a bright green future.