Worldchanging’s radical tool kit for the world of tomorrow is marked by much, much more—some of it more familiar from the mainstream environmental agenda (clean renewable energies, carbon neutrality, sustainable transportation and agriculture, environmental justice), and some of it less so. Of that latter category, one aspect in particular stands out. According to Sterling at least, the bright green paradigm will be one that is completely free of spiritual or mystical overtones. “[These are] simply absolute anathema for us,” he declared the day he inaugurated the Viridian design movement. “If it doesn’t pass muster over at the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, we don’t want to know about it. 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.”

Because I was an “illuminated hippie type” myself, I can understand what Sterling is rejecting here. These days, the quaintly Old World mysticism of dark green—the kind of spirituality that reveres the earth, celebrates full moons and solstices and harvest time, and idealizes the pastoral simple life—often makes forward-thinking folks of all stripes run in the other direction. But we have to make sure we don’t lose the baby with the bathwater. Environmentalism itself was born out of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “discovery” of nature—a spiritual awakening if ever there was one—in which Europe’s Romantics and later America’s Transcendentalists began to contemplate the aesthetic beauty of the world and saw reflected in its mirror new and unseen depths within themselves. Not coincidentally, the emergence of environmentalism as a movement in the late 1960s happened in conjunction with that same romantic awakening in the popular counterculture. It was in 1968 that NASA released the first photos of the entire Earth from space taken by the Apollo 8 moon mission, and that familiar shot of a tiny blue-green marble floating alone in the black distances of eternity graced the cover of Brand’s first Whole Earth Catalog. People made it into buttons for Earth Day 1970. The astronauts who came back spoke of seeing a planet without nations or borders, a home more like home than the places they grew up in. James Lovelock, whose “Gaia hypothesis” proposed a vision of the Earth as a single living superorganism, called it the most extraordinary image he had ever seen.

“When people look at Earth from the outside,” NASA scientist John Oró predicted, “some-thing strange [and] revolutionary will happen: people will alter their thinking.” And he was right. In those days, it was as if some cosmic aperture began to open in the human mind that helped shift us out of ethnic and national identities and into a deeper resonance with the rest of creation. This awakening to a heartfelt unity and affinity with all of nature and life—the same thing I discovered myself as a young man walking the prehistoric Sequoia groves and lupine-dotted valleys of Yosemite—is the foundation stone of environmental consciousness, the very platform of relatedness and responsibility that makes dark, bright, or any other shade of green possible. It changed the entire historical trajectory of the industrialized world, for starters. If you want to give yourself nightmares, just imagine what our planet might look like today if it weren’t for this flowering of spiritual and moral sensibility that emerged within postmodern culture in the sixties and seventies in response to the reckless exploitation of nature and the runaway materialism of modern society. Those were the decades of every major American environmental law, from the Wilderness Act to the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and Endangered Species Act, and in no uncertain terms, we have the evolution of consciousness to thank for them.

In his glittering exuberance for high-tech solutions and glamorous green consumerism, Sterling seems to have forgotten all that. “The cybergreens are winning,” he writes in a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, because unlike the rest of the environmental world, “they’re not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.” While he’s clearly delighting some-what in the role of the provocateur, his anti-spiritual triumphalism is not only shortsighted but confused. Imploring us all to become environmentalists in one breath, he turns around and mocks the very impulse that encourages us to do so in the next. This sort of hyperbole is obviously self-defeating, but it also points to a deeper irony within the bright green movement as a whole. In-deed, the greatest danger for bright green today seems to be that the very thing that makes it so progressive—its attempt to integrate postmodern ecological consciousness into the modernist project of economic and social progress—is the same thing that threatens to drag it backward into an overly materialistic orientation toward sustainability and global development.

Luckily for bright green, its center of gravity is not entirely settled yet. The movement has many voices, and Sterling’s is only one of them. Many tend toward unbridled materialism in the same way that Sterling does, if not so vociferously; others seem to recognize that being ruthlessly pragmatic about moving forward doesn’t have to mean flattening everything down to the lowest common denominators of “sex, glamour . . . and tons of money.” At times, progressive environmentalists have certainly been able to embrace technological optimism and capitalist ingenuity without rejecting spiritual idealism, and there’s no reason they can’t do so again. Bucky Fuller, for example, was a man for whom a certain reverential depth seemed to be synonymous with the attitude of progress. “I live on Earth at present,” he wrote, “and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.” Brand has always held a richer, more integrated view as well. One of his current projects is called “The Clock of the Long Now,” a mechanical clock that will be built to last 10,000 years out in the Nevada desert, ticking once a year, bonging once per hundred, and letting out its cuckoo each time a millennium rolls around. The idea is to create a public icon of “mythic depth” that will do for the concept of “deep time” what the photos of Earth from space did for our awareness of the environment.

In continuing to define and consolidate the next stage of green for the twenty-first century, perhaps the insights of the nascent field of integral ecology can help orient us. Environmental philosopher Michael Zimmerman is coauthor with Sean Esbjorn-Hargens of the forthcoming Integral Ecology, due out in 2008. “There’s such a revulsion against modernity among modern environmentalists,” he told WIE, “that their interpretation of modern history is always colored by the worst possible way of looking at it. But there’s no going back to a naïve time when humans are just like the other animals running around. It’s too late for that now.” At the same time, integral ecology would argue that as we take up the mantle and the moral burden of absolute creative stewardship over the biosphere, we have to make sure we don’t lose touch with the reason people such as John Muir railed against modernity in the first place. “Most people are on the world, not in it,” Muir wrote in John of the Mountains in 1938. “[They] have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” This is not only the perspective that gave birth to environmental awareness, Zimmerman explains, but the only perspective sensitive and sophisticated enough to sustain it:

Environmentalism has to align itself with a developmental, even progressive interpretation of human history. The developments of modernity are extraordinary, including the human emancipation from terrible political systems, the elimination of slavery, the elimination of poverty in many ways, the development of science, the separation of church and state, the development of rights for women . . . I mean, these are not trivial achievements. Yet there is also a dark side to modernity, which includes this continuing practice of domination over other species, and a kind of willful ignorance, at times, in regard to our dependence on the natural world. But the solution to modernity’s dark side is not to abandon modernity and regress to premodern social formations, which would just be a disaster. The only solution is to encourage and facilitate the further development of human consciousness, and the institutions and practices that are necessary to sustain it. We have to be able to go forward constructively, to open up and envision further developmental possibilities while respecting everything that’s gone before in a way that’s not naïve.

The crisis that confronts us is “unthinkable,” Alex Steffen likes to say. The solutions we must implement, he continues, are as yet “unimaginable.” And between these two seemingly paralyzing poles lies the liberating perspective of the bright greens. To stretch way beyond our comfort zones into the unknown, they propose, may be the only real shot at survival that is left to us. To let go that much, with both feet on the (hybrid) gas pedal, may be our only chance at moving fast enough.

“The most important thing that professionals in sustainability will have to offer in the future is not ready-made solutions,” writes Worldchanging contributor Alan AtKisson, “but an ability to improvise, adapt, innovate, and dream up still more visionary-yet-feasible ideas about how to transform a global civilization or rescue ecosystems in trouble. This is going to require even more exertion, more creativity, more risk. . . . In the next few years, people who have been working on sustainability, especially where it touches the climate-and-energy nexus, are going to be seriously tested—not by resistance to their ideas, but by the ever-increasing demand for them.” Perhaps our greatest asset in this enterprise of possibility and uncertainty will be the willingness to question everything—the courage not to take easy positions but to insist on searching for the right ones. Worldchanging itself is a real example of this in that they’re honestly grappling with the whole integrated matrix of sustainability in ways I’ve never seen before. Everything, it seems, is up for reinvention, and nothing’s off the table—including some of environmentalism’s heftiest sacred cows.

Two years ago, for example, Brand published a piece titled “Environmental Heresies” in which he called for a serious reconsideration of two of the most sacrosanct issues of the day: bio-technology and nuclear power. Setting off predictable storms of controversy, Brand’s arguments were mostly practical ones. On genetic engineering, he feels knee-jerk anticorporatism has won out over science and that genetically modified crops and microorganisms have the potential to dramatically ameliorate hunger and disease in the developing world, produce new and cleaner fuels, and combat invasive species. On the nuclear issue, he believes that our burning need to decarbonize energy production and avert the “universal permanent disaster” of global warming trumps the risks of nuclear generation and nuclear waste, which, great as they are, are nevertheless known quantities. Several prominent environmentalists agree with him, including James Lovelock, and heated debates are taking place on all sides of the fence. Worldchanging comes down more in agreement with Brand on bioengineering and less so on nuclear issues, according to the website’s cofounder Jamais Cascio:

The Bright Green reluctance about nuclear power has far more to do with it being centralized infrastructure and dated technology than with any fear or loathing of atoms. The environmental situation in which we find ourselves demands a fast-learning, fast-iterating, distributed and collaborative technological capacity, not a system that bleeds out investment dollars and leaves us stuck with technologies already on the verge of obsolescence. If we’re looking for resilience, flexibility and innovation, the nuclear industry is not a good place to start. With regards to biotechnology, resilience, flexibility and innovation are definitely possible, at least in the years to come.

In the years to come, I can’t wait to participate myself in the creative unfolding of a future so bright and green it’s currently impossible to imagine. And while the avant-garde eco-philosophers at Worldchanging and elsewhere are doing their best to question everything, reconfigure all our dark green assumptions, and blow the old sacred cows out of the water, I hope they don’t make a sacred cow out of spirituality. If the future of environmentalism depends on the evolution not just of our physical circumstances and social formations but also of the deeper interior structures of consciousness and culture, the most important question of all may be whether the bright green vision of sustainability is willing to grow broad enough to encompass these interior dimensions.

The good news is, I think it can. If Zimmerman is right when he characterizes the dark green call for a romantic return to nature as reflecting a kind of nostalgia for older, safer, more familiar structures of consciousness within ourselves, then why shouldn’t the call of the bright green future be the call to completely let go of them, making room for something as yet unknown? With bright green, the pressing moral obligation to take the fate of the world consciously and carefully into our own hands right now, or risk losing everything, is really inseparable from the thrilling possibility inherent in the human capacity for progress that we can make life better, richer, and more inclusively prosperous than ever before in history. And to me, that’s not just the voice of technological optimism. It’s the voice of the spiritual impulse itself.