💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › viridian-gems captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:25:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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In 1998 cyberpunk author extraordinaire, futurist and design geek Bruce Sterling, whose works my fondness for is by now well demonstrated, started an environmentalist art/design movement and a mailing list to go with it. Lasting ten years, the "Viridian Green" movement was in some senses a spiritual predecessor of today's "solarpunk" movement, in that it was a primarily internet-based community of creative people interested in and optimistic about responding to climate change without renouncing modern technology or creature comforts (something Bruce slandered as "hairshirt green").
The archives of all Bruce's "Viridian Notes" emails are available on the web, at viridiandesign.org, along with an emphatic "feel free to archive everything yourself!". So, "Viridian Gems" is my project to do exactly that and archive the Viridian Green mailing list in Geminispace. This feels like a good match, both technically - the notes are just text and links so they translate to Gemtext easily - and culturally - there are plenty of solarpunk or solarpunk-adjacent folks in Geminispace.
The "Editor's notes" link below explains a little more about why and how I'm doing this, if you're interested. Apart from that, everything else you'll find below is original Viridian content! Notes will appear slowly over time. I don't want to just throw up a pile of slap-dash automated refromattings, but to do each one carefully by hand, replacing dead links (there are a lot of 'em!) with links to archive.org versions where those exist. The whole shebang might take literal years. Patience is a virtue!
The Manifesto of January 3, 2000