Author, critic, futurist, blogger, green design evangelist, Viridian Movement founder, and WorldChanging Ally #1 Bruce Sterling is online this week, engaging in his annual "State of the World" conversation on The WELL with WorldChanging contributor and longtime online activist-technologist Jon Lebkowsky.

Jon sets the stage for Bruce to comment on current and future trends in his singularly take-no-prisoners style. This conversation (which is world-visible, and also open for anyone to submit questions) is almost certain to spark your own synapses.

Just a sample:

Bruce: I'd agree that there is a frenzy of creative green thinking this year. I've never seen the like. Unfortunately, green doing, as opposed to thinking, is about forty years overdue. Even though there's quite a lot of green doing, too, it's starting mighty small.

Jon: How can we ramp it up? I've been working with Worldchanging, and we talk a lot about solutions, and we find a few, but I'm wondering how to orchestrate the solutions so that they synergize and produce something more than a lot of ahas and back-patting?

Bruce: Sell out, man. That's the answer. It's gotta be money. Huge amounts of money. Ford and Rockefeller amounts of money. There isn't any worlchanging mechanism that moves as fast, as ruthlessly, as comprehensively as the market.

In a recent Viridian List entry on "Green Plutocracy," Bruce commented on plaNYC, the proposed New York City sustainability plan:

So: who's Bloomberg? He's a technocrat, a meritocrat, a former Eagle Scout and Phi Beta Kappa scholar, one of the five hundred richest people in the world, a former Democrat, and current Republican (who cares? They're both for sale).

Bloomberg's self-set salary as mayor of New York is one dollar. He's hugely popular. "Hey, rich people: you bought the world, you fix it." Bloomberg is the kind of guy who would take a wisecrack like that quite seriously. Yeah, we're in an epoch of All Katrina All the Time, and we've also entered a Gilded Age where the ultra-wealthy can buy power over world capitals the way they used to buy a stable full of racehorses.

But, you know, what if this apolitical market mogul was greener than grass and actually did a great job? Not that that's necessarily so. I'm just asking...

...read more.

Image, small: found at Studio Camuffo
Image, large; found on blog at Walker Art Center