Decades ago, Bruce Sterling — no love lost between us, but credit where it’s due, however grudgingly — tried to launch what he called Viridian Design, a manifesto-ish thingie aimed at making ecological thought sexy or something along those line. My joke-not-joke analogy when he was circulating a draft was that he wanted to do to environmentalism what Verso did to British Marxism. In retrospect, I understand my reservations a bit better: his focus on reception was basically consumerist, where what we need is something more structural — a reformation in poetics. Like this, a new way to hear through the endless empire of technocracy : “a climate change-induced landslide in eastern Greenland triggered a tsunami, which sloshed back and forth in a narrow fjord for nine days. The rhythmic slamming of water between the tall, steep parallel banks created detectable vibrations in the Earth’s crust.”