Shiny Green Visions

Shiny Green Visions is the name for a proposed documentary to be produced by the SolSeed Movement, depicting and commenting on fictional and real-world examples of the Shiny Green aesthetic, which embraces technology that works in harmony with nature. Since the fictional content is copyright and including it in this movie will require paying substantial licensing fees, this will likely be a crowdfunded effort. Ben Sibelman is planning to discuss the launch of this project at the Shiny Green Festival in August 2015.

Inspirational images

 * Shiny: Bullet train, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Burj Khalifa, Valencia's City of Arts and Sciences, Shanghai, Cirque du Soleil, the Olympics, the International Space Station
 * Green: Yosemite, the Guilin Hills, Victoria Falls, the Amazon River, the Great Barrier Reef, a flock of migrating swans, a herd of giraffes, Earth seen from orbit

Shiny vs. Green
We'll start by noting that technology and nature are often viewed as in conflict, with the natural world being gradually supplanted by human-controlled agricultural and built environments. Deep ecologists bemoan this trend while technophiles embrace it, claiming that Earth will be a better place under human management.
 * James Cameron's movie Avatar portrays a far-future iteration of this conflict in which alien hunter-gatherers are the clear "good guys," while the high-tech humans are just there to extract mineral resources no matter what the cost.
 * The novel Fallen Angels by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle portrays a dystopian future ruled by fascistic environmentalists in which the cessation of fossil-fuel burning has precipitated a new Ice Age.
 * Starhawk's novel The Fifth Sacred Thing takes a somewhat more nuanced approach, with the protagonists in a future San Francisco shunning some technologies but embracing others (and relying on magic as well). Their enemies, however, are stereotypical planet-raping technocrats.

Beyond the conflict

 * Ernest Callenbach's seminal novel Ecotopia describes a new nation formed when two and a half Pacific Coast states secede from the U.S. to pursue a vision of sustainable living that includes advanced solar power, videoconferencing, and high-speed trains.
 * The protagonist of Hayao Miyazaki's anime film, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, seeks to understand and make peace with a mysterious "toxic jungle" that most people see as a threat, which she explores using a futuristic aircraft.
 * The movie Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, portrays an effort to preserve ecosystems by carrying them into space in domed habitats.
 * Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 includes a major plotline about using hollow asteroids as wildlife refuges.
 * The Pixar movie WALL-E, directed by Andrew Stanton, features two robots on a quest to help restore Earth to health after it was completely trashed, enlisting the aid of humans who have been living on an enormous space cruise ship for centuries.
 * The Disney movie Tomorrowland, directed by Brad Bird, features an inspiringly high-tech city with biological elements and promotes technological solutions to environmental problems.

Futurism

 * The episode on the global climate crisis in Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos: a Spacetime Odyssey portrays a shiny green future city somewhat similar in appearance to the one in Tomorrowland, as well as a project to green the Sahara Desert.
 * Marshall Savage's book The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps is a beautifully illustrated how-to manual for people interested in spreading life to the stars, based on the idea that all life is precious and more life would be better.
 * Dandridge Cole's futurist work Beyond Tomorrow depicts hollow asteroids filled with living ecosystems, a vision that clearly inspired the novel 2312.

Real-world projects

 * Bicycles are the simplest Shiny Green technology, enabling reasonably fast human transport without the need to burn any fuel other than the food in our stomachs and the air in our lungs.
 * Wind turbines and solar panels are symbols of a Shiny Green future in which civilization could slake its thirst for electric power without harm to the natural world.
 * Earthships and Living Buildings are both types of green building that use solar energy, rainwater capture, and ecological waste remediation technology to obviate the need for electric, water, and sewer connections.
 * Tesla Motors is a company dedicated to the idea that shiny, inspiring automotive technology can be consistent with environmental sustainability.
 * Its CEO, Elon Musk, is also CEO of SpaceX, a company with a long-term vision of terraforming Mars.
 * Biosphere 2 in Arizona was built as an effort to simulate space missions in which life supports itself using Closed Ecological Life Support Systems.
 * The Eden Project in Britain likewise shows how to support ecosystems in enclosed environments.
 * The Federation of Damunhur in Italy is among the world's most high-tech ecovillages.
 * Bioneers is an organization dedicated to "covering the waterfront" of solutions to the world's biggest social and environmental problems, many of them embracing technology.
 * The Rocky Mountain Institute publishes detailed plans for how to transition away from environmentally destructive technologies while continuing economic growth and improving quality of life.