Possible Planet Virtual TV Series

Possible Planet Virtual TV Series

Our “virtual TV series” is essentially a set of ideas, scripts, notes, and suggestions for a series of episodes that could eventually be illustrated (as a graphic novel), animated, videotaped, or otherwise developed, ideally through an “open-source” model, crowdsourcing the content, the dramatic elements, and the graphics.

The Concept

Here’s a diagram of the concept, and some background as to where we are currently with it. Stay tuned for more on this by signing up for our newsletter or subscribing to our blog posts.

Initially we floated the idea in an email to Delton Aug 29, 2017:

In this connection we had a bit of a wild idea, and that was to imagine a TV series based on Possible Planet, with the first episode built around Global 4C and what its implementation might look like, especially given your penchant for presenting it in the form of a narrative. At this point it seems a bit far-fetched, but it led to the idea that we could post a “virtual TV series,” with script outlines, on the web site, and even invite others to contribute to the scripts and the ideas on an “open source” basis. The overall concept would be a visit to the future, sometimes positive, sometimes scary, but trying to put the reader at the center of it.

Naturally the episodes would need to be dramatic and entertaining as well as informative, and tell the story behind the story, which in your case is quite dramatic, and could show scenes of your work on the Great Barrier Reef, etc. as well as the Climate Reality conference in Istanbul. We can put Al Gore and Paul Hawken in with walk-on parts. And if we like the stories and can’t get them produced, we could possibly put them out as graphic novels. (And that actually might be a great way to explain the policy.)

His response, a few hours later:

I generally like the idea of story telling and creating a narrative – as you described – and I think your ideas are at the scale that we would need to have a major voice in the ecosystem of ideas. I doubt that even Paul Hawken will come on board until we can actually get a chance to talk to him. He is on another planet with Chad cutting the relationship. We will need to work on that after the book chapter – I made some more edits and posted it to the reviewer – fingers crossed!!

I have been thinking about the narrative and I do believe that the new economy people (I mean the so-called thought leaders in progressive economics) have made an error by following the Herman Daly school of steady-state, which is a model that is appealing to the ecological economics. The sad irony is that steady state is totally unnatural and is not how ecosystems or biology actually works. They should know this but they have no other model to believe in, and so they have created a myth and an ideology, which excludes people like me from the narrative (it is intentional exclusion to push their models).

If you would like to bring the idea down to a scale that we can immediately finance, my suggestion is that we raise a few thousand dollars and write a storyboard as an ‘instruction animation’. We can hire the illustrators with an online service. We have the material and theory to explain the biomimicry and the thermodynamic solution. If it is done well, I think it could go viral, and then we might earn some grass roots support. The problem with Grass Roots is that we also need to be able to manage people who can provide us with resources. Receiving 100’s emails could be just a total waste of time…

The Plan

The next step is to lay down the plan to get from the rough concept to at least a preliminary implementation.

Update (Monday, August 24, 2020):

What we’re looking for is:

A video concept that is consistent with our current plans for the Possible Planet Mobile, including an entrepreneurial and educational road show, and for the sustainable local community development programs we’re building around PACE and the regenerative economy.
Part of what we’re envisioning is a series of conversations, recorded along the way, as we seek to bring transformational change to the way we humans interact with the biosphere.
We’re interested in looking for a new way to visualize The Race for PACE, originally a campaign to get towns on board with PACE, as a way of focusing on its use and implementation in communities and not just individual projects, and helping each and every community switch to 100% renewables.
The broader picture is the need to restore every bioregion, every watershed, to full functioning, both to support human life in a sustainable way and to enhance the environment within which we all exist.

We’re also happy to share our own story, and use it as a framework for the series, as we seek to downsize, minimalize, and focus attention on the systems we need to change if we’re going to become a contributor to the health of the biosphere rather than a detractor.

The overall tone of the series would be like that of the Bioneers, which is calm, considered, and informative. We are facing a climate crisis, but we humans will improvise ways to deal with it, as we have done with previous challenges. We’re continuing the American pragmatic tradition of looking at what’s possible, identifying opportunities, and organizing people to seize these opportunities to create a better life.

The initial outline diagram shows what we wanted to create in August 2017. The first question is, perhaps, whether we need a separate web site to build the series, and/or a special set of tools to allow people to contribute materials, script elements, and so on to the series.

Here’s the original graphic.

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