Welcome to E.A.R.T.H.  Designed, written and rewritten by me, Cameron Green.

So why does a website called E.A.R.T.H. not have a similar domain name?  Well, I tried to get a domain with the word Earth in it, earth, green earth etc, but even in the late 90s, it was hard to get those sort of domains.  Finally, I just registered my name, and today it's hard to get those sort of domains too. It's become more common to have your name as a domain now, but for many years after I got it people would say things like "camerongreen.org? Are you an organisation?", and I would reply "Well, you didn't have many options back in the day and I certainly wasn't a com (commercial) or a net (network)".

Each section of E.A.R.T.H. has its own introduction, articles and quotes etc. I would appreciate it if you find any spelling mistakes or broken links, be a good netizen and let me know.  Also if you have any thoughts, whether positive or negative, I'd love to hear them, especially if they contain information that might deepen or correct my knowledge.

There are sliding doors moments in your life, and one for me was in 1996 when I was working at the Internet Pub in North Melbourne as part of a government jobs programme. A guy call Art who was involved in running the "Internet" part of the pub came in one day and I asked him how his day was and what he had been doing. He replied "teaching young people to make web pages with HTML".  "That sounds interesting, what is HTML?" I replied and then Art said something that perhaps dramatically changed my life "Do you have five minutes?". He then showed me the basics of HTML: how to make a file with an HTML extension, open it in a browser, the basic structure tags and most importantly he showed me the "View Source" option in a browser.  This was pretty revolutionary to me, and I immediately started trying to learn more about HTML. 

18 months later, I enrolled in an IT degree and less than 10 years later I was working at Google in London. I don't think that would have happened but for a number of random occurrences, with Art's 5 minutes being a key one. Never doubt you can positively change someone's life, even though you might never know you did. 

My first page was called "The Esoteric and Compassionate Homepage" which I still have a copy of but is too embarrassing to put up. I was smoking too much pot and reading a few too many things like Nexus magazine at the time. For a taste, conspiracy theories involving aliens featured on one part of the site. I have since learned the importance of rationality, how to better judge truth claims, and that marijuana is a fine occasional hobby but a terrible lifestyle. So whilst not all my views have changed, particularly the compassionate part, the esoteric part no longer reflected my thinking.

Still, I don't renounce what motivated me to put the page up: I wanted to connect with people and learn through dialogue. I was hoping that my friends and strangers would read what I had written, and tell me what they agreed and disagreed with. I have always felt that putting our ideas out there is the best way to make them better, it gives other people a chance to add their knowledge and understanding to your own, especially where you get things wrong. This alas has never really happened. I learnt that no one cares about a web page amongst millions on the Internet. In the early days I could Google my name and my site would come up on the first page of results. Over the years it has slid precipitously down, made all the worse by an Australian cricketer also called Cameron Green making a name for himself. So yes, as my page became an ever smaller percentage of the Internet, and slid ever further down into search engine irrelavance, I realised the Internet wasn't going to be what I hoped. I also learned that no one really cares what the people around them think, which is slightly worrying, but maybe that's a topic for another ramble. There is a liberation in being irrelevant however: I don't feel cringey putting things up here because I know they may never be read by anyone but me. So anyone back to the website story...

The second version of my webpage I did during my first break at University, so late 1998.  I had learned a lot more about coding by then, and the technologies of the Internet were getting every more interesting. It was straight HTML as most things were at the time, and I started adding a few Javascript things here and there.  A few years later when I started learning PHP, I rewrote it to use it.  You can check out a static HTML version of it in all its glory here:

E.A.R.T.H. I - https://v1.camerongreen.org

Then in 2006 I was working at Google, and I felt the page was looking a little tired.  The fashions of the Internet move fast, pushed along by browser, standards and network improvements.  I started to redesign it, but it took me a long time to actually put it up.  I think it was maybe 2008 when I finally did.  I then got a job working for Global Action Plan, a charity that used a Content Management System called Drupal.  I wanted to learn it for work, so I rewrote E.A.R.T.H. in about 2010, I think in Drupal 6 first, and then I moved it to Drupal 7.  Here is a static HTML version of the second E.A.R.T.H. for your delectation: 

E.A.R.T.H. II - https://v2.camerongreen.org

Now we come to the page you see before you. Again for work purposes, I wanted to learn Drupal 8. Again, as well, the fashions of the Internet had moved on and the page was looking tired again. When the Internet was young and modem speeds were measured in Kb, we were very careful about making web pages small and fast. We used to try to only use small images sparingly etc, but now that has all change. It's common to have full-screen video as a background and although you won't see that on this site yet, you will see a lot more images. I took so long to finish moving to Drupal 8 that Drupal 9 had come out before I was ready to put it online.  So here it is, hopefully running on whatever the current version of Drupal is.

As for the name E.A.R.T.H. it came to me when I was in the kind of twilight stage between being asleep and awake one day, and I thought it summed up well the specific areas I wished to concentrate on:

• Environment
• Animal Rights - now called Animal Liberation 
• Revolution - the political section
• Transcendence - the philosophical section
• Human Rights

Most of the work on this website has been done with free and open source software, in other words Microsoft and Apple have had virtually nothing to do with it. The role of honour includes PHP, MySQL, CSS, SQL, MySQL, Drupal, Apache, Linux, Gvim, Drupal, Gimp, Perl, Sass, Firefox and so much more. Open Source is a model for the future of humanity.

I hope you enjoy your stay on E.A.R.T.H., please visit again and give me feedback on the good and bad. If you would like to see more content on here, let me know as I actually have quite a lot of unfinished writing laying around. Any suggestions for the site would also be appreciated. 

Finally, send me your site so I can read your thoughts too and maybe we can think a bit better together!

Ahimsa