Welcome to E.A.R.T.H. Designed, written and rewritten by me, Cameron Green.
The first question people ask me is, what should I read? The "introduction" article for each E.A.R.T.H. section is something I'm putting care into. I have started a rewrite and after I finish that I am recording an audio version. So that's a good place to start, listen to the ones that have audio and you can see if you want to read others.
With that done, as promised here's the info you weren't interested in...
Each section of E.A.R.T.H. has its own introduction, articles and quotes etc. It's maybe not the ideal way to structure a website, you probably just want a single page that list my latest hot takes on things, but that's not what I wanted to make. I guess I was a web developer, and I practised in an industry that had one of its main design manuals called "Don't make me think". But I want to make you think, I want you to do the work.
Now some of the work I would like you to do is 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 extend or correct my knowledge.
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 that we didn't have many top level domain options back in the day. .com, .net and .org were it really and I certainly wasn't a commercial organisation or a network, so I took the least worst option of non-profit organisation.
History
So how did my website begin? 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 what he had been up to. He replied "teaching young people HTML". Naturally I asked "What is HTML?" and then Art dramatically changed my life by responding "Do you have five minutes?". Art showed me the basics of HTML and web pages: how to make a file with an HTML extension, open it in the Netscape browser, the basic structural tags like body, head, h1, a and p, and most importantly he showed me the "View Source" option in the browser. This was revolutionary and I immediately started trying to learn more. 18 months later, I enrolled in an IT degree and less than 10 years later I was working at Google. Sliding doors, never doubt you can change someone's life, even though you may never know.
If that wasn't enough, Art and the guys he worked with set me up with home internet service, which include a space to create a web page. 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 (most edition featured either a new repressed form of free energy or a new repressed cure for all diseases) at the time. For a taste of what was on my site, one section was purely about aliens, and of course that was the best performing section. I have since learned the importance of rationality, how to assess competing truth claims, and that marijuana is a fine 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. Also this was the 90s, repeating colourful backgrounds, animated gifs, yes it was a thing of soaring beauty that needed to be mercifully put to sleep.
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 a talented Australian cricketer also called Cameron Green making a name for himself.
So yes, as my page became an ever smaller point on the Internet, and slid ever further into search engine irrelevance, I realised the Internet wasn't going to be what I hoped. Probably the most troubling thing I learned is that very few people really care what the people around them think, 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...
I enrolled in University, and learnt a lot more about coding etc. The second version of my webpage I did during my first Uni break at in late 1998. The technologies of the Internet were getting every more interesting. Although it was still done in straight HTML as most things were at the time, I started adding a few Javascript bits and even some Java here and there. A few years later when I started learning PHP, I rewrote it to use it. I have created a static HTML version of the first version of E.A.R.T.H. 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 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/blog so I can read your thoughts too and maybe we can think a bit better together!
Ahimsa