This month's issue of Wired magazine is all about the old environmental problems and a whole new set of environmental answers. It's the first issue of Wired I've bought in a long time, and the most hopeful piece of literature I've seen come out of the environmental movement...ever.

The cover, featuring an eerie picture of Al Gore, espouses “The Pro-Tech, Pro-Growth Fight to Stop Global Warming.” The magazine includes feature stories on Neo-Greens , people who understand, care and vote with their wallets, and one particularly ecogeeky article on “The Next Green Revolution .”

The thesis of this article (written by World Changing Editor Alex Steffen) is that technology isn't anti-environmental intrinsically, it's anti-environmental because most of it was conceived before we had a clue how the planet worked. The answer to our problems, thus, is not avoiding technology, but embracing and restructuring it.

“You don't change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of save the earth bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster.”

Thanks Alex, for writing a possible mission statement for EcoGeek that includes the phrase “Hair Shirt,” we definitely could never have done that on our own.

Is this article overly-optimistic, Utopian techno-pandering? Or is it a more clear outline of the future of the environmental movement? Probably both. And certainly worth reading.