051: The Guerrilla Galactic Gardeners

ENTRY 051: The Guerrilla Galactic Gardeners

Irregular eco-activists who pursue and promote an every-person approach to terraforming and xenoscaping, the Guerilla Galactic Gardners are an informal network dedicated to the promotion of small-scale, individual-action unplanned events to promote ecological change with the ultimate goal of spreading the growth of ecosystems throughout the solar system. While there are network tools for coordinating flash-xenoscaping events, the majority of the network is designed to promulgate and communication information and techniques by which an individual or small group of individuals can perform some small personal terraforming event. Major projects of the Guerrilla Galactic Gardeners include the Mars Garden located in the Okhotsk Crater, and the seasonal Europa Sargasso, but the vast majority of Guerrilla Galactic Gardening takes place in habitats, with small plants and fungal colonies kept in recycled drinking containers with homemade compost.

Detractors point to the relative inconsequence of the mostly uncoordinated efforts, which on a terraforming timescale are generally too short-lived and ineffectual to contribute substantially to a sustained terraforming effort. Worse, there have been moments when through ignorance or maliciousness GGG efforts have skewed toward ecoterrorism, particularly when they upset the delicate balance of systems in a habitat. The most notorious such incident was the over-oxygenation event in Harmonious Anarchy, when eco-activists seeded water weeds into the station plumbing, which over populated and causes a brief but dangerous oxygen swell. However, given the distributed nature of the GGG network and the widespread popular appeal, efforts to combat further such incidents is mainly accomplished by attempting to educate network members to consider and calculate the holistic effects of their actions.

Using the Guerrilla Galactic Gardeners

Mostly, the GGG is a background element designed to add or emphasize a small, interesting human touch—a morph hanging small plastic containers with little plants and flowers in otherwise sterile and high-tech habitat, school children outside in vacsuits laying down bacteria-rich nutrient strips to help transform a few meters of dusty Martian surface into soil, planting radiothermal heaters to melt centuries-old ice and release liquid water on the surface, etc. Occasionally, PCs may get caught up in a flash-terraforming event, persistent projects like the Mars Garden or the Europa Sargasso, or in bad cases may have to track down well-meaning but erroneous eco-terrorists whose efforts occasionally pose a threat to transhuman life, or at least the profits and properties of habitats and hypercorps.

Seeds

• GGG-enthusiastic belters have aimed three water-ice asteroids at Mars. However, while two are headed toward deserted, isolated craters, the third has been steered towards Olympus Mons. The PCs are hired to correct the course now, when a relatively small correction will safely see it impact somewhere else, and to do this are given an antimatter bomb and the appropriate instructions on where and how to set it off. However, the PCs still have to deal with the well-meaning belters.
• The PCs are asked by the GGG to smuggle a couple thousand homemade “garden grenades”—egg-shaped bacteria colonies designed to help kick-start soil production—from Titan to the Jovian Republic. The Jovians have instituted an embargo against unscreened bacteria, so if they accept the job, the PCs will have to find some way to sneak them past the authorities.