#activating the solarpunk imagination

[cognitivejustice]

Tending a garden is about as hands-on as climate solutions get. On a basic level, putting plants in the ground helps sequester carbon. Vegetation can reduce stress and tension for the humans around it, and it provides habitat and sustenance for pollinators and other wildlife. Gardens can provide spaces for education, and, of course, sources of food. But the act of designing and planting a green space serves another, more metaphorical purpose: It gives the gardener agency over a piece of the world and what they want it to look like — and a role in conveying of all those aforementioned benefits.

That’s the premise behind Wild Visions, a challenge launched in the DMV area (that’s District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, for the uninitiated) in January. The project invited university students to design gardens with all sorts of visions and themes, then bring them to fruition this spring with native seedlings from Garden for Wildlife — an offshoot of the National Wildlife Federation.

For every plant the company sells, it donates one to a community project, said campus engagement lead Rosalie Bull. This spring, around 2,000 went to Wild Visions.

“We’ll be creating in total nearly 6,000 square feet of new wildlife habitat in the DMV,” Bull said. “And that’s just this year. We hope to do it year after year.”

In Bull’s view, this project has a distinctly solarpunk framing — celebrating a literary genre and art movement that conjures visions of a sustainable future, where nature is as central as technology. Although part of the goal was to get more native flowers in the ground, the challenge also hoped to “activate the solarpunk imagination,” and let students offer their perspectives on what the gardens could accomplish.

For instance, a group called Latinos en Acción from American University wanted to focus on monarch butterfly habitat, as a symbol of the migrant justice movement. Others, like the Community Learning Garden at the University of Maryland, were interested in exploring culinary uses of the plants they received, which included sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, milkweed, goldenrod, and aster.

[solarpunkbusiness]

What started as an idea for a new approach to science fiction has evolved into a worldwide community

There are people all over the world who believe a just and sustainable world is possible. Maybe you’re one of them. Oh, the details of how that world works will vary according to our individual priorities and values, not to mention the physical and political climate of where we live. But we share the same vision: a future in which we’ve tackled the environmental and social justice issues of our time in a way that brings humanity, nature, and technology into harmony. We dream of green, community-centered cities; of high-tech, ethical farms; of pollution-free skies and plastic-free oceans. We dream of a world of abundance and inclusion, with equitable resource distribution and flattened hierarchies. We know we can’t achieve this by following the same path we’ve been walking; we must work together to blaze a new and better trail.

We are artists and writers and musicians. We are activists and community organizers and urban planners. We are architects and scientists and engineers. We are gardeners and gamers and makers.

We are the solarpunks.

[gnome-punk]

Text: When someone asks my political views

Picture of a book titled "Everybody has a house and everybody eats"

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

3.4: Capitalism, Community, and Friendship with Joey Ayoub

Ariel speaks with Joey Ayoub today about the imaginative expansion of solarpunk, the “realist” impulse, climate anxiety and grief, and community building in a crisis. Also The Office. Trust us, it’s an important part of this whole conversation. 

Why is it easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than it is a generative, sustainable future? This question drives Joey Ayoub, host of The Fire These Times: in fact, this season of his pod is partially about solarpunk and generative futures. Tune in today to listen to Ariel and Joey discussing imaginative expansion of solarpunk, the “realist” impulse, climate anxiety and grief, and community…

[diaryofaphilosopher]

What are the features, knowledges, values, representations, practices, infrastructures, institutions, and governance modes of a just world that fits within planetary boundaries? How can we imagine them in a way that acknowledges the deep entanglements between human and non-human worlds while addressing the ubiquity of entrenched asymmetrical power relations that structure global societies?

— Ivana Isailovic, "Introduction" in "Radical Imagining of ‘Just & Green’ Futures."

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Against Lore

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

One of my favorite nuggets of writing advice comes from James D Macdonald. Jim, a Navy vet with an encylopedic knowledge of gun lore, explained to a group of non-gun people how to write guns without getting derided by other gun people: "just add the word 'modified.'"

As in, "Her modified AR-15 kicked against her shoulder as she squeezed the trigger, but she held it steady on the car door, watching it disintegrate in a spatter of bullet-holes."

Jim's big idea was that gun people couldn't help but chew away at the verisimilitude of your fictional guns, their brains would automatically latch onto them and try to find the errors. But the word "modified" hijacked that impulse and turned it to the writer's advantage: a gun person's imagination gnaws at that word "modified," spinning up the cleverest possible explanation for how the gun in question could behave as depicted.

In other words, the gun person's impulse to one-up the writer by demonstrating their superior knowledge becomes an impulse to impart that superior knowledge to the writer. "Modified" puts the expert and the bullshitter on the same team, and conscripts the expert into fleshing out the bullshitter's lies.

Yes, writing is lying. Storytelling is genuinely weird. A storyteller who has successfully captured the audience has done so by convincing their hindbrains to care about the tribulations of imaginary people. These are people whose suffering, by definition, do not matter. Imaginary things didn't happen, so they can't matter. The deaths of Romeo and Juliet were less tragic than the death of the yogurt you had for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, whereas R&J never lived, never died, and don't matter:

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

Hijacking a stranger's empathic response is intrinsically adversarial. While storytelling is a benign activity, its underlying mechanic is extremely dangerous. Getting us to care about things that don't matter is how novels and movies work, but it's also how cults and cons work.

Cult leaders and con-artists know that they're engaged in mind-to-mind combat, and they make liberal use of Jim's hack of leaving blank spots for the mark to fill in. Think of Qanon drops: the mystical nonsense was just close enough to sensical that a vulnerable audience was compelled to try and untangle them, and ended up imparting more meaning to them than the hustler who posted them ever could have dreamt up.

Same with cons – there's a great scene in the Leverage: Redemption heist show where an experienced con-artist explains to a novice that the most convincing hustle is the one where you wait for the mark to tell you what they think you're doing, then run with it (scambaiters and other skeptics will recognize this as a relative of the "cold reading," where a "psychic" uses your own confirmations to flesh out their predictions).

As Douglas Adams put it:

A towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Magicians know this one, too. The point of a sleight is to misdirect the audience's attention, and use that moment of misattention to trick them, vanishing, stashing or producing something. The mark's mind is caught in a pleasurable agony: something seemingly impossible just happened. The mind splits into two parts, one of which insists that the impossible just happened, the other insisting that the impossible can't happen.

You know you've done it right if the audience says, "Do that again!" And that's the one thing you must not do. So long as you don't repeat the trick, the audience's imagination will chew on it endlessly, coming up with incredibly clever things that you must have done (a clever conjurer will know several ways to produce the same effect and will "do it again" by reproducing the effect via different means, which exponentially increases the audience's automatic imputation of clever methods to the performer).

Not for nothing, Jim Macdonald advises his writing students to study Magic and Showmanship, a classic text for aspiring conjurers:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/11/13/magic-and-showmanship-classic-book-about-conjuring-has-many-lessons-for-writers/

There's a version of this in comedy, too. The scholarship of humor is clear on this: comedy comes from surprise. The audience knows they're about to be surprised when the punchline lands, and their mind is furiously trying to defuse the comedian's bomb before it detonates, cycling through potential punchlines of their own. This ramps up the suspense and the tension, so when the comedian does drop the punchline, the tension is released in a whoosh of laughter.

Your mind wants the tension to be resolved ASAP, but the pleasure comes from having that desire thwarted. Comedy – like most performance – has an element of authoritarianism. You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs.

Same goes for TTRPGs: the game master's role is to deny the players the victories and treasure they want, until they can't take it anymore, and then deliver it. That's the definition of an epic game. It's one of the durable advantages of human GMs over video game back-ends: they can ramp up the epicness by "cheating" on the play, giving the players the chance to squeak out improbable victories at the last possible second:

https://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2009/03/behind-the-screen.html

This is so effective that even crude approximations of it can turn video-games into cult hits – like Left4Dead, whose "Director" back-end would notice when the players were about to get destroyed and then substantially ramped up the chances of finding an amazing weapon – the chance would still be low overall, but there would be enough moments when the player got exactly what they'd been praying for, at the last possible instant, that it would feel amazing:

https://left4dead.fandom.com/wiki/The_Director#Special_Infected

Critically, Left4Dead's Director didn't do this every time. As any showman knows, the key to a great performance is "Always leave 'em wanting more." The musician's successful finale depends on doing every encore the audience demands, except the last one, so the crowd leaves with one tantalyzing and imaginary song playing in their minds, a performance better than any the musicians themselves could have delivered. Like the gun person who comes up with a cooler mod than the writer ever could, like the magic show attendee who comes up with a more elaborate explanation for the sleight than the conjurer could ever pull off, like the comedy club attendee whose imagination anticipates a surprise that grows larger the longer the joke goes on, the successful performance is an adversarial act of cooperation where the audience willingly and unwillingly cooperates with the performer to deny them the thing that they think they need, and deliver the thing they actually need.

This is my biggest problem with the notion that someday LLMs will get good enough at storytelling to give us the tales we demand, without having to suffer through a storyteller's sadistic denial of the resolutions we crave. When I'm reading a mystery, I want to turn to the last page and find out whodunnit, but I know that doing so will ruin the story. Telling the storyteller how the story should go is like trying to tickle yourself.

Like being tickled, experiencing only fun if the tickler respects your boundaries – but, like being tickled, there's always a part where you're squirming away, but you don't want it to stop. An AI storyteller that gives you exactly what you want is like a dungeon master who declares that every sword-swing kills the monster, and every treasure chest is full of epic items and platinum pieces. Yes, that's what you want, but if you get it, what's the point?

Seen in this light, performance is a kind of sado-masochism, where the performer delights in denying something to the audience, who, in turn, delights in the denial. Don't give the audience what they want, give them what they need.

What your audience needs is their own imagination. Decades ago, I was a freelance copywriter producing sales materials for Alias/Wavefront, a then-leading CGI firm that was inventing all kinds of never-seen VFX that would blow people away. One of the engineers I worked with told me something I never forgot: "Your imagination has more polygons than anything you can create with our software." He was talking about why it was critical to have some of the action happen in the shadows.

All of this is why series tend to go downhill. The first volume in any series leaves so much to the imagination. The map of the world is barely fleshed out, the characters' biographies are full of blank spots, the mechanics of the artifacts and the politics of the land are all just detailed enough that your mind automatically ascribes a level of detail to them, without knowing what that detail is.

This is the moment at which everything seems very clever, because your mind is just churning with all the different bits of elaborate lore that will fill in those lacunae and make them all fit together.

SPOILER ALERT: I'm about to give some spoilers for Furiosa.

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FURIOSA SPOILERS AHEAD!

Last night, we went to see Furiosa, the latest Mad Max movie, a prequel to 2015's Fury Road, which is one of the greatest movies ever made. Like most prequels, Furiosa functions as a lore-delivery vehicle, and as such, it's nowhere near as good as Fury Road.

Fury Road hints as so much worldbuilding. We learn about the three fortresses of the wasteland (the Citadel, the Bullet Farm, and Gastown) but we only see one (The Citadel). We learn that these three cities have a symbiotic relationship with one another, defined by a complex politics that is just barely stable. We meet Furiosa herself, and learn something of her biography – that she had been stolen from the Green Place, that she had suffered an arm amputation.

All of this is left for us to fill in, and for a decade, my hindbrain has been chewing on all of that, coming up with cool ways it could all fit together. I yearned to know the "real" explanation, but it was always unlikely that this real explanation would be as enjoyable as my own partial, ever-unfinished headcanon.

Furiosa is a great movie, but its worst parts are the canonical lore it settles. Partly, that's because some of that lore is just stupid. Why is the Bullet Farm an open-pit mine? I mean, it's visually amazing, but what does that have to do with making bullets? Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal – the solarpunk Green Place is a million times less cool than I had imagined it. Sometimes, it's because the lore is banal and stupid: the scenes where Furiosa's arm is crushed, then severed, then replaced, are both rushed and quasi-miraculous:

https://www.themarysue.com/how-does-furiosa-lose-her-arm/

But even if the lore had been good – not stupid, not banal – the best they could have hoped for was for the lore to be tidy. If it were surprising, it would seem contrived. A story whose loose ends have been tidily snipped away seems like it would be immensely satisfying, but it's not satisfying – it's just resolved. Like the band performing every encore you demand, until you no longer want to hear the band anymore – the feeling as you leave the hall isn't satisfaction, it's exhaustion.

So long as some key question remains unresolved, you're still wanting more. So long as the map has blank spots, your hindbrain will impute clever and exciting mysteries, tantalyzingly teetering on the edge of explicability, to the story.

Lore is always better as something to anticipate than it is to receive. The fans demand lore, but it should be doled out sparingly. Always leave 'em wanting more.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/27/cmon-do-it-again/#better_to_remain_silent_and_be_thought_a_fool_than_to_speak_and_remove_all_doubt

[solarpunkani]

I think one thing that would be nice to see explored a bit more in Solarpunk art/aesthetic posts is how Solarpunk will likely look different depending on where you are, what’s feasible in that area, weather patterns, etc.

Like its almost 5am so I’m gonna be rambly but like. A lot of the most common features of Solarpunk art so far are a bit of an art-noveau type look, with lots of stained glass. Heavy emphasis on solar power and windpower and trees. In no way, shape, or form am I going to pretend this is BAD! I love this look, I think its great and inspiring and I love the color green I just.

Maybe Solarpunk doesn’t mean ‘green’ for everyone everywhere. Solarpunk might be more… yellows, and reds, and oranges. If you live in a desert, where there aren’t a lot of trees. I’m thinking places like Arizona, New Mexico, Niger, Chad, Libya. What would solarpunk fashion look like in these places—I feel like embroidered jean overalls won’t be common here. Traditional wear from these places is GORGEOUS, and I’d love to see more of a highlight on it and these biomes in Solarpunk. What would the housing look like—how would you keep cool indoors and out? I’ve seen a few ideas put into practice, but what would you dream up? How would you make them fun?

Similarly, how about coastal communities? Sure there’d be lots of green—but green may stand for seaweed just as much as it would trees. Not to mention the vibrant blues of the sky and seas, and the rainbow of colors from coral and seashells and glittering scales. What would a solarpunk community look like along the coasts of places like Florida, Hawaii, Jamaica, etc.? How are some of these places already Solarpunk? Wind and solar power could be an option, but we can also use hydropower as well—what would a solarpunk hydropower system look like in your wildest dreams? Fish-shaped spinning turbines underwater, swimming like sharks? Would houses float and bob along the water? How would gardening be handled with mostly salt water around—rain water capture would be critical, I feel—or desalination of small amounts of salt water. What would the fashion look like HERE? What does it look like already?

What does solarpunk look like in snowy places—like Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia? When green comes around in spring and summer, but fall and winter brings expanses of snow and ice? Solarpunk fashion here would be a LOT cozier than the solarpunk fashion on a Florida beach. I’m imagining lots of furs and layers. How would traditional practices be used to stay safe and warm, how would energy be captured and stored during long and dark winters? Would communities here be more nomadic, traveling further south during the coldest months, or would they stay where they are and construct homes that easily stay warm with little output?

Its actively 5am now so if I don’t make sense by all means. I guess I don’t make sense. But this has been on my mind for a few days now and I guess as we get closer to Solarpunk Aesthetic Week, this can be a fun and interesting thing to keep in mind! Let this inspire your art, your music, your fashion, your stories, your musing, and how you reach out to others about the ideals of Solarpunk.

[paper-mario-wiki]

Do you do farm stuff Scout? Or would you like to? Like owning chickens or tending an outdoor garden, that sort of thing?

From ages 7 to 19 I lived on farms, and was made to be an active participant in maintenance and usages of the facilities I don't know why the fuck I'm typing it like this, but I grew up on a farm. I was kinda in charge of everything, but slacked a lot and my brother had to cover for me. That said, I still spent a LOT of time doing chores.

At one point or another I've been responsible for most every farm chore you can really think of. All the basics like raking leaves, milking goats, collecting eggs, feeding chickens- but also the big stuff like moving tons of hay, herding flocks, caring for large animals such as llamas, alpacas, horses, and cows, as well as delivering babies, gutting and plucking fowl (only chickens and turkeys, though I've also cared for ducks and geese), dehoring, hoof cleaning, corpse transportation, crop maintenance, winter ice removal by breaking up frozen water troughs in 10 below weather (thought this was usually circumvented by anticipating the cold and setting up water heaters beforehand), constructing enclosures, slaughtering pigs, and etc etc etc etc etc all that shit. Bunnies snakes mini horses donkeys. All that shit. Farm stuff. Ya know.

Moved away when I went to college and immediately plunged into a mixed-zoning district in the Fushimi district in Kyoto. This was a really good transition from rural living to city living, because mixed zoning districts have blocks dedicated to apartment complexes and family homes right next to blocks of rice fields and ponds, which was behind the 7-Eleven I bought most of my food from.

Now I live in a SHITTY mixed zoning area in SHITTY America where we never stop hearing cars because there's a massive parking lot nearby and constant police sirens, not because the area is particularly dangerous, but because there's like 2 police stations nearby.

My ideal housing goal, which also happens to be my current goal in life, is to reach a slightly more rural version of the Kyoto living situation. The goals are very distinct:

0. I'm editing this one in after the fact to note that while I've used Kyoto as an example a few times in this post, I'm just looking for an area that feels right and would happily live in any prefecture that fits my needs.

I want to not be tied directly to a visa which would draw me away from doing whatever work I really want to do, like my student visa did later on when school started getting worse as professors were struggling to learn digital classroom mechanics. The visa I'm shooting for is dependent on a few ideas I have for businesses, but that's still kind of a long shot.

I want to be in a position of relative financial freedom so that I can spend enough time genuinely living there instead of just being tied to a computer all day, limiting me to the world I already know. This one's the big one, so I'm still workin on that. That said, recently I've been taking some pretty massive steps towards making this a more tangible circumstance. Fingers crossed.

I want to have a home that I own instead of renting, and I'd like to work with a Japanese architect to actually construct it. Again, these are big big plans, but I think a life goal is a thing worth thinking big about. And it's not like I'm trying to build a mansion, or even a family-sized house, I think I'd be content with three bedrooms, a kitchen, and common room. Of course, in keeping with the "dream big" spirit, in a world where I've got enough money to have a nicer, slightly bigger home, I can imagine as many as 5 bedrooms. It's nice to imagine in this "perfect" outcome that I've got a reason to have enough space for guests to sleep over. A local community, or an otherwise tangible, real-world web of relationships would be nice. Like, Real Adult Socializing Shit.

I want to have a significant emphasis on self-reliance on this home. As far solarpunk as I can reasonably go, without biting off more than I can chew as someone who's kinda limp-wristed. In a gay way and a feeble way. I figure this will come down to solar panels, water filtration, a well, and a garden (or at least the space to have gardening stuff like pots and soil). Some chickens would be nice too, but I don't know that I'd ever take on livestock proper.

I want to be properly submerged in trees without being more than a 5 minute bike ride from a train station. Somwhere like Yase-Hieizanguchi Station in north Kyoto is a good example of station that's on the edge of a metropolitan area and the forest. There was an apartment there I almost got, but backed out when covid hit cuz I decided moving across town would be a whack decision.

This is a BONUS goal, but I think it'd also be nice to not compromise on a single location, and instead have a home out in the inaka, while also having a small apartment rented in the city I can go between whenever I need to. In a world where I can afford a plot of land out in the country, but would still need to travel into town for business, that would be nice. Though in that scenario I'd likely need to also take on the arduous task of getting a Japanese drivers license. If I know far enough in advance that I want to take this specific route then I could bypass that last one by getting an international license before moving to Japan, but after moving to Japan you're barred from getting an international license.

I couldn't tell you in honesty that I'm a Salt of the Earth, Red Blooded American Farmer in my heart, and in fact I could not WAIT to move away from the farm. I hated that I didn't have a say in living on a farm, and was made to take care of animals. But what I DID enjoy about that life was the stillness. The opportunities of perfect silence. The stars unobstructed by light pollution. The ability to explore. Those things I was incredibly grateful for. And as such, in my perfect world, I would like to live on something like a farm again one day, just on my own terms.

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Autumn and winter is a RUBBISH time for my love of solarpunk to be rekindled, because so much of what I can act on is guerrilla gardening. Alas, here I am, getting back to my solarpunk roots.

Do you have any suggestions for solarpunk activities we can work on in the cold months?

God I feel for this!!! Winter always feels like such a festering time to be in love with solarpunk. Not to mention how starved we are for winter content for solarpunk and lunarpunk in general. But yeah!! Here's some ideas to do in winter!!!

Out and about:

There are a lot more social clubs in your city then you'd expect! I know 2 different community associations in my city that have social clubs that go in adult field trips (like to farms and cafes ans boardgame places!!)! And have crafting clubs! And the best part is if their in your community, it's within a decent walk of you but it's almost always walkable!

Using a library!! For anything! Everything! In my provenance we got a saying "Use it or they

Graffiti- leaving kind messages or fun stickers all over the place isn't really a weather restricted activity for the most part. I know someone who made a Playlist filled with union songs and rebellion songs and put a code for it and links to how to unionize on stickers and did that.

Adopt a stop- more cities have these then you might think! But adopt a stop programs basically let you take care of a certain bus stop and this lets you add things (like good benches, shoveling and removing ice, asking the city to add heaters, etc..) you become the advocate for that bus stop. If your city doesn't have a program like it yet you can ask your city or community to start one since it saves a bunch of money on maitance costs!

At home:

Archiving and pirating - highly recommend doing it in a physical sense if you can afford it. Bc then you can give them out as gifts!

Create!! - Sewing, sewing for friends, knitting gloves/scarfs for ppl who might need it, make art to inspire others via writing or drawing or other mediums! Gift economies require gifts after all so make some!

Learn! - learning a new skill, like canning or how to install solarpanels. Researching in general, but also keeping up to date with local politics and what you can do on the ground there. Building up knowledge is such as useful even if it doesn't feel like your doing anything.

Connect! - Shoveling neighbors walkways, or in general connecting with the ppl in your immediate surroundings! They can help you out in ways you couldn't imagine, someone didn't bake often so they gave me 15lbs of flour!! And their extra pair of snow boots, I hadn't had snow boots since I was 12 years old and it meant the world to me. The pizza I taught her daughter to make and a cheap meal for them meant the world for them. These small acts really are what tie each other together.

Plan! - plan for next year, what kind of equipment can you gather? What do you wanna accomplish next growing season? Seed swaps are also a fun thing I know ppl will do in winter as they start preserving food!

[southernsolarpunk]

I am once again posting the solarpunk manifesto because I keep seeing people saying that solarpunk is just an aesthetic

Inspired by Solarpunk: A Reference Guide and Solarpunk: Notes Towards a Manifesto

A Solarpunk Manifesto

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.

The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.

Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.

Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.

Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.

Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.

Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.

Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.

Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:

1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)

Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)

Appropriate technology

Art Nouveau

Hayao Miyazaki

Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world

High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.

Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.

Solarpunk:

is diverse

has room for spirituality and science to coexist

is beautiful

can happen. Now

-The Solarpunk Community

[alpaca-clouds]

Utopia is always a Compromise

Someone asked me something in a private message, getting rather annoyed with my insistence that pretty much any and all conflict can happen in a Solarpunk world: "Well, what is an utopia to you?" And technically the answer is fairly simple: "An utopia is not perfect, but as good as things are going to be." And that is a claim I am going to stand by.

I spent yesterday pretty much the entire day writing a Solarpunk short story for an anthology. And that short story very much is about all that. About compromises. Because I somehow feel, that a lot of folks in the solarpunk sphere do not grasp two things about utopias:

Utopias are going to differ a lot depending on who you ask.

Because of this, any utopia is inherently political.

One person's utopia is going to be someone else's dystopia. Or to put it differently: Nazis imagine utopias too. In their utopias whole cultures have been eliminated, while a few rich white people rule over everyone else. To them this is what they imagine "the best possible world" to be.

Of course, Solarpunk inherently is a very left leaning genre and ideology. My Solarpunk utopia is anarcho-communist of course. In my Solarpunk utopia, there are no more nation states, and there are no more borders. Everyone who wants it is given room to live, and the other necessities to life: access to clean water, food, electricity, health care and education. The education system is a lot more self-directed by the students. And the electricity obviously is created by renewable ressources. Food is grown more locally. Indigenous people get their land back. All those things apply.

And yet, even my Solarpunk utopia has to deal with compromises. Because some things are always going to be a compromise.

Everyone who has been following me, knows that I am a prison and police abolitionist. And this means compromise. While I am 100% certain, that most crime can be prevented by giving people access to the ressources listed above, and allowing everyone a healthy life, some crime will still happen. People still will find reasons to argue. And in some cases arguments might result in violence, and in some extreme cases in death through violence. And some people will be more prone to that violence, for a variety of reasons. And I still think, they should not be "locked away", with maybe some extreme cases as exceptions. But all of that is always a compromise not everyone is going to agree with.

The story I wrote yesterday tackled two other topics in this regard, I have very complicated feelings about myself. Religion and mental health.

Most folks active in the solarpunk sphere are either agnostic or atheistic, or part of some more spiritual nature-related religions. And either group generally tends to have a big disdain for organized religion like Christianity or Islam. Which I - someone who has been abused for pretty much his entire youth through the means of Christianity - absolutely can understand. And yet, I do not think it would be right to overly regulate religion in a Solarpunk world. Even though a lot of those religions are very anti-anarchist in many regards, I also do not think it is the anarchist way to forbid someone else from believing in whatever feels right for them to believe. But that will undoubtedly bring further issues. Because where are you going to draw the line? No matter where you draw it, it is going to be a compromise. And some conflict will arise from it.

What if you have a religion that thinks queerness is bad? Or that thinks women belong in the kitchen? When is it okay to regulate a religion? Because you will not have political success going on and wanting to forbid the world largest religions. Trying to do that would be quite dystopian to me. You also cannot force them to completely change their doctrine, and even if you tried, they would probably still preach some of it behind closed doors. So what are you going to do? Which is the compromise you would take?

In the story I wrote, the main character was a queer guy who has grown up religious and struggled a lot with mental health issues because of it. Because he was queer and his family had been hateful towards that queerness because of their religion. Simply for the reason that controlling someone's personal believes was not right - but the family controlling that queer kid was not right either.

And mind you: We know that contrary to what atheists say, religion is not fully something people choose for themselves. There is some genetic component to religiosity. And if someone has grown up religious, you cannot just force that person to change their religion. That is absolutely akin to forcing a gay person to be straight. It is a violation of the person's rights and freedom, and will be very detrimental to their mental health.

But the mental health issue is another one that is a big topic for compromise in the anarchist way - and even in our modern democratic way.

Most progressive nations do not allow a person to be forcefully put into a psych ward, unless that person tried to commit suicide, or was outright physically violent towards another person. This is also the same bar that usually has to be cleared before someone has to be forced into therapy, and you basically cannot force anyone to take medication. But this is a compromise as well, that does harm as much as it does good.

Because even those mentally unwell people who might not be physically violent, still can very much be abusive towards others. Be it family members, partners, colleagues, roommates, friends, or themselves. And there can absolutely be an argument made that it would be better for everyone to set the bar lower before you can force someone into therapy, as they would probably even benefit themselves. Yet, we do not do that. Because technically it is everyone's personal freedom to decide, whether they want medical care or not - and because we have made the mistake in the past, of course, when a lot of people were forced into and kept under miserable conditions in psychological phacitilies. And we do not want any repeat of it.

But to come back to the story: The main character is abusive mostly towards himself - but this is obviously still harmful towards his partner and child. Nobody can force him to accept any help, after having made a bad experience in therapy before. But the status quo clearly also is not helping anyone.

And you will find those issues in a thousand of different ways. If you are anarchist, you are going to be against a lot of regulations, because those will always give some people power over other people, but where will you draw the line to regulate? Where will you allow some people to make decisions over other people?

Because in some regards this will always have to happen. And no matter how much you can argue: Every line is pretty much arbitrary. Which is why you will find some people argue for pretty every possible line you could draw in the sand. I can bring a thousand arguments for prison abolition - but the people who are for keeping prisons around, can bring a thousand arguments themselves. Sure, I think a lot of those arguments are bullshit. But they think the same about my arguments. And the big issue with those social topics is, that the science is not as firm as we wanted it to be. I will argue that there is some science clearly giving indications for prison abolition - but the prison abolition crowd such as myself does also assume a general scenario, that never has been tested in the modern world. We do not know if it would work. And I myself will openly say, that I have no fucking clue how to deal with issues like misogyny, where we have some data that suggests that once it has taken a certain hold even the best rehabilitation system will not erase it from someone's mind in about 30% of all cases. Sure, we might be able to get rid of it over the course of generations - but as an anarchist I also have to ask: "What do we do until then?" Because those misogynist men will kill and assault women.

I know it is easy to imagine that if only things were better, all human strive would end. But it simply is not the case. Partly, because some people will still struggle with one thing or another and develop bad ways of dealing with that struggle. And partly, because certain ideologies that lie at the root of so many issues cannot just be erased from the world from one day to the other. You cannot uninstall hate from someone's mind. You might through education get some people to be better - but not everyone. And this... Well, this will always create some issues.

[cognitivejustice]

Released in 2022, Strange World is thematically aligned with Solarpunk values. And while its Disney origins do have a certain greenwashing aftertaste, its keen interest in systemic change (rather than individual action) and its acknowledgment of Solarpunk’s debt to indigenous and afro- future-proofing is noteworthy.

Is Strange World an on-the-nose allegory? Yeah. But there’s also an argument to be made that its Solarpunk message has more bite than what the rest of climate has been slinging for decades.

[dipperdesperado]

guerrilla gardening is very cool

I’m really stoked to talk about praxis and solarpunk today. Hopefully, you all know what solarpunk is. I imagine fewer of you know what praxis is. Essentially, praxis is a term, used a lot by leftists, to talk about doing stuff. It’s a practice or activity, informed by theoretical and experiential knowledge. In our goal to create an ecological society informed by appropriate technology, we should think not only about the massive upheavals but the things that we can do right now. That’s where guerrilla gardening comes in.

Gardening in general is activism, but guerrilla gardening is like, super solarpunk. The rundown is essentially when you and/or a group of homies take some love-starved land and turn it into a garden (or just plant stuff there) without permission from the owner of said land. That lack of permission is what makes it guerrilla. This can lead to a better community, and supports abolition (of private property), autonomy, and collective resiliency. Ideally, you can get public support behind ya, and be able to work with the municipality to not get in trouble. The classic asking for forgiveness than permission, until you’re the one that can decide.

Where to Start: X Marks the Spot

When you (and your small-but mighty collective/affinity group) decide that you want to set up a guerrilla garden, the first thing you want to do is find a good spot. It can be that little line of grass that split up two sides of the road, a sidewalk bed, or an empty lot. You want to make sure there’s good sunlight and decent soil. If the soil ain’t good, but you wanna do stuff there, I’d recommend researching how to rehabilitate it. Obviously, that’s more work, though.

Once you have your target spot, you’ll need your tools and plants. Some basic things will be gloves, a trowel, a water source (like a can or hose), and plants/seeds. Some nice-to-haves could be mulch, compost, or soil amendments. It depends on what you’re planting and what your conditions are to know what you’ll need to bring. If you’re in a high visibility area, it could be nice to have some clothing that makes sure you don’t look suspect. That’s probably a good general rule of thumb. Act like you deserve to be in the space because you do! If you look suspect, people will think as much.

Prepping the Garden

Once you have everything you need, you’ll need to get the garden site ready. If you need to clear it out, whether there’s vegetation you’re not interested in, trash, debris, etc., do that. Ideally, you can also improve the soil quality with stuff like compost and organic stuff if you need to.

Time for Plants!

Here’s where the real fun begins. Get some plants going! You want the ones you pick to be a good fit for the target climate and soil. Even better if some of them are edible. When you’re planting, be sure to space the plants out and water them pretty well. If you're planting seeds, be patient! It can take a few weeks for the plants to sprout.

Garden Tending

Now that you have a garden going, it’s time to keep it up. You want to water them regularly and watch out for any invasives or weeds that could crowd out your plants. You might also have to add additional amendments to the soil, to keep the plants happy. Try to make sure to think about and account for issues in the garden. Whether that’s nonhuman neighbors or mean vandals, you want to try to think of ways to uphold the values of the project while protecting its continued existence.

Permablitzing

I also want to touch on some more specific types of guerrilla gardening. Firstly, let’s talk about permablitzing.

Permablitizing is a portmanteau between permaculture and blitzing. Permaculture is a type of gardening and farming that aspires to copy natural ecosystems to create harmonious gardens that are self-sustaining. It generally will include a mix of native, edible, and wildlife-attracting plants. Permablitzing is taking that permaculture idea and rallying the community to create a permaculture garden in a single day.

It looks a little something like this: volunteers collectively design and install the garden. They put in garden beds, plant trees, and shrubs, and install irrigation. There might also be compost systems, raised beds, or accessible walkways through the garden. Permablitzing is great because it’s relatively quick, it’s tangible and immediately garners buy-in. It’s more about finding the space to do this and finding people who are willing to participate.

Seedbombing

If you’re not able to work with a group, or you just want to be able to very quickly deposit new plants in places, you can seedbomb!

Seedbombs are small packages of seeds wrapped in soil that can be thrown or dropped onto the ground. This kinda stuff is great for rewinding and restoring neglected or degraded areas. Just make sure you do research! You don’t wanna introduce invasive or incompatible plants.

The basic seedbomb recipe is:

Soil

Clay or compost

Seeds

You mix them together, roll them into small balls, then let them dry. You can just toss them into your target areas. Seedbombing is great because it’s fun and creative while being a great way to un-neglect neglected areas. You can also do it alone or with the homies. It’s a very flexible guerrilla option.

Final thoughts

One of the most important things to think about when trying to enact social change is aligning your ends (the liberatory future you envision) with your means (the things you do to get to that vision). Guerrilla gardening is great to this end as a form of praxis because it allows for this to be realized in the here and now. It helps us realize that we don’t have to wait until people let us do what we think is right. If you see an issue, you can respond to it. Also, gardening is fun, gets you outside, and allows you to be more connected with the earth, which is just so so so good for you. Be smart, keep each other safe, and good luck with your gardening!

[gnome-punk]

Article: U.S. House overwhelming approves bill backing record military spending.

Working Families Party comments: Imagine investing this money into people instead of the military.

[is-solarpunk]

Accessible solarpunk

If a better future isn't for everyone, then it's not a better future. Therefore, solarpunk have to be accessible. If it's not possible, solarpunk strives for accessibility.

It may be hard to imagine accessible infrastructure while living in a place deprived of it. For some, it may be hard to imagine infrastructure being both accessible and beautful, particularly if only instances when accessibility is brought to attention are places that were originally inaccessible and fixing methods are visibly jarring. It's understandable: imagination, like everything else, is trained. But solarpunk is, if nothing else, at least an exercise in imagination.

Let's talk about some ways to train this imagination.

Urban activism / Accessibility activism

Self-advocating accessibility activists are marvelous invaluable source of mental imagery. Their goal is literally to explain what they need, how it looks like and why is it important. (And then to finally got what they need.)

They can provide you not only with images of accessible infrastructure in modern urban architecture, but also with mental checklists allowing to assess accessibility of whatever environment.

Traditional architecture of extreme environments

Maybe you aren't interested in modern urban architecture and want to explore something different, like ways of living integrated into extreme environment. Understandable, but it's not a reason for them to be inaccessible.

It's generally a good idea to check traditional architecture of people who lived in such environment for centuries. With few caveats tho:

It should go without mentioning, but never believe Hollywood about how space works and how people are living. It's not even their fault most of the time: cinematography is about creating story and a feeling, while accessibility is often about an avalanche of interconnected details.

Cross-check perspective, zoom in and out, compare wide panoramic views and close shots. Most popular photos are usually those with most dramatic and unusual proportions, which isn't necessarily reflected in experience of daily life in those settlements. For example: some of most widespread photos of Pueblo settlement suggest a high wall of houses built almost vertically on each other, with ladder as primary communication route and no stairs in the sight. In other views, they seems much more accessible - but those photos, as less scenic, are also less widespread.

Check type of construction, who uses it, how often and for what activities. If roof of the house is defacto daily room, it should be safe for elderly and little children to use. If there's only a narrow ladder to the roof, you may discover it was primarily used as a drying place for fruits and reed, and needed to be accessed once a week at most. Routes to the distant foraging spot used at a certain time at year needs different level of accessibility than routes between neighbouring houses, and that's okay. But it would be weird to use them as full replacements.

Pay attention to details.

Temporary disability

Having a broken arm with a generally able body is different than having a broken arm with a previously chronically ill body, and both of them are different than just having one arm, and all of them are different from having to deal with really heavy package. But they have some similarities.

By all means, use these similarities to train your imagination!

[third-world-punks]

✦ THIRD-WORLD PUNKS ✦ INTRODUCTION

“Who are we? We are the global South, that large set of creations and creatures that has been sacrificed to the infinite voracity of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and all their satellite-oppressions. We are present at every cardinal point because our geography is the geography of injustice and oppression. We are not everyone; we are those who do not resign themselves to sacrifice and therefore resist. We have dignity. We are all indigenous peoples because we are where we have always been, before we had owners, masters, or bosses, or because we are where we were taken against our will and where owners, masters, or bosses were imposed on us. They want to impose on us the fear of having a boss and the fear of not having a boss, so that we may not imagine ourselves without fear. We resist. We are widely diverse human beings united by the idea that the understanding of the world is much larger than the Western understanding of the world. We believe that the transformation of the world may also occur in ways not foreseen by the global North. We are animals and plants, biodiversity and water, earth and Pachamama, ancestors and future generations—whose suffering appears less in the news than the suffering of humans but is closely linked to theirs, even though they may be unaware of it.” — Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide.

We are THIRD-WORLD PUNKS, a blog devoted to cultivating a dark-academia aesthetic inspired by Latin America and the UK Punk Scene. I'm your host, PHILOSOPHIKA, a 33-year-old British and Colombian philosopher specialising in aesthetics (the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as beauty and ugliness and investigates the nature of art and the senses) and anti-totalitarian ethics. Keep reading to learn more about the aesthetic's main goals, sources of inspiration, and suggested hashtags.

✦ OUR MISSION

To create a Latin American take on the 'dark academia' aesthetic from the perspective of the region's actual inhabitants. The T.W.P. aesthetic actively avoids depicting the region as a holiday destination (fruity drinks, trendy hotels, sexy pool boys, designer sunglasses, etc.) or representing the culture through a tourist's eyes (for example, as exclusively consisting of festivals or big public events). This aesthetic should provide the viewer with an intimate portrait of what it's actually like to call this region home. Images of local food, daily customs, traditional clothing, distinctive architecture, weather patterns, etc., are encouraged.

To provide a modern fusion between Latin American (principally Colombian) and UK culture that does not reproduce the aesthetics of British colonialism. To this end, the T.W.P. aesthetic steers clear of antique botanical prints, colonial uniforms, overly beige colour palettes, floral chintz wallpapers or decorative accents, leather trunks, and/or anything even faintly reminiscent of a plantation. Emphasis is placed instead on UK Punk fashion and culture (think Camden Market and Vivienne Westwood), extravagant and eclectic UK (& European) architecture and interior design, and Oxbridge academia vibes.

To challenge what traditional academia looks and feels like, as well as its core tenets (eurocentrism, US-centrism, elitism, abelism, etc.). The T.W.P aesthetic celebrates and encourages out-of-the-box thinking, ethnic and racial diversity, neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ higher education experiences, as well as discussions of postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory, among others (think TWAIL: Third-World Approaches to International Law). Quotations, reading lists, book recommendations or reviews, and catchphrases along these lines are welcome.

✦ SOURCES OF INSPIRATION

— art deco/decopunk — art nouveau — solarpunk— steampunk — gutterpunk — latin american geography, flora & fauna — latin american culture — spanish colonial architecture — pre-columbian latin america — 70's & 80's uk punk scene — elements of cyberpunk — alternative fashion — maximalism — haute boheme aesthetic

✦ RELEVANT HASHTAGS

Do you want to tag something with this aesthetic on your blog? Check out the suggestions below:

#TWP —   #TWPs —   #TWP Aesthetic —   #TWPs Aesthetic | #Third-World Punks —  #Third World Punks —  #Third-World Punks Aesthetic —