Solarpunk

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?”

Do you know the "Future Histories" podcast? It aims to expand our concept of the future by discussing a broad range of themes like alternatives to capitalism, degrowth, commons, cybernetics and much more. In every episode the host Jan Groos talks to interesting guests, who are activists, scholars or experts on their fields. I linked one of the recent episodes but I would recommend to check them all out. Sadly many episode are in german, but you can find the English episodes by searching for "Future Histories International".

On this server we are often victim of this stuff, i hope we can all improve

Are you an introvert but still want to make a difference?

Work is under way to create a mine water heating system which will supply hundreds of homes.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/122308

Indigenous futures thinking brings the expertise built up by Indigenous communities over many years into the plans needed for the world to adapt to climate change.

Vision is the most vital step in the policy process. If we don’t know where we want to go, it makes little difference that we make great progress. Yet vision is not only missing almost entirely from policy discussions; it is missing from our whole culture. We talk about our fears, frustrations, and doubts endlessly, but we talk only rarely and with embarrassment about our dreams. Environmentalists have been especially ineffective in creating any shared vision of the world they are working toward — a sustainable world in which people live within nature in a way that meets human needs while not degrading natural systems. Hardly anyone can imagine that world, especially not as a world they’d actively like to live in. The process of building a responsible vision of a sustainable world is not a rational one. It comes from values, not logic. Envisioning is a skill that can be developed, like any other human skill. This paper indicates how.

Hey solarpunks!

You are one of the passengers on a ship that has crashed onto an uninhabited island and have been given a section of the island to turn into your habitat. You have to start from scratch and build it in a way that respects nature and keeps all your necessities within a 15-minute walking distance.

Whats a good tool for tracking my emissions?

I think that often the confusion when talking about solarpunk happens because solarpunk as per now it's a term that includes different subset of its characteristics without being necessarily superimposable with each other

I think this reasoning applies well to solarpunk. It’s true that ethical consumerism doesn’t scale etc but we have to resist the urge to give money to the people who will commodify solarpunk just for cheap merch and media.

I thought this ingenious invention might interest some folk on here:

The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.

A street university for solarpunks, dreamers and activists is launching in the UK this February. The London School of Solarpunk (LSOS) is a space to invent new ways of urban living and find positive responses to the many crises we're facing.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

Last June, Pasadena, California — about 11 miles from downtown Los Angeles — decreed that June 22 was Octavia E. Butler Day, in honor of the science fiction writer born in the city on that date in 1947. The Pasadena middle school Butler attended was renamed for her in 2022.

Kia ora! I'm just another solarpunk in Aotearoa looking for other like-minded friends, inspiration, and advice on other ways I can green up my life.

We outlive capitalism. In a post-scarcity society, people do things not out of desperation but for joy. Xavi loves nothing more than putting on a silicon tail and swimming as a mermaid. She performs for children. Xavi encourages them and their parents to protect the clean water of the city’s canals. A community treasure, she is the first person who comes to mind when excited doctors develop a surgery to turn someone into a merperson. Xavi pioneers it, pushing the boundaries of transhumanism.

It's got little instructive explainers worked into the story. Good art, too.

Let me know if you have suggestions for short phrases that could excite people enough to investigate solarpunk.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22438897

Picture up top from yours truly, lmao

Today, imagining a better future is a powerful act of resistance. It’s a way of reclaiming our agency when it feels like the ground is falling away beneath us. This isn't about naive optimism or pretending the difficulties we face aren’t real.

I didn't know anything about Bhutan before reading this, so it sounded fairly Solarpunk to me. I'm hopeful for their new city.

I was digging up old layers of the Internet and found out about old (well, late 90s, early 2000s) texts by Bruce Sterling who mentioned his Viridian notes where he describes something very close to a solarpunk movement (sustainability focused tech and social changes). It is fun to read because some have very strong cyberpunkish vibes but with the twist that cyberpunk describes the world we are in right now and viridian is the world we want.

In just over two years, their small Hamilton-based business, Sustainable Plastic Solutions, has reclaimed 3,000 tonnes of plastic and has created a world-leading closed-loop circular economy for grain tarpaulins.

Didn’t plan on publishing my solarpunk novel this week. But it feels like the time for a story that’s radically hopeful.

Well, it’s happening here.

This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.

Events by initiatives across the world, which build upon Kate Raworth's *Doughnut Economics* (Summary by herself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=talXb1wiEFY)

Hello! I hope this is the right place to post this! I'm part of a small team launching Tractor Beam, a new fiction publication dedicated to optimistic visions of the future loosely related to soil, farming, agriculture, etc. We're doing an open call for short stories for our first issue. Details here More details / updates on judging etc, on instagram: [@tractorbeam.earth] (https://www.instagram.com/tractorbeam.earth/?hl=en)

This summer I read The Lord of the Rings to my eight-year-old and was struck by how much the themes continue to be relevant for the modern environmentalist movement. Ents destroying Isengard (the industrial power) is the classic example, but there's so much more. Mordor as an imperial, extractive power. Hobbits regenerating the land after it has been degraded. Gimli trying to preserve the Glittering Caves of Aglerond. And of course, growing trees symbolizing renewal and prosperity. So, I decided to write all these themes down, and compare them to instances where similar things are happening today.

First of all, detergent pods are for dummies who cannot measure the right amount of detergent for a job and those who don’t know that water hardness is a factor. They are for convenience zombies who cannot be bothered to think. So from the very start, pods are not for solarpunks.

The article is of course about the US situation, where the small scale and one-off nature of passive houses may be increasing costs.

I gotta say that I feel weird reading this examination of Octavia Butler's notes.

Wasn't quite sure where to ask the question in the title, or if this is even the right question to ask, but figured a Solarpunk community would be most likely to have the answers I'm looking for...

There was a post on Reddit that praised the ubiquitous "Dear Alice" commercial, and inevitably a comment criticizing praise for a commercial. This led to me to wonder more about who it was that made this famous solarpunk advertisement. The answer is an animation studio called The Line. I went looking at some of their other work, and came across this interesting demo short for what appears to be a proof of concept or pilot for a solarpunky animated monster hunting series.

About 23,500 of the 1.5 million customers that lost power in western North Carolina still lacked electricity on Sunday, according to Poweroutage.us. Without it, they can’t keep medicines cold or power medical equipment or pump well water. They can’t recharge their phones or apply for federal disaster aid.

I found this the other day, while I was paddling with a green kayak. I would not say it is solarpunk, but I think it could lead us to the right direction