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I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre. Have you looked into the groups like permaculture, regenerative agricultu

by hosh 5y ago

I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre. Have you looked into the groups like permaculture, regenerative agriculture, Stamet’s work with mycology, Dr John Todd’s work on ecovats ? The earthship designs? What about the practices Cuba had to adopt when they were under embargo, and could no longer import oil or synthetic fertilizer? There are a lot of things we can do. There are already solutions that work. People are doing them. They require a shift in how you view the world. By comparison, solar panels and wind turbines are simplistic solutions that do not adequately address these problems. I am coming to the conclusion that more technology will not solve these problems because the world view and paradigm that spawned these technologies are what lead us here. That rather than viewing the world as if it were mechanisms that can be reduced to isolated, cause-and-effects, and solutions that come from acting upon things in the system through the application of some kind of force, one can see the world as a living system, that is capable of growth of regeneration. This not only includes ecologies and our individual bodies, but also organizations, businesses, communities, and technologies.

sverona 5y ago
What exactly is your criticism? Saying "more technology will solve it!" is not really the point of solarpunk. Most of the solarpunks I know, including myself, are also broadly described as anarchists. "A shift in how you view the world" is something that happened to us long ago.
- hosh 5y ago
  I was talking about a shift from a Machine Worldview to that of a Living Systems Worldview. You can be an anarchist with or without that kind of a shift. Perhaps you could share your views of solarpunk. Maybe I don’t really understand it and I just see it as slapping a bunch of solar panels on houses.
  - pkdpic 5y ago
    I kind of dig the visual of solarpunk just being a bunch of millennials slapping solar panels on houses and Ive shared some version of the same concern I think. In any case sorry to tag along on the thread but Im a dev and visual artist trying to find some way to get more involved with part of the solarpunk community. Binge-reading Kim Stanley Robinson right now but totally isolated. Anybody have a discord or irc suggestion or anything?
  - ahevia 5y ago
    A decent video on the topic: https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88 https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88 Just to add my +1. I have also never seen Solarpunk as a "just slap solar panels on houses" but rather using the minimum possible technology to enhance what nature has to offer and live alongside it. Kind of like mixing the practices indigenous peoples with minimalist tech. The Cuba example you used is nice. After my family fled Cuba they worked hard to ensure our household kept many of the same cultural practices. That partially informs my view of Solarpunk as well.
  - sverona 5y ago
    So there's a climate apocalypse coming. I spent a while being blackpilled on it until I tried to hurt myself because of the stress that put on me mentally. I view solarpunk as being the things that you mentioned (some of which I wasn't aware of, thanks!) plus a general attitude of "yes, things are very bad, and they're gonna get worse, but we'll work now so we can live later, we'll meet the challenge in some way, we'll fight capitalism and kyriarchy, we'll build community, we'll build resilient structures, we'll live." Are these foolish hopes? They might be. But I'd rather hope foolishly than be a collapsenik who truly believes there is nothing left to live for.
    - dougmwne 5y ago
      I'm not sure where you see your personal role at, but I think if you spent any time being blackpilled then you really need to step back and reconnect to your own sphere of influence. These are huge issues and they are way beyond us individually. They are not yours to solve unless I am unknowingly talking to a head of state. I say this as someone who has spent most of my career working with environmental nonprofits and have been on the ground and in the room on these issues many a time and with many of the people who influence US policy. Finding a way to act is helpful, despair is not. I appreciate Solarpunk as a budding eco ideology, it just feels pretty early for it to have any real solutions or influence. But if its proponents keep sharpening it then I hope to see it enter the arena of serious ideas about how we get ourselves out of this mess.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > broadly described as anarchists This is a bit much. From what I can tell, most solarpunks are mostly just social anarchists (in the sense of anarcho-socialists) and not individualist anarchists. It's a bit frustrating to see this split glossed over by anarchists who think their anarchism is the "true anarchism".
artpi 5y ago
( OP here ). For me the core of Solarpunk is that we need to work with nature and we need to inspire people to do so. In my definition, your suggestions are very much in line! Contrary to some communities, I consider "overthrowing capitalism" NOT a consideration of Solarpunk, and a detractor.
- hosh 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing. You are the second person I have met who espoused that view of solarpunk. So maybe I should give it another chance. I get the sentiment on “overthrowing capitalism”. Since encountering Carol Sanford’s work, I came to see that it isn’t capitaism per se as much as value extraction; and even there, there is a personal growth and developmental stage where someone or communities grow beyond value extraction to something else. Sanford’s work have been very useful for me to understand how to identify and articulate the world view and paradigm from which people are speaking from. As such, one of the things I think I see in art or discourse produced on solarpunk is clinging to a machine worldview while trying to work with nature. Instead, if everything were seen as living systems, one finds the appropriate place for technologies and machines (and businesses and commercial concerns), then it isn’t even about working with nature as if nature were separate from our daily lives. Our role as humans are not about trying to save the planet, but rather, a _participant_ in the ecology as a steward. We’re not above and separate, but already interconnected.
causi 5y ago
I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre. Indeed. Solarpunk enthusiasts are by and large insufferable, being people who get off on the aesthetic of sustainably solving problems but don't ever feel like doing the hard math of planning on how to maintain a technological society while doing it. It's as if steampunk cosplayers were a voting bloc.
- Hexayurt 5y ago
  A lot of the problem is that when the lefties arrived, it went from artistic and creative to a really shoddy, greyed out political shadow of itself. It was promising for a while.
dougmwne 5y ago
> By comparison, solar panels and wind turbines are simplistic solutions that do not adequately address these problems. Yes, that's exactly my perspective. The problems are enormously complex and will require a complete rethinking of every process lifecycle. Without that we will inevitably hit one carrying capacity limit or another. Today it's carbon, tomorrow it's water, the day after it's soil. Pasting solar panels all over everything is a gross oversimplification of the work before us as a species. We will find ways to reach for sustainability and settle for mitigation along the way, sometimes only when we are absolutely forced. The solutions will reach into thousands of seperate domains. If the first three centuries of industrial development were about building our capabilities, the next three will be discovering how not to lose them.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  In other words, solar panels and wind turbines are where we start the work. They still need to happen. We can't just get from here to sustainability in one jump. Even if we could figure out how a sustainable civilization looks - which we can't, because it's too complex a challenge - we still couldn't just make all the changes happen at once. It's not how human societies work at scale.
FredPret 5y ago
Moving from more abstract to more concrete, it starts with philosophy and arts (what is desirable), then engineering and business (how to get to the desirable situation). Now that the world has mostly established that the ecosystem is both important and interconnected, I think it's a matter of time before we come up with the technologies and business models to act accordingly
donkey-hotei 5y ago
This seems like a place to plug for the study of social ecology: https://social-ecology.org/ https://social-ecology.org/ Liberatory technologies, like the ones you mention, are just a piece of the puzzle. A tenant of social ecology is that "humans problems with nature come from humans social ills".
timClicks 5y ago
> I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aesthetic, and literary genre. It's nascent and formative. I mean, even the "Solarpunk Manifesto"[1] is a cluttered mess. The best is yet to come. [1] https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/ https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/

by hosh 5y ago

sverona 5y ago

What exactly is your criticism? Saying "more technology will solve it!" is not really the point of solarpunk. Most of the solarpunks I know, including myself, are also broadly described as anarchists. "A shift in how you view the world" is something that happened to us long ago.

hosh 5y ago
I was talking about a shift from a Machine Worldview to that of a Living Systems Worldview. You can be an anarchist with or without that kind of a shift. Perhaps you could share your views of solarpunk. Maybe I don’t really understand it and I just see it as slapping a bunch of solar panels on houses.
- pkdpic 5y ago
  I kind of dig the visual of solarpunk just being a bunch of millennials slapping solar panels on houses and Ive shared some version of the same concern I think. In any case sorry to tag along on the thread but Im a dev and visual artist trying to find some way to get more involved with part of the solarpunk community. Binge-reading Kim Stanley Robinson right now but totally isolated. Anybody have a discord or irc suggestion or anything?
- ahevia 5y ago
  A decent video on the topic: https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88 https://youtu.be/u3aauiR9M88 Just to add my +1. I have also never seen Solarpunk as a "just slap solar panels on houses" but rather using the minimum possible technology to enhance what nature has to offer and live alongside it. Kind of like mixing the practices indigenous peoples with minimalist tech. The Cuba example you used is nice. After my family fled Cuba they worked hard to ensure our household kept many of the same cultural practices. That partially informs my view of Solarpunk as well.
- sverona 5y ago
  So there's a climate apocalypse coming. I spent a while being blackpilled on it until I tried to hurt myself because of the stress that put on me mentally. I view solarpunk as being the things that you mentioned (some of which I wasn't aware of, thanks!) plus a general attitude of "yes, things are very bad, and they're gonna get worse, but we'll work now so we can live later, we'll meet the challenge in some way, we'll fight capitalism and kyriarchy, we'll build community, we'll build resilient structures, we'll live." Are these foolish hopes? They might be. But I'd rather hope foolishly than be a collapsenik who truly believes there is nothing left to live for.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    I'm not sure where you see your personal role at, but I think if you spent any time being blackpilled then you really need to step back and reconnect to your own sphere of influence. These are huge issues and they are way beyond us individually. They are not yours to solve unless I am unknowingly talking to a head of state. I say this as someone who has spent most of my career working with environmental nonprofits and have been on the ground and in the room on these issues many a time and with many of the people who influence US policy. Finding a way to act is helpful, despair is not. I appreciate Solarpunk as a budding eco ideology, it just feels pretty early for it to have any real solutions or influence. But if its proponents keep sharpening it then I hope to see it enter the arena of serious ideas about how we get ourselves out of this mess.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> broadly described as anarchists This is a bit much. From what I can tell, most solarpunks are mostly just social anarchists (in the sense of anarcho-socialists) and not individualist anarchists. It's a bit frustrating to see this split glossed over by anarchists who think their anarchism is the "true anarchism".

artpi 5y ago

( OP here ). For me the core of Solarpunk is that we need to work with nature and we need to inspire people to do so. In my definition, your suggestions are very much in line! Contrary to some communities, I consider "overthrowing capitalism" NOT a consideration of Solarpunk, and a detractor.

hosh 5y ago
Thank you for sharing. You are the second person I have met who espoused that view of solarpunk. So maybe I should give it another chance. I get the sentiment on “overthrowing capitalism”. Since encountering Carol Sanford’s work, I came to see that it isn’t capitaism per se as much as value extraction; and even there, there is a personal growth and developmental stage where someone or communities grow beyond value extraction to something else. Sanford’s work have been very useful for me to understand how to identify and articulate the world view and paradigm from which people are speaking from. As such, one of the things I think I see in art or discourse produced on solarpunk is clinging to a machine worldview while trying to work with nature. Instead, if everything were seen as living systems, one finds the appropriate place for technologies and machines (and businesses and commercial concerns), then it isn’t even about working with nature as if nature were separate from our daily lives. Our role as humans are not about trying to save the planet, but rather, a _participant_ in the ecology as a steward. We’re not above and separate, but already interconnected.

causi 5y ago

I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aestheric, and literary genre. Indeed. Solarpunk enthusiasts are by and large insufferable, being people who get off on the aesthetic of sustainably solving problems but don't ever feel like doing the hard math of planning on how to maintain a technological society while doing it. It's as if steampunk cosplayers were a voting bloc.

Hexayurt 5y ago
A lot of the problem is that when the lefties arrived, it went from artistic and creative to a really shoddy, greyed out political shadow of itself. It was promising for a while.

dougmwne 5y ago

> By comparison, solar panels and wind turbines are simplistic solutions that do not adequately address these problems. Yes, that's exactly my perspective. The problems are enormously complex and will require a complete rethinking of every process lifecycle. Without that we will inevitably hit one carrying capacity limit or another. Today it's carbon, tomorrow it's water, the day after it's soil. Pasting solar panels all over everything is a gross oversimplification of the work before us as a species. We will find ways to reach for sustainability and settle for mitigation along the way, sometimes only when we are absolutely forced. The solutions will reach into thousands of seperate domains. If the first three centuries of industrial development were about building our capabilities, the next three will be discovering how not to lose them.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
In other words, solar panels and wind turbines are where we start the work. They still need to happen. We can't just get from here to sustainability in one jump. Even if we could figure out how a sustainable civilization looks - which we can't, because it's too complex a challenge - we still couldn't just make all the changes happen at once. It's not how human societies work at scale.

FredPret 5y ago

Moving from more abstract to more concrete, it starts with philosophy and arts (what is desirable), then engineering and business (how to get to the desirable situation). Now that the world has mostly established that the ecosystem is both important and interconnected, I think it's a matter of time before we come up with the technologies and business models to act accordingly

donkey-hotei 5y ago

This seems like a place to plug for the study of social ecology: https://social-ecology.org/ https://social-ecology.org/ Liberatory technologies, like the ones you mention, are just a piece of the puzzle. A tenant of social ecology is that "humans problems with nature come from humans social ills".

timClicks 5y ago

> I have been disappointed with Solarpunk as a movement, aesthetic, and literary genre. It's nascent and formative. I mean, even the "Solarpunk Manifesto"[1] is a cluttered mess. The best is yet to come. [1] https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/ https://www.re-des.org/a-solarpunk-manifesto/