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A Solarpunk Manifesto (www.re-des.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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!
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submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

From the book Plurality chapter 2-2

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submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Seems pretty solarpunk to me !

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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Waiting for it to be available in walk-in stores at a decent price, but it looks Solarpunk AF.

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Solarpunk games? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I've taken a look at Anno 2070, Timberborn, and Terra Nil. Any other recommendations?

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TIL of the text "bolo'bolo" (theanarchistlibrary.org)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I was searching for the "definitive" solarpunk work and came across this as a recommendation to someone else. I'm not sure it fits the bill, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers take place in a very solar punk setting where significant rewilding has taken place. The main character is a travelling tea monk (you don’t need to know what that is) who travels with what is called an ox-bike. Essentially the setup is an e-bike-driven lightweight campervan or possibly wagon. My impression from the book is that the front bike does not detach from the back.

I’ve done some literal back of the envelope calculations and I think it would be possible to make something like that in real life with our current technology. But I’ve not been able to find any prior art, except for the Wide path bicycle camper, which is more like a trailer than a campervan. My guess is you could improve on the if you made the bike built in, not least because it’s easier to stop without the damned bike falling over.

Have you ever heard of or seen anyone make something like this? Do you think it could work?

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

And yes, I know the shading isn't ideal...

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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We did it!! (feddit.it)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

What’s Canvas? Canvas is a collaborative pixel canvas similar to Reddit’s r/place, except it is open to (almost) the entire Fediverse! The event is going on from July 12th 4am UTC to July 15th @ 4am UTC (72 hours)

🌎 https://canvas.fediverse.events

We could try creating a template https://toast.ooo/post/3987393

UPDATE: I think I manged to create a template to follow. Click here and check if you see the solarpunk logo to the left of the big german lemmy. Help me draw it! 🌱 LINK TO TEMPLATE 🌱

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The Vaccine Test (open.substack.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Presenter is not me, and I claim no credit, but wowzah Scott Galloway really crystalizes and cements some notions I've picked up from the punk side of solarpunk.

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submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

"Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument." How the capitalist employer-employee relationship violates fundamental rights

https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

Solarpunk should emphasize democracy in the workplace and not take something like the employer-employee contract as part of the furniture of the universe

@solarpunk

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balkon solar (freiburg.social)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.


AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.

All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!

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submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Full Image

Kowloon was built as a small military fort around the turn of the 20th century. When the Chinese and English governments abandoned it after World War II, the area attracted refugees and people in search of affordable housing. With no single architect, the urban center continued to grow as people stacked buildings on top of one another and tucked new structures in between existing ones to accommodate the growing population without expanding beyond the original fort’s border.

With only a small pocket of community space at the center, Kowloon quickly morphed into a labyrinth of shops, services, and apartments connected by narrow stairs and passageways through the buildings. Rather than navigate the city through alleys and streets, residents traversed the structures using slim corridors that always seemed to morph, an experience that caused many to refer to Kowloon as “a living organism.”

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Solarpunk Pioneers Fund - The Idea (www.solarpunk-pioneers.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The Solarpunk Pioneers Fund is a private funding initiative with the goal to kickstart and fund solarpunk projects that develop solutions for a good and sustainable livestyle within the planetary boundaries.

We do this with private money that our family wants to invest into a better future, and we do this in our free time next to our day jobs. Hence, we want this project to develop organically, step by step, in exchange with the broader community.

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submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

n her 2016 Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein examines how Said's ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have been the silent partners to climate change since the earliest days of the steam engine, continuing to present day decisions to let entire nations drown and others warm to lethal levels. The lecture looks at how Said’s bold universalist vision might form the basis for a response to climate change grounded in radical inclusion, belonging and restorative justice.

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submitted 4 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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SOLPUNK event in Germany (solpunk.ukrudt.net)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Piped mirror: https://piped.video/watch?v=UVlBmdvIC6s

This channel is about architecture, and this video (from Nov 2023*) is about Solar Punk and covers some of the history and real-life attempts.

I was amused that shortly after talking about Solar Punk's rejection of consumerism she did the sponsor section, but that's Youtube for you.

* it's been posted elsewhere on Lemmy but not here that I can see

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