Solarpunk

Hey solarpunks!

I'm Clockwork, an Italian solarpunk physicist, juggler and writer. I would like share my website with you; I've set it up two years ago with zero html knowledge and I have given it a new revamp recently. Since I write in English but the publishing system is extremely walled, I want to make myself known among likeminded people without selling my soul.

I write mostly solarpunk (you can check out the short story page and the Meteorina "saga" (three long stories, with a fourth one coming soon), but you can also find some Neolithic fantasy and scifi with community and resistance themes. All stories are FREE TO DOWNLOAD; there are no Amazon links and most files are interoperable and freely accessible. There is a donation button but I'd rather you enjoy these stories in a non-transactional way.

I hope you will find them interesting and possibly get inspired!

EDIT: I'm an idiot, here's the link! Thank you for pointing it out 😅

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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25383874

Whats a good tool for tracking my emissions?

I tried apps like Klima and Earth Hero. Earth Hero is especially good but I would like to play with the numbers myself for specific scenarios like snapshots of my emissions, planning my next year, logging my specific air travel, hobbies, etc.

If anyone has a spreadsheet model I would be grateful. Otherwise I can build one. Earth Hero gives a lot of references to their source models.

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

2 examples:

• can have solarpunk aesthetic produced in a non solarpunk way
• can have solarpunk movements not relying on the solarpunk aesthethic

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.

For example: game full of bad messages but made by a workers coop and ethically distributed > game with solarpunk aesthethic made by limited liability company that took or wants to take VCs money and run in the capital race

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

The SunSaluter is a solar panel rotator designed for the developing world. Using only the power of gravity with a water clock, the SunSaluter enables a solar panel to passively follow the sun throughout the day, boosting energy output by 30% and producing four liters of clean drinking water.

https://www.sunsaluter.org/

From Field to Form: Mycelium with the Architectural League of New YorkFrom Field to Form: Mycelium with the Architectural League of New York

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

"We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator," he told The Register.

Edit, because I think folks may be confused due to the quote I put in. They are not installing crypto miners into water heaters. That was just their original inspiration. Sorry for the confusion.

"We're not looking at serving real time workloads, we're not doing websites, databases, message queue servers," Jordan explained. "Our ideal job is; here's a chunk of data, go and process that for some hours. And here's the result," he said.

This could still prove useful for 3D rendering workloads, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and others where there is a lot of CPU or GPU processing, he claimed.

I think this story is a solarpunk seed, where communities come together to face environmental disaster, against a predominant narrative of hate.

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.

Facilitated by the Idea Factory, it’s a 4-week programme taking place in Hackney for up to 15 participants. It will feature lectures ranging from social art to energy humanities as well as cooperative economies and creative activism. Those taking part will also co-design group readings, discussions and social experiments.

Bonus: what aspects do you want to change in the future to be more solarpunk

Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)

The beautiful open vistas and bountiful plants and animals described by early European explorers were not an untouched wilderness in which humans played no role. (...) Native people created the landscape that Europeans encountered: “Lands adapted to them as they adapted to landscapes.”

Fires, many of them intentionally set, also shaped much of California’s vegetation before European colonization.

Native communities treated fire as an ally to increase biodiversity, improve basket materials, encourage healthier berries, control pests and diseases, enhance the growth of grasses and bulbs, germinate seeds, encourage mushroom growth, and reduce the chances of high-intensity fires.

According to Hankins and other experts, Western methods of fire suppression are largely to blame for California’s catastrophic fires that are becoming increasingly common every summer. The removal of Indigenous people and their land-tending practices, such as intentional burning, went hand in hand with misguided fire-suppression policies.

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.

Butler, who died in 2006, has in the past few years been celebrated nationally, including posthumous profiles in the New York Times, New York magazine, and more. Particular attention has been paid to the prescience of her Parable series of books. Organizers and artists, like adrienne maree brown, spent the 2010s calling attention to Butler’s work — and her warnings.

The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, begins on July 20, 2024, the 15th birthday of Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. Olamina grew up in the fictional LA suburb of Robledo, described by Los Angeles journalist, essayist, and author Lynell George as “a struggling walled suburb… besieged by severe drought; class wars; violent, fire-setting scavengers; and a long-embattled population seized by political apathy.” In the second book, Parable of the Talents, published in 1998, a candidate runs using the slogan “Make America Great Again.”

Economic consolidation is killing us. Robbing us of value, dismantling the financial fabric of our society, and disconnecting us from one another. From Walmart to Uber to Amazon and beyond, everyone loses: consumers, workers, and ultimately even the heartless profiteers orchestrating this disaster.

I'm not going to write a full review here but I really enjoyed it. It looks incredible, had strong Solarpunk and Half-Earth implications. It's emotional yet honest and mature. Animals look and act great as well. You should watch it.