Solarpunk

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.

I live in an off-grid tiny home I built with my partner in 2016 out of wood and second-hand windows/doors/appliances. We run off solar power, rain water, a composting toilet, and try to repair, mend, make, borrow, and buy 2nd hand or local. Our meat is all hunted, which here in Aotearoa is a huge help for our environment as our only native mammals are seals and bats. Everything else is a pest. We also grow a lot of our own fruit and veggies, but the garden is still a work in progress.

I'm looking at irrigating the garden and automating the process. I saw something about https://www.home-assistant.io/ online but would love any advice you might have. I'd like to automate and chart my watering as well as integrate moisture monitors and a weather monitoring system.

I have an electric bike and an old 1996 honda crv. I'd like to switch to an electric vehicle, something like a Pickman 4x4 or another small farm vehicle, as I only need to get to the village bus stop, neighbouring farms, and the occasional trip into town via back roads.

Clothes are me-made with 2nd hand materials, mostly from the dump shop. I've helped start a collection point for alternative recycling like bottle lids and tetrapaks, a library of things, and a community workshop. We are working towards a bike repair hub and time bank but it might be a couple years before they are operational.

Please share all your inspiration, book recommendations, and thoughts around other ways I can make an impact in my community 😊

Albert Tomanek CC Attribution

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.

Then the mermaid goes missing.

A local citizen detective discovers Xavi had texted them “help” the night before, when their devices were silenced. The Citizen Detective Society mobilizes across the globe. They hope to crowdsolve the mermaid’s location and soon. Every passing hour reduces the probability they’ll discover her alive.

You can discover the ebook lots of place and the paperback here.

Minecraft is a great tool to visualize what Solarpunk architecture and design could look like in the future. I thought this video was pretty cool.

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

Pretty cool animator, pretty cool animation that reflects solarpunk. An interesting take on the living in/after the apocolypse like a solarpunk. Library Socialism ftw!

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16150990

The 1982 edittion can be found in the anarchist library

This is the playlist with the full audiobook.

Consider using FreeTube, an open-source program for YouTube, and/or Libredirect, because your pricacy is important.

I was buying some second hand furniture and they just had a box of new potatoes that were destined for compost because they were supermarket surplus. But, they had a sign saying to help yourself, they’re free, etc.

Obviously it’s great that they were going to be composted, but you know what’s better?

I took a bag home. I planted them in my garden, discarding any not-great ones for my compost. Only two plants worked out, but… today I pulled up a bunch of big ol potatoes that are going to be made into roasties this holiday season.

I’ve never successfully grown potatoes before, so finding success when I planted them super late and had to pull them up early (we had our first frost) feels really good. Especially because they are entirely free.

Anyways, wanted to share that as it’s the most solarpunk I’ve felt in some time!

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

I've been thinking about the advantages of tool libraries vs. maker spaces and why I think the latter would be more beneficial for creating access to tools for life and hobbies.

While I like the concept of tool libraries, I think providing larger sets of work spaces: art studios, carpentry spaces, bike shops, kitchens, office spaces, sewing rooms, etc. makes a lot more sense. For most of these activities, you need access to a variety of tools at once, and not everyone has space at home to work on refinishing furniture or spinning pottery. To me, the dream is having a series of community centers in every neighborhood that has various labs for community members to access to partake in hobbies, repair their stuff, etc. I do think integrating tool libraries into these spaces would be useful, for instance, the carpentry studio could have a wall of tools for you to check out if you need to accomplish something at home.

There are of course applications where tool libraries make more sense to me. Neighborhood garden tool sheds for example. I just think focusing on developing maker spaces would be a more effective way of providing these types of resources to communities.

Thoughts?

Thought this might be interesting to share

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

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22406409

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.

Rather, it’s refusing to let these problems dominate our thinking. It’s about creating mental and emotional space for ideas that push beyond the status quo, even when the present can feel like it’s crushing us with its darkness.

If we only resist, we risk becoming defined by what we oppose. To change the world for the better we need visions to sustain us. Vivid and inspiring ones that helps keep us going through the tough times and challenges ahead. Ideas of the future that don’t deny the difficult work ahead. They give that work purpose and meaning.

This is why we believe in the power of solarpunk. Not as a fantasy to escape to but as a radical re-imagining of what we can build if we work together for a deliciously sustainable world.

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.

It led me to learn that there is a label that more or less matches solarpunk in political theory: Bright Green Environmentalism

This is a huge corpus of text and I obviously disagree with some things, and the 1999 vibes of promoting at the same time intense air travel (for multi-culturalism) and sustainability sounds a bit tone-deaf, but I find it interesting to dive in with a tolerant curiosity.

(Dig that 1999 GIF btw!)