Happy Solarpunk Action Week
Review of The High Sierra: A Love Story
There Is No Perfect System
Hope, but not right away
As I’ve said before both here and on the podcast, I really do believe that solarpunk is about looking around at the detritus of the early twenty-first century, then choosing deliberately to roll up one’s sleeves and get to work making a better world using the materials at hand, despite all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. However, moving rapidly away from negative feelings does them a disservice, and more importantly, may be doing solarpunk a disservice. Let me explain.
Happy Spring!
Links Roundup
Here are some recent links from the interwebs that Ariel has been chewing over.
Pondering a Solarpunk Writing Group
Review: Animals in Translation
I (Ariel) recently listened to the audiobook version of Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. It really shone a light on how far we’ve come both in our understanding of neurodiversity and language around it; it also caused me to realize how very little I actually know about animal behaviour. It’s free to read over on our Patreon; I’d really like you to go take a look!
Scrape
Today, Ariel considers the issue of data-scraping by companies like OpenAI - specifically in light of the recent news of Automattic being “in talks” to sell user content for LLM models to train on. She muses on the internet as an inherently (un)ethical enterprise, her own experience of social media and data scraping, and thinks a bit about what solarpunk internet use might look like.
It’s Time to End the Hero’s Journey
I don’t know about you, but I’ve absolutely had enough of it: the story structure known as the hero’s journey. While these stories make for great escapism, they’re not great for actually changing the world. Let’s let solarpunk stories dump the hero’s journey, even as a means to explore life in a solarpunk future. Let’s use all the other story structures instead.
Questioning the “survival” narrative
After studying Cold-War, Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction, I have decided that I don’t want to survive the post-apocalypse.
Or at least, I don’t want to do what it takes to survive. Not according to the tenets of the classic non-solarpunk sci-fi narrative, that is…
Links Roundup
The interwebs had so many interesting things to read this week! Here’s a links roundup of a few.
Hope and Solarpunk
Following hot on the heels of last week’s discussion of naïveté in solarpunk, Ariel wants to address the idea of hope head-on in this post.
Hope is an affect (aka feeling that drives action) that I’ve been thinking about for a while, ever since I was a graduate student. “Hope” is a word that gives people warm fuzzy feelings when they read it or use it, but I’m not sure that it’s very well understood or theorized in this day and age. Because most people equate the concept of hope with that of naïve positivity and intentional ignorance of “reality”.
Solarpunk Naiveté?
In this post, Christina ponders the opposition that solarpunks face, both offline and online. Solarpunk opts for optimism—and action—over despair, but sometimes she wonders if we are just being naïve.
Carbon offsets - karma or indulgence?
Carbon offsets are a bit of a joke to most people who are involved in environmental organization and activism. They tend to be lumped into the same category as medieval Catholic indulgences - “buy this special ticket to wipe away your environmental sins” - and are widely regarded as ineffective virtue-signalling…..Yet, carbon offsets were set up initially with the best of intentions. And it is still possible, today, to purchase carbon offsets that do actually contribute to combating climate change.
…For solarpunks, the ability to hold two conflicting concepts in one’s mind is extremely necessary in this case, in order to walk the tension that is life in late capitalism: understanding that the program can be used for good or for evil and is currently being used for both, necessitating a deeper, more thorough look through what exactly constitutes a particular carbon offset program.
Some Sights From Lutherstadt Wittenberg and the Elbe River
Solarpunk … orthodontics?
In a solarpunk world, many people are going to need dental surgery. Many people are going to need orthodontic interventions. It’s just a fact. But what can we do now to make sure that the dentists and orthodontists of the future actually work to make their patients’ lives better, not just their teeth?
Review of The Boy and the Heron
Working on Better Endings
Solarpunks and companion animals
Using the language of “ownership” to describe humans’ relationship to their companion animal(s) assumes a subject-object relationship, or a hierarchical binary that positions all human animals as superior to non-human animals.
Instead of the baggage-laden term of “owner,” then, I propose solarpunks start to use “kahu” instead.