Review of Four Lost Cities
I (Ariel) recently listed to the audiobook version of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. I honestly think that it’s a book that every solarpunk (especially those of you into city planning and urbanism) should read! It’s free to read over on our Patreon; I’d really like you to go take a look!
Some Thoughts On the Work of Peace
Fantasy, feminism, and philosophy
Ariel picked up some fantasy books lately, and she has some Thoughts about feminism and philosophy as it comes out in fantasy narratives. Join her for a little dive into the history of science and just a dash of literary analysis. (It’s not just a dash. Sorry not sorry).
Review of The Mountain in the Sea
I recently read Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea and enjoyed it so much, I decide to write a review of it. That’s up at our Patreon right now and available for everyone to read. I’d love it if you’d check it out.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/book-review-in-93689277
Potato Blight
This year was the best of times and the worst of times for growing potatoes where I live in Northern Germany…
Infrastructures of Violence
Solarpunk isn’t new to debates about violence, its pros and cons, whether it is a true reflection of the movement’s values or antithetical to its ethical commitments. I figured I’d give my own two cents’ worth here; I know I might be retreading old ground, but given this season’s focus on housing in particular and the built environment generally, I wanted to address this topic specifically.
Dear Solarpunk Presents… Is It Solarpunk When Billionaires Decide to Build a Solarpunk City?
Solarpunk is people! - notes on a generic visual identity
Solarpunk has a contested visual identity - or rather, it doesn’t have one at all, compared to cyberpunk’s cohesive vision of Brutalist buildings. That’s a problem, but one worth exploring, Ariel writes.
Introducing Season 4
Climate change is a mental health issue
The recent essays and articles that I read for my thesis had a fascinating overlap: they were talking about climate, but they were also talking about mental health. Mental health issues such as depression and anxiety are a natural corollary of experiencing the climate changing. And this is something solarpunk can and should address now.
Mashing Solarpunk and Cyberpunk to Wage War Against War in The Creator
The Creator is a moving spectacle. And it felt new. Which is not easy to do, as anyone who has sat down to try to write sci–fi could tell you. Sci–fi is so far beyond the first flush of its youth, unless you're really good, that just about any story you come up with has been written several times before. Despite the clunkier aspects of the plot, whoever wrote The Creator is really good. This sci–fi movie broke ground.
Introducing Our Shiny New Logo
We have a new logo, after much deliberation and back and forth. This is a post about the journey from our previous iteration to this one.
Is Solarpunk the Hippie Movement Redux?
Christina here with a confession. Sometimes when people talk solarpunk, I can’t help but wonder if solarpunk is just this decade’s version of being a hippie. Solarpunks want to wear natural fiber clothing, listen to groovy music, eat organic food, grow their own veggies, shop at co-ops, and peace out in a world full of social justice, sustainability, and community gardens. It’s easy to think, well, how is this not just the 1960’s all over again? Or for that matter, how is solarpunk not just another resurgence of the same old ideas about alternatives to the prevailing society that have been going in and out of style since even before the Cynics of Ancient Greece?
Thoughts on a solarpunk “canon”
Is there a solarpunk canon of must-read books? Or should there even be a “canon” at all?
Eating Like the Ancestors (Some of Them, at Least)
All those years I stared at the huitlacoche galls on the corn and thought EW! What an idiot I was. I could have been eating this amazingness instead. Three cheers to the person who first got hungry (or curious) enough to give the fungal galls on maize a good chew. They're totally now my hero.
A Self-Driving Auto Dystopia
Never mind the autos of the future, the cars of today are already a privacy nightmare. As in, if your biggest fear of a self–driving car future is of the hacker who takes over and crashes the car you’re riding in, guess again. Our biggest fear should be of the car companies themselves and the future they're aiming to create for us. And the present they've already got us corralled in.
"Solarpunk and Sustainability: Towards a Better Future"
unsustainable magazine recently profiled us as part of a larger article about solarpunk - read it here: https://www.unsustainablemagazine.com/solarpunk-and-sustainability/
Ariel's Land Story: A Sneak Peek into some Patreon-exclusive content
This is an excerpt of a post that I (Ariel) made today on our Patreon. It's members-only content, but I thought I'd give our blog followers a bit of an idea of the kind of content we post there. To read more, head over to our Patreon, where you can subscribefor just $3 a month.
Can Solarpunk Have Visions of Organized Religion?
As an atheist scientist myself, I (Christina) assumed all scientists are atheists; my vision of a scientific, solarpunk future did not include faith.And yet, as I eventually realized, there are tons of religious scientists out there (of many faiths and traditions!), many of whom were my colleagues. I have no interest in becoming religious personally, but I wanted to hear for myself how self-identified religious scientists grapple with some of the issues that are deal-breakers for me.Maybe it is solarpunk to explore religion in our visions of a good future. Being so community-oriented, I bet solarpunks could come up with satisfying alternatives to organized religion. But what would that look like?
Getting Ready to Get Rid of the Solarpunk Cave to the New Tunes of Lana Del Rey
Today, because it was too dismal and rainy to finish digging the evil ground elder roots out of my strawberry patch, I started ripping the wallpaper off of the walls of the Solarpunk Cave. This meant saying goodbye to the cave paintings I started to make a couple of years ago, because they were exactly the sort of thing that belonged on the grungy old walls of the grotto.