Solarpunk
- Share the solarpunk / smallweb blogs you follow!
I'm always looking for things to add to my RSS reader! I loved the Hundred Rabbits site that was posted here recently and thought others might have some nice submissions.
I recently found Sunshine and Seedlings which is substack, alas, but has some great content.
I'm also a fan of Low-tech Magazine.
- Plans for "The Mindful City" in Bhutanwww.cbsnews.com Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis
With an economy hit hard by COVID, many Bhutanese have left for jobs abroad. Bhutan's government, which for years has prioritized Gross National Happiness, is now working to lure people back.
I didn't know anything about Bhutan before reading this, so it sounded fairly Solarpunk to me. I'm hopeful for their new city.
- The Viridian Design Movement, a 1998 precursor to Solarpunk?
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!)
- Fighting For Liberationanarchosolarpunk.substack.com Fighting For Liberation in the Face of Fascism
They tried to bury us, but little did they know - we were seeds.
- Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Actionorganizingmythoughts.org Collective Survival, Adaptation and Direct Action
Defiance must be woven into the fabric of our daily lives, rather than simply proclaimed at marches or on social media.
- How to Restore Community Economies: Reestablishing the Right to Associatenonprofitquarterly.org How to Restore Community Economies: Reestablishing the Right to Associate - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
Growing US corporate economic control has impeded people’s capacity to self-organize. The time to rebuild community-scale economic institutions is now.
- "Solarpunk USA" PeerTube videospeertube.stream Solarpunk USA
A hopefully nationwide movement to organize ourselves into creating networks of communities to act as sort of a union for the planet in the age of climate fear and doomerism Current logo courtesy o...
- Sustainable Plastic Solutions becomes world leader in farm waste recycling
In just over two years, their small Hamilton-based business, Sustainable Plastic Solutions, has reclaimed 3,000 tonnes of plastic and has created a world-leading closed-loop circular economy for grain tarpaulins.
They've just received a federal grant for matched funding of $9 million that will expand their operations to 16,000 tonne capacity per year and should enable them to tackle the so-far-unsolvable problem of recycling silage wrap.
But in the beginning, it was all financed by local farmers.
- Solarpunk mystery novel released today
Didn’t plan on publishing my solarpunk novel this week. But it feels like the time for a story that’s radically hopeful.
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 find the ebook on this indie site as well as the two more mainstream ones.
- The Sky is Falling; We've Got Thismargaretkilljoy.substack.com The Sky is Falling; We've Got This
or: yes it's bad, no we need not despair
- Required reading for Solarpunks: “Tyranny of Convenience” essay by Tim Wu
This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.
The importance of Solarpunks reading the ToC essay became starkly clear when someone said they ticked a box in a voting booth and essentially said: I’m done… I give up. They got ~75+ pats on the back for this hard work whilst condemning taking further action (activism).
Voting in an election is the bare minimum duty expected of everyone. It’s not even activism. In some countries that much effort is obligatory (Belgium). Tim Wu covers voting in his essay, speculating that younger generations stand in lines less than older generations had to, suggesting that this inconvenience might be attributed to lower voter turnout among the young (2018, so pre-mail-in ballots).
From the solarpunk manifesto:
> 4. 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.
Convenience is the beaten path of the mainstream. Convenience zombies don’t even have to be cattle-herded because our corporate adversaries have designed the infrastructure to ensure the path of least resistence automatically leads the masses to feed them revenue. Solarpunks resist. We do not accept the path of least resistence. We bring resistence because we understand that convenience is the enemy of activism more often than not.
But not everyone is on the same page. More Solarpunks need to become familiar with Tim Wu’s essay for their own benefit and also for solidarity and empowerment of the movement. We need to get better at recognising tyranny of convenience when we see it.
The perceived inconvenience of boycotting puts many people off especially if they have not absorbed the concepts of the ToC essay. The slightest change to their lifestyle is likened to living in a cave and triggers people to think about a meme where a guy pops out of a well. Boycotting gets progressively easier. It can also start in baby steps so it’s less of a sacrifice. As someone who has been boycotting thousands of companies and brands for over ten years and consciously choosing the hard path for longer than the age of Wu’s essay, it feels less like a prison to me and looks more like those trapped in the cult of convenience are the ones in a prison of sorts. A useful task by the solarpunk movement would be to try to influence convenience zombies toward activism.
One quote from the essay:
> Convenience is all destination and no journey.
It’s even worse than that in some cases. The destination can be wrong as a consequence of convenience. The convenience of neglecting the duty of an ethical consumer to boycott leads to a bad place -- financing and enabling adversaries of our values.
The NY Times article is inconveniently enshitified in a paywall. Since this essay is something folks would want to keep a local copy of anyway, I have linked a PDF instead of the original link. The text is also below for those who prefer to exand a spoiler over a PDF.
Tyranny of Convenience, by Tim Wu
“The Tyranny of Convenience” by Tim Wu
Feb. 16, 2018 The New York Times (opinion)
Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.
In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.
As Evan Williams, a co‑founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech‑related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance. Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much. Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor‑saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes‑washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.
Convenience was the household version of another late‑19th‑century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.
However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self‑cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.
This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid‑20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button.
Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self‑destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.
The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time‑consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.
By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co‑opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.
You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self‑expression.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self‑expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one‑click, one‑stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.
We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.
As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).
The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.
I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open‑source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?
Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.
Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor‑saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.
An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.
We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.
Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.
Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.
So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.
--- Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia, the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads” and a contributing opinion writer.
- Global Donut Days 2024 - Wednesday is online day
Events by initiatives across the world, which build upon Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics (Summary by herself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=talXb1wiEFY)
- Writing contesttractorbeam.earth Tractor Beam | Bringing SciFi Down to Earth
Radical visions rooted in soil coming early 2025
Hello! I hope this is the right place to post this! I'm part of a small team launching Tractor Beam, a new fiction publication dedicated to optimistic visions of the future loosely related to soil, farming, agriculture, etc. We're doing an open call for short stories for our first issue. Details here More details / updates on judging etc, on instagram: [@tractorbeam.earth] (https://www.instagram.com/tractorbeam.earth/?hl=en)
- I'm writing a book on how environmentalist themes in The Lord of the Rings are relevant for the modern movement to confront the climate crisis
This summer I read The Lord of the Rings to my eight-year-old and was struck by how much the themes continue to be relevant for the modern environmentalist movement. Ents destroying Isengard (the industrial power) is the classic example, but there's so much more. Mordor as an imperial, extractive power. Hobbits regenerating the land after it has been degraded. Gimli trying to preserve the Glittering Caves of Aglerond. And of course, growing trees symbolizing renewal and prosperity. So, I decided to write all these themes down, and compare them to instances where similar things are happening today.
I just reached a milestone in the writing process and wanted to share a sample my work so far! Please take a look and let me know what you think.
- A simple argument shows that capitalism is theft and workers have an inalienable right to workplace democracy - 35 minute video
A simple argument shows that capitalism is theft and workers have an inalienable right to workplace democracy - 35 minute video
"David Ellerman: Neo-Abolitionism: Towards Abolishing the Institution of Renting Persons"
The talk argues that employment contract is invalid due to inalienable rights. Inalienable means can’t be given up even with consent. Workers’ inalienable rights are rooted in their joint de facto responsibility for all production in the firm
- Solarpunks do not use detergent podshomescale.net Do Dishwasher Detergent Pods Really Clog Drains? Here's The Truth! - HomeScale
Dishwashers have become an indispensable part of modern households, making the task of cleaning dishes a breeze. However, the convenience of dishwasher
First of all, detergent pods are for dummies who cannot measure the right amount of detergent for a job and those who don’t know that water hardness is a factor. They are for convenience zombies who cannot be bothered to think. So from the very start, pods are not for solarpunks.
Someone told me they had a problem with their dishwasher because undisolved gelatin sacs were gumming up their drain. The linked article goes into clogs. This article (if you can get past the enshitification) says there is research on an environmental impact by pod sacks. So that’s also antithetical to solarpunkness.
So do it right. Fuck pods. They cost more anyway. Buy powdered detergent if you have soft water (or if your dishwasher has a built-in water softener) and use less (to avoid etching). If you have hard water, either use liquid detergent or just use a bigger dose of powder.
- This green housing trend is booming — but not for the middle class | Passive houses are designed to be as energy efficient as possible. But they come with a high price tag.
The article is of course about the US situation, where the small scale and one-off nature of passive houses may be increasing costs.
Access options:
- gift link - registration required
- archive.today
- Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them fasterwww.asomo.co Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
Breaking through the illusion of convenience that's used to sell us automation
- Examining Octavia Butler's unpublished Parable of the Sower sequels
I gotta say that I feel weird reading this examination of Octavia Butler's notes.
I'm reading Parable of the Talents right now, and I had to stop. It's gotten too fucking dark. It's about the fascist takeover of America by Christian Nationalists, and a major character just died, and there is sexual exploitation of children... I really like Butler and Parable of the Sower, but this just got so dark I decided to read the summary and find out if I wanted to read more, and I don't think I can read this, at least not right now.
Reading about the unpublished sequels feels even worse. It seems like Butler had a head full of so much darkness and cynicism, and her published works were just the processed output after she managed to find the least brutal version of her thoughts. These books were her at her most hopeful! YIKES.
I like her and these books, but I just had to vent about some of this.
- [Request For Comments] Can you recommend any groups/books/papers/blogs/keywords/etc on the topic of UN reform and global constitutionalism?
Wasn't quite sure where to ask the question in the title, or if this is even the right question to ask, but figured a Solarpunk community would be most likely to have the answers I'm looking for...
My reasoning is we are facing some global problems here, you know with all the climate change and whatnot; So we need global solutions for them; Therefore the obvious solution seems to be the United Nations 2.0, or League of Nations 3.0 if you will. Basically a global constitutional assembly, hopefully before it all devolves into total war again this time, or worse.
So I want to read up on what thought or maybe even activism there is out there specifically in this regard. Anything to read, recent or historic, you can recommend?
Any thoughts you want to share? Why can or can't this work? Am I being to naive here? Explain it Like I am 5 please!
- An interesting short: "HYPERVOLTAIC CHRONICLES" by THE LINE ANIMATIONvimeo.com HYPERVOLTAIC CHRONICLES / THE LINE ANIMATION
Project: Hypervoltaic Chronicles Client: The Line Animation Music & Sound Design: Box of Toys Audio BACKGROUND / Hypervoltaic Chronicles" is a client-funded…
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/14202920
> There was a post on Reddit that praised the ubiquitous "Dear Alice" commercial, and inevitably a comment criticizing praise for a commercial. This led to me to wonder more about who it was that made this famous solarpunk advertisement. The answer is an animation studio called The Line. I went looking at some of their other work, and came across this interesting demo short for what appears to be a proof of concept or pilot for a solarpunky animated monster hunting series. > > I don't love the heavy use of guns. But setting that aside, I think the art is interesting. I'm fascinated to see what people are doing with the artistic and conceptual toolset solarpunk offers, and I think this is a use case that I wouldn't mind seeing more of. > > Unfortunately, this demo is as far as the project went. But I'm happy to see that the folks at The Line appear to have some broader interest in solarpunk, and I hope they keep putting it into practice in unique ways.
- How these volunteers are getting solar power to help Hurricane Helene’s disaster zone
About 23,500 of the 1.5 million customers that lost power in western North Carolina still lacked electricity on Sunday, according to Poweroutage.us. Without it, they can’t keep medicines cold or power medical equipment or pump well water. They can’t recharge their phones or apply for federal disaster aid.
The Footprint Project is scaling up its response to this disaster with sustainable mobile infrastructure. It has deployed dozens of larger solar microgrids, solar generators and machines that can pull water from the air to 33 sites so far, along with dozens of smaller portable batteries.
With donations from solar equipment and installation companies as well as equipment purchased through donated funds, the nonprofit is sourcing hundreds more small batteries and dozens of other larger systems and even industrial-scale solar generators known as “Dragon Wings.”
- Economy of the Common good could be Solarpunk adjacentwww.econgood.org Home
News Read all News A growing movement for change Members Businesses Local Chapters Municipalities Countries ECG INTERNATIONAL ECG Approach What ECG stands for The Economy for the Common Good (ECG) aims to benefit all stakeholders
I found this the other day, while I was paddling with a green kayak. I would not say it is solarpunk, but I think it could lead us to the right direction
What is the Economy for the Common Good?
ECG is an economic model, which makes the Common Good, a good life for everyone on a healthy planet, its primary goal and purpose.
At the heart of this concept lies the idea that values-driven businesses are mindful of and committed to:
- Human Dignity
- Solidarity and Social Justice
- Environmental Sustainability
- Transparency and Co-Determination
Such businesses gain a competitive advantage in this new economy.
The good thing about this "new economy" is that it is compatible with capitalism in such that you can start with your current company, but make an extra Matrix, which can then be used by other companies.
It is already in use and not an inaccessible theoretical idea, which might never work.
- A Georgist's Guerilla Gardening Guidetaylor.town A Georgist's Guerilla Gardening Guide
Every vacant plot could be a home, park, market, garden, farm...
- Join a book club in reading Solarpunk Creaturesdiscord.gg Join the Solarpunk Book Club ☀ Discord Server!
Check out the Solarpunk Book Club ☀ community on Discord - hang out with 113 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
Every Sunday this Discord of solarpunks has discussions, which are often thoughtful and interesting. We are about to start a new book, Solarpunk Creatures. Now is the perfect time to join us.
- We Would Call It Solarpunk (Comic) ~ By the-lemonautwww.tumblr.com That's why i'm looking into Solarpunk and am thinking of taking any readers (and myself) on a little journey through a better world, and how it might work, through a series of mini-comics I'm posting here. I don't have all the answers (no one person ever does), and i don't hold any pretenses that this kind of world is going to be our future. But i often hear "You love critiquing the status quo, but what do you propose instead?" I'd like to find out too. Here's to something we can hope for, no matter how slim the chances are! Because as I said, i might just lose my mind otherwise ☠️
Characters co-owned w @_magic.stardust_ on IG 😌✨ (a couple more comics abt this on my account already) I'm not a very positive person, i have a LOT of doomer tendencies. I feel everything like it's…
- Introduction
Hi all!
We’re a fledgling movement with a handful of members in Africa and then me who is currently in Sweden. We have some plans for various projects in Africa that align well with the overall ideas of the solarpunk movement. I’m here hoping to make new friends and learn about what everybody else is doing. I believe that change is possible on a global scale, and that the hegemony of the mainstream, greed fueled, centralized status quo can be challenged most effectively by a global movement of decentralized, grassroots communities working together.
- How to move daily computing/electronics to solar?
I got a little inspired by the solar powered EDC post and it made me think about my computing setup. I use a modern smartphone and a higher-end desktop that is almost always on. I also have an e-reader and some ear buds. I often charge the smaller devices with a power bank. It would be interesting to see if I could move my computing from my desktop to a (preferably second hand) laptop and find a means of charging all of these devices without using the electricity from the utility company.
I already have a small 250W solar array on top of my garage with three golf cart batteries. It runs some lights and occasionally charges devices via USB on the controller. The issue is that it is a bit of a hassle to use due to the garage not being well sealed or climate controlled. It's dusty and there's grease and other things from my mechanical projects and it's always very hot or cold depending on the time of year.
The perplexing part of this for me is charging laptops. Inverters are wildly inefficient but I'm not sure of a way to sufficiently charge (or power) a laptop without one. What are some solutions here?
Additionally, what are some solutions for a potentially portable (or luggable, I guess) setup for these devices? Build a battery box myself and keep it charged on the garage array? Pick up one of those larger "solar generator" pre-made battery boxes that are so popular on the big eCommerce sites now? What about small panels I could put in a window or take outside?
I know the energy used by these devices is far less than things like my fridge/HVAC/laundry machines but it's an interesting rabbit hole for me. Sorry if this has been posted already but I scrolled through a couple of pages and didn't see a similar question.
Thanks!
- The truth about mass migration
Edit: Please watch the video before commenting or reporting this... it seems like a lot of people assume it is some right-wing BS based on the title alone, which I can assure you it very much isn't.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20625279
> From the description: > > "I'm Andres Acevedo and this is The Market Exit. During the migration crisis of 2015, the small country of Sweden admitted a very large number of refugees. What effects did this surge of migrants to Swedish have on the Swedish economy? To find out, I met professor Peo Hansen, author of the book "A Modern Migration Theory" and from our conversation, I realized that many of the economic models we use for assessing our economy and society are deeply flawed. > > In the conversation, we talk about the field of research called the fiscal impact of migration. We talk about the difference between real resources and financial resources. We talk about the so-called brain drain within the European Union. We talk about why politicians are so afraid of speaking the truth about migration."
- My solar powered everyday carry electronics
Hope this fits here.
It's not much in the grand scheme, but all of my everyday carry electronics are all solar charged.
Left to right: Cat S22 Flip smartphone, Bluetooth earbuds, rechargable pen light/laser pointer/black light/dog toy, and my Kobo e-reader.
They're mostly charged / topped up overnight from my 12W / 8000 mAh solar battery bank. I just throw it outside or in a window during the day and plug a USB hub into it to charge my devices overnight. My phone will usually go 2-3 days on a charge, but I've also got a 6W panel I stick in the window if it needs a little battery boost during the day. I also top off other things from the 6W panel, but those aren't exclusively solar like my EDC stuff.
Thought I was going to have to cheat a week or so ago. It was rainy and cloudy for nearly 2 weeks, and the solar battery bank was struggling to stay above 50%, but the clouds finally broke and my solar bank was able to fully recharge with a few hours of sunlight to spare.
Like I said, it's not much, but these have only ever been charged from solar**, and I think that's pretty cool.
** Except the bit of charge my phone and e-reader got from my laptop when I had it plugged into USB to flash firmware and add files.
My solar battery bank. (Not the best design with an integrated, non-removable battery, but has worked well enough)
- On Sieges, Solidarity, and Solaritsgoingdown.org On Sieges, Solidarity, and Solar
Report from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief about ongoing mutual aid efforts to build autonomous infrastructure in Puerto Rico. Borikén (Puerto Rico) is no stranger to sieges. La Junta de Control, PROMESA, the Jones Act, and other colonial policies have made imports to the island more difficult and costl...
- Restoring Iberian rain - Forests and marshes, & the chimneys, cakes, and summer storms they createclimatewaterproject.substack.com Restoring Iberian rain
Forests and marshes, & the chimneys, cakes, and summer storms they create
- Looking for a step-by-step or ELI5-type guide on how to disconnect from the power grid and go full solar on a 4-bedroom house.
I know very little about in-depth electrical work so I would definitely need professional electrician assistance, but I am looking for a sort of "how to disconnect from the power company" and go full solar? I understand that it's becoming much less expensive to purchase and maintain, and I would like to free myself from $300/month electrical payments on my residence.
If it helps, I live in the mideast USA.
Any help is really appreciated! :)
- Map of ecological thought [in french]
Accompanying article [fr] https://bonpote.com/la-carte-des-pensees-ecologiques/
Sorry this is in French but I think many movements have a similar enough name that English speakers will understand what "écosocialisme" or "écologies anti-industrielles" means. A note though: "libertaire" is not "libertarian" it is closer to "liberal" with a stronger left-wing bias.
I found it interesting because while they mention that it is extremely hard to make such a map and that it has tons of very debatable links and placement, I still see solarpunks being all over the left 2/3 of the map.
