Solarpunk

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The space to discuss Solarpunk itself and Solarpunk related stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.

What is Solarpunk?

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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.

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Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid.

Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world ,  but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings.

Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share.

Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.

  • We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
  • We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
  • At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.
  • 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.
  • Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.
  • Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.
  • Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.
  • Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
  • Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.
  • Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.
  • Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.
  • Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.
  • Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
  • Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.
  • Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.
  • Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.
  • Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.
  • The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:
    • 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
    • Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
    • Appropriate technology
    • Art Nouveau
    • Hayao Miyazaki
    • Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
    • High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
  • Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
  • Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
  • In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
  • Solarpunk:
    • is diverse
    • has room for spirituality and science to coexist
    • is beautiful
    • can happen. Now!
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So the big thing with the balcony solar to me is it can be plugged into a standard outlet and it would work without sending electricity downstream to the system somehow. So it seemed to be smart like that. Let me know if I have a misunderstanding here. So I always felt like having batteries would be useful enough without solar as you could (at least in my area) take the hourly electric rate and charge it during non peak times and have it be used during peak hours. This in addition to getting through power outages. So im kinda wondering if there are balcony battery options that would allow for this. Plug it into an outlet and setup when not to charge and when to provide power. Anyone know if this is a thing?

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Maybe not 100% on topic, but I think there will be people in here who value repairing things and keeping them going longer.

I have a front loading washing machine (clothes) where the inner metal drum that spins is no longer sitting in the right position inside the larger plastic watertight container. It was still being driven to turn, but was rubbing at some point and so struggling to spin, and vibrations were bad. I don't know how things are connected inside there but I'm imagining a bearing or two inside has failed. I don't see any sign of other damage to other parts like the motor or the springs.

Is that likely to be something reasonably easy to repair myself? I'm happy enough disconnecting and reconnecting the electrical connections, but would you need any specialist tools for the seals or big springs? Or maybe the whole watertight part is a single piece and not designed to be repaired inside?

Thanks for any advice or info. If i haven't described it well enough please ask questions...

Cheers!

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Last month I released my solarpunk ebook for some emergency hope. At last you can get your hands on the paperback. Discover Neon Riders on Barnes and Noble.

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“At such a critical stage, access to affordable, reliable electricity is paramount."

This is something we, as people, need to make clear that we support. Write people, share, and if you can, perhaps even donate.
A fundamental solarpunk ideal is that we can make a difference. That we can do things to make stuff better, no matter what billionaires or corporations or governments are trying to throw at us.

Well, here's a chance.
https://4indigenized.energy/

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Oakland Critical Mass rolls through the First Friday street festival every month, where I do projection activism. These bicyclists inspired my solarpunk novel, Neon Riders.

You can find the ebook on this indie site and the paperback on Barnes and Noble.

The projected art is by Jordan Johnson

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It is nice to look at if you can't speak German, just look at the awesome images.

I really wanted to share, because Agrivoltaic is such a good idea. He started the project because he did not want one of these foil green houses and also needed to do something against the energy crysis.

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Inspirational documentary with ideas about how to become a part of your local economy

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For the 250th anniversery of America (honestly, vomit) the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Natural Areas and Preserves is reconstructing the maps and transcribing surveyor notes from the 1800s to create an interactive map of Ohio's presettlememt habitats.

I'll be sure to post an update once the map is out.

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publication croisée depuis : https://jlai.lu/post/23348432

Je publie ici aussi comme j'ai vu que mon précédent post y a été relayé.

Update suite à mon test avec une parabole, j'envisage de construire un cuiseur solaire selon ce schéma. La parabole linéaire fait 50cm de large et 1m40. Pour les réflecteurs j'ai prévu de découper des miroirs de 50cmx5cm. La parabole n'est donc pas courbe mais composée de facettes de 50cm (je n'ai pas dessiné les renforts transversaux, ni les miroirs.

Je prévois de construire la structure en agglo de récup, avec quelques pièces en contre-plaqué d e5 et10mm. Pour les pièces complexes, je l'ai ai découpées à la découpeuse laser de mon fablab et je m'en servirai de gabarit pour les refaire dans un bois plus épais avec une affleureuse et une fraise de copiage.

Je vais probablement doubler la transversale en haut pour plus de rigidité.

Les parties supérieures avec les trous sont prévues pour suspendre une marmite et à terme une plaque de cuisson, mon objectif est de voir si je peux faire une plancha solaire.

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More and more people are getting motivated to get involved with in person activism. Which is great! But when you go out there and look for orgs to join, you don't want to get recruited by a cult or an authoritarian group looking for cannon fodder.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by callcc@lemmy.world to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net
 
 

The guys at Flow Battery Research Collective have been designing a Redox Flow Battery development kit that you can build yourself using a 3d printer and a few tools. It's a desktop size flow battery that you can use to either do your own research, e.g. on different electrolytes or just to replicate their experimental findings.

Redox Flow Batteries have the potential to become grid scale or home electric energy storage solutions that are way better for the environment than current lithium based batteries. They can often scale power and capacity independently and allow for repairs.

The FBRC project wants to spread the knowledge on RFBs and help kickstart a global community that develops sustainable energy storage technology in an ope source fashion.

Beware that the project is still in its infancy and sourcing the materials can be a bit of a challenge. Be sure to ask around in the forums for help!

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24783048

I put together a quick flyer for us to print out for tomorrow's Good Trouble Again protest. (Find events near you on the map at their website!)

It was made in Krita (Scribus probably would've been better, but I didn't have time to learn it), using graphics from old IWW pamphlets.

It recommends:

  • Collective action and Unionizing with the IWW
  • What a General Strike is
  • Building community with a link to the Food Not Bombs website (probably the weakest section)
  • A section on Solarpunk with text from the manifesto, along with a link to slrpnk.net!
  • Ends with imploring readers to talk to the people around them at the protest and form connections.

The flyer is 2 pages designed to fit on a standard US Letter in landscape orientation to enable 2 flyers per page, and intended to be printed double-sided in long-edge mode.

You can create a PDF of the 2 pages for easier printing in Libreoffice Draw (go to Page > Page Properties > Enable Landscape Orientation, and reduce margins to 0.25")

Page 1 Double Flyer:

Page 2 Double Flyer:

If the double flyers aren't working out for you, I also have a single page version. (without the section imploring reader to talk to the people around them)

Page 1 Single Page:

https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/48eb821d-c3c7-481f-8cbb-029989fb18c8.png

Page 2 Single Page:

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It’s been about 10 years since I first heard the word “solarpunk.” It came to me via Facebook feed, in the form of a link to Adam Flynn’s “Solarpunk: Notes Toward a Manifesto.” As a lapsed writer of SFF and one-time poli-sci major, this was a pretty irresistible title for me. So I clicked.

The piece still holds up (I’ve assigned it a couple times). It’s a brief and elegant medley of imagery, references, and sloganeering. It had stuff to say about pop culture, and politics, and the looming climate crisis. For me, the most exciting part was that it implied a science fiction that wasn’t ‘space manifest destiny’ (which I could tell wasn’t happening) or 'cyberpunk singularity’ (which I’d soured on living in the shadow of Silicon Valley) or ‘dystopia/apocalypse’ (which was oversaturated in the post-Hunger Games/Walking Dead media landscape of the teens). And that science fiction had a catchy name that seemed to open up bright vistas of previously clouded possibility.

I was living in the Bay Area at the time and realized that actually I kinda knew Adam. We had met a friend’s birthday escape room night in SF Japantown. So I sent him a message, and we got a beer and talked solarpunk, and pretty soon I started thinking about what I had to say on the topic.

The result was a longread-style essay on Medium titled “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk." Now, a decade later, this is one of the pieces of writing I’m most known for. It’s been read tens of thousands of times, cited in at least a dozen graduate theses, and translated into several languages. Here at around the 10 year mark of my involvement in solarpunk, I want to look back on this piece, talk about how it’s held up, how solarpunk has evolved, and what might be next.

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I’m racing-downhill excited to announce the release of my latest solarpunk novel, Neon Riders. You can discover the ebook on this indie site. It will be findable on other channels eventually.

The illustration is by Neville Dsouza.

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