Alternative Invidious Link (though I would recommend watching in 4k if you can, due to the way compression garbles some of the animation at points).

Alternative version in French

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7878389

I’m not sure why but I’ve always found the Civil Defense to be really cool, and I often try to work it into my stories in one form or another (though none of those have been published yet). When I was helping with reorganizing FA!’s box text on the military, I thought it’d be a good addition.

It fulfills the role of being an organized, primarily civilian, primarily voluntary disaster relief organization. It has a long history in dozens of countries, in one form or another, all around the world. Its provided training, search and rescue, preventative measures, emergency response, and recovery, in everything from wars, to natural disasters, and even the Chernobyl disaster. And the different formats used in all those countries give us a historical precident for almost any organizational structure we choose. Want to make it an auxiliary of a military branch? The US did that at some points. Directly part of the military? Some Soviet countries ran it that way. A purely civilian volunteer charity? Britain has recently revived theirs and is running it like that. They can even function as a volunteer militia, like the British home guard, or the American Civil Air Patrol who Wikipedia claims once dropped bombs on axis submarines.

And they have history. People like that kind of lineage, the sense of being part of something that dug people out of rubble in the blitz, that cleared radioactive debris in Chernobyl. There's a long history of sacrifice and service to draw on. And one with comparatively few atrocities on the record.

They're even pretty cool visually. They have the iconic blue triangle motif common in most countries, and a blue and white color scheme not really associated with combat.

Whether you need someone to respond to wildfires, to assist paramedics, to build levees in a flood, or to distribute and build tornado shelters, it's not a far leap from what they've already done. Like Noir said on the discord, given the scale of the Global Climate Wars in the game’s backstory, it seems pretty likely that every government on the planet would start handing out shovels and white helmets again.

And I think it fits the anarchist influences in solarpunk. Putting some of the responsibilities and capabilities for disaster relief back in the hands of the community. It's also a decent role for a varied cast of characters in a RPG. People with regular lives and skills who can be tasked with a quest and be granted some degree of official legitimacy.

When I wrote up the Civil Defense section for the game manual, I tried to provide enough flexibility to allow players and GMs the option to adjust the local Civil Defense chapter to fit their campaign. I like the idea of modern chapters tracing their lineage to different local groups, a postwar militia here, a wildland fire fighter unit there. Like the Defense served as a way to bring various factions (especially armed ones) into the fold, providing them with improved legitimacy in trade for increasing oversight and standardization. So while they’re supplied and trained by the same organization, at the unit level they have some leeway in how they operate and what they specialize in, which can conveniently fit any campaign that wants to use them.

A society where we accept indigenous lifestyle as peers is a great part of solarpunk.

From citizen science to 'Legos of the revolution' this guest post prompts ways to imagine better futures

Curious to hear people’s ideas on how education would look in such a world.

For me, I’d like to see it moved away from testing and results based learning.

A stronger focus on physical engagement with things, e.g. learning biology by going out and cataloging wildlife and learning what’s in a local ecosystem before coming together and researching findings and looking for new questions to ask.

Less sitting around at desks being fed information and a greater focus on individual agency in exploring topics of interest.

Not to say there isn’t a time and a place for “high level” stuff where you need to deep dive into books and listen to lectures, but there needs to be a greater balance in methodology.

except for the ''new experiences'' sentence it's a lovely article :)

Often we dig our own grave making people "defend" their opinion. Instead of winning them over, we push them to become more and more entrenched in their opinion as they build larger mental defenses against the challenges we present. So I want to hear from you:

How do you avoid putting people on the defensive? (Even though those people had a strong alternative opinion)

What was a time where the opposite happened; all the facts were there, but absolutely no one was convinced by the talk?

I feel like solarpunk has a lot of obvious-once-seen ideas and powerful "ahh-ha" moments. But if we can't convince others to take a glimpse from our perspective, not much benefit will come from it.

Some of you might be interested to know that wearing raw denim and babying it for fades by never washing it is actually the most ecologically sustainable thing you can do 😆

Long text #Solarpunk blogging community on the SLRPNK #Movim

While #Lemmy is a nice platform to share links and discuss them, it is less suitable for personal longer form blogs (like those one would find on Substack or Medium). As an alternative, we added a that can be easily used with your SLRPNK #Lemmy account.Movim chat and blogging service

Movim has two options for such kind of long form blogs:

There is also the option to make blogs private so only invited members can read them, and community blogs have the option to be either text based or image-gallery based.

All these blogs can also be subscribed to through #Movim (#XMPP pubsub based) or via the provided ATOM feeds that any RSS client should understand.

As an additional service, we can manually set up a Lemmy repost bot for these ATOM feeds, so if you came here through the on Lemmy, you probably saw this bot in action./c/solarpunk community

Also don't forget what we have an dedicated #Solarpunk chat channel that you can join via our or any federated . So if you have any questions regarding these features, don't hesitate to ask us thereXMPP client

1. Personal blogs, like the one our member JacobCoffinWrites has set up
2. Community blogs that multiple members can contribute to such as this Solarpunk one

I'm looking for books, games, movies, etc. that are set in a relatable, high-tech post-capitalist solarpunk world.

I've got a few of the most popular novels, but I'm looking especially for ones that I haven't seen.

There are a lot of stories within anthologies, Solarpunk magazine, and the Grist's 2200 collections that I haven't seen before, for instance.

Can folks throw out suggestions that fit this tone across any media? Bonus points if it could be described as action/adventure.

Capitalist Markets Aren’t “Free.” They’re Planned for Profit.

Neoliberalism was never about shrinking the state to unfetter markets and enhance human freedom. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley argues that neoliberalism has always sought to wield state power to maximize profits for the rich.

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/neoliberalism-markets-planning-vulture-capitalism/

@solarpunk

maybe we could use this to collect guerilla gardening strategies or something?

This is one of those things that wouldn't exist in a fully realized solarpunk world, but might be useful during a transition.

This camera assesses drivers behind a cyclist to let them know when someone is coming up behind them, and other driver behaviors. One idea I particularly like:

A major bonus is that data gathered from Copilot devices can prove useful to aid local authorities and road safety organisations seeking to make cities and towns safer for cycling. “We are in the middle of starting a partnership with the city of Pittsburgh,” says Haynes, “where we’re going to deploy dozens of these Copilots with people that bike to work and use that to actually inform where do we need to improve the bike infrastructure?”

Archive link

getting independent.

so, I have been thinking: preppers often learn how to live independent of industrial production. Maybe the solarpunk movement can learn something from them?

The diversification of prepping was clear last weekend at the Survival & Prepper show at the fairgrounds in Boulder County, a liberal district which President Joe Biden won in 2020 by nearly 57 percentage points over Trump. Over 2,700 people paid $10 each to attend the show, organizers said, and attendees were varied.

Bearded white men with closely cropped hair and heavily tattooed arms were there. But so were hippy moms carrying babies in rainbow colored slings and chatting about canning methods, Latino families looking over greenhouses and water filtration systems, and members of the local Mountain View Fire Rescue team, who in 2021 battled a devastating fire in the region, giving CPR demonstrations and encouraging citizens to be more prepared for extreme events.

“People want to regain their agency, their sense of control, and do something to match their fears to their actions,” said Ellis, who underscored that he did not speak on behalf of the Department of Defense.

People motivated by climate change, Ellis said, tend to be homesteaders who grow their own food and move to more “climate proof” locations, such as the mild summer haven of Duluth, Minnesota.

It was once normal for economists to imagine a world with less work. What happened?

I want to write a novel that takes place sometime in the latter half of this century (let's say 2075), where the premise is that we've more or less achieved what could be described as a Solarpunk society globally, albeit not a perfect utopia. I am just an amateur, so don't hold your breath for the next literary masterpiece, but I am hoping that, if finished, it could at least inspire some people to envisage a better future. The novel itself will only use this as the setting, as a contrast to the often bleak and dystopian visions of the future - the plot will not be related to how this was achieved.

I am currently looking for inspiration for the world-building. What have happened between now and then on a big scale, particularly in terms of geopolitics? How did the tensions of today resolve so that we eventually landed in a Solarpunk society? I am happy to read both critical analyses of probably futures as well as speculative fiction on what could become, but that still remains rooted in the realm of the possible. The world should be mostly stable at the point of the novel, but many turbulent things could've happened on the way there.

A few examples of things I am looking for:

• Which regions/peoples gained independence? Are The Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland reunited, is Scotland independent from the UK, is Catalonia a sovereign state? Other examples outside of Europe?
• How have e.g. the African Union and/or the East African Federation progressed, and what role do the play on the global scene? What about other would-be superpowers?
• How did what today looks like an uncrossable divide between the left and right in the United States resolve? Was there ever a new civil war? What did that look like? Are they still united? Any new states?
• Has the United Nations undergone any changes to become a more effective organization?

Have you read or seen anything like this that you could share? Articles, books, movies, TV-shows etc.? Do you have any thoughts of your own you would like to share?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7550276

Marigold was adopted at birth by Carol and Georgie Sinclair in 2108. As the oldest of five, Marigold has always been a leader in their large household. They’re the product of their mothers’ inquisitiveness, their father’s confident passion for service, and a general love of taking things apart. In school, communication and writing were long their favorite subjects, narrowly beating out applied science and engineering. After a class field trip to the KNOCK LA newsroom when they were 12, Marigold became captivated by the sense of heroism they associated with investigative journalism.

On their school newspaper (Toypurina’s “The Recruiter”) they made a beat in looking for undisclosed potential conflicts of interest in procurement processes (they found five over two years) and performing other investigations into administrative oversight. Their greatest achievement was an expose on the fraction of school district travel opportunities which were provided to administrators versus educators. Marigold’s discovery that educators only received one sixth of the district’s off-world travel opportunities compared to upper level administrators when adjusted for group sizes received passing coverage from all the major municipal papers and earned them an angry letter from the school district’s head office, which Marigold framed and hung up in their room.

Knowhound spends their time hanging out with their friends Shoshana, Rocco, and Goat; going on adventures around Torrance with their younger siblings (where they’re equal parts protector and bad influence); and chasing leads for stories that either make it into an article for the school paper or wind up as microreports on the neighborhood Community Post.

Character sheet link

Degrowth is a popular concept among solarpunks. This Jacobin article discusses some of its flaws from a Marxist standpoint. In particular, Jacobin reminds us an interpretation of Marxism which blames the Western working class for exploiting the Global South, and lectures the ever-more-exploited Western worker on the need to consume less, divides international labor against itself and sabotages its own best hope of success.

I think it's an interesting work for solarpunks as it describes the blueprint for what is one of the most democratic and ecological societies around the world.

Web 3, nature conservacy, crypto-somthing, blockchain? So this organization appears to be buying land to then put in the hands of stewardship organizations. One of the places being bought under this scheme is Traditional Dream Factory.

Their plans and ideas seem sound, I just don't understand the crypto part and tokens and what these are supposed to accomplish as opposed to something like traditional shares or just write everything down on a piece of paper?

Is crypto ultimately just an ultra complex way of record keeping here?

I would really appreciate your opinions. In terms of activities and spaces, a lot of the TDF setup is very close to what we would like to build, so I try to study and understand different ways people organize such projects.