Keep your hydroponic sculpture. Keep your solar-power stained glass glory. It’s pretty, and it’s something to work toward on cathedral time.
But now? Give me old factories repurposed as urban farmspace. Give me backyard food dehydrators made of reused household trash. Give me dirt and DIY. Give me variety and innovation and things made by teenagers being just as important as high-class elegance. Give me genengineered creatures that are ugly and independent and badass and the very best at what they do. Give me poor solarpunks. Give me DIY tutorials and strangers exchanging mad-science ideas of how to build a better rain filter out of stuff they can scrounge in thrift stores and dumpsters. Give me handmade outfits from scraps of old clothing. Give me equality in education and egalitarianism in identity.
Give me a culture that values how things WORK as more important than how they LOOK.
I think this is why I’m enjoying parts of the solarpunk tag right now - the acknowledgement that for most of us, the future is full of ordinary people adapting to poverty in a constrained future with extreme challenges - and doing it in style, in DYI inventions, in recycling items to make useful things, in learning old time skills for a post-oil & electric future, in creativity and imagination and in intentional beauty. We must tell new stories - truer stories - about how we got into this mess, how we must change ourselves and society to reflect reality, no matter how grim, if we are to survive as a species for any length of time. We must tell new stories about our stupidity in creating nuclear energy and do all we can to get away from nuclear powers and shut it down and make it as safe as we can for many future generations until our safety measures fail and the end comes. We must tell ourselves new stories.
I can’t be hopeful for much of the solarpunk ideals (green tech and solar cities and ‘clean’ energy and innovative eco-fashion), as they rely on the same dwindling supply chain to create those things as any other present day material goods), and I think we’re in for one hell of a horrific crash (unavoidable consequence of overshoot), but survivors will have to be incredibility resourceful and imaginative to have any quality of life.
That’s what I like - the low tech solutions that are accessible to everyone, the pursuit of justice and celebration of diversity, resilience, and of quality of life during planetary hospice. This is what I put forth for your consideration every day.
Like my favorite collapse-aware author, Richard Heinberg, says, “… protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of what we’ve collectively achieved and live a life that is worthy”. That’s a worthy goial.