Category Archives: Green

Good news for tidalpunks

Photo by Andre Estevez on Pexels.com

The Guardian recently reported that according to scientists in Nature, if we take the right steps moving forward, we could have healthy, vibrant oceans again as early as the 2050s. Some bright points in ocean restoration that exhibit the resiliency of Mother Nature include humpback whale and sea otter populations that were once quite dire.

Some challenges that we still must overcome to find our tidalpunk future are overfishing, agricultural runoff, and ocean acidification due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. This year will be particularly challenging for life in the Gulf of Mexico given the increased rainfall expected once again in the Midwest United States which drives erosion and agricultural runoff. An increase in regenerative agriculture on the land, and sustainable fishing practices in the water would help greatly toward the goal of revitalizing our oceans.

A study from 2016 showed that protecting 30-40% of the world’s oceans from exploitation would provide a benefit not only for the creatures in the ocean, but also for the people who rely on fishing and tourism to make their living. By setting aside parts of the ocean for the wildlife that lives there, we ensure long-term viability of the ocean’s biodiversity. In 2018, the United Kingdom’s Environmental Minister became one of the first major political leaders to back the plan.

On a personal note, as a midwesterner, I’d never been to the ocean until I was twenty. Growing up in a place where the largest bodies of water were ponds and small streams, it was boggling to see the water stretch out beyond the horizon. All the different types of fish and birds that live along the shorelines here in Virginia are fascinating to watch, and the ocean waves themselves are mesmerizing. I feel a great respect for the ocean, and hope that we can help it recover from the damage caused by years of careless neglect.

Do you live near the ocean? Are there any programs in your area to help wildlife, aquatic or terrestrial? Let us know below!

Symbiosis

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Decentralization of power, both political and electrical, is one of the core tenets of solarpunk. As the meme says, we’ve had the technology to transition to a decentralized, clean economy for a long time. Centralization of political power controlled by centralized corporate interests has been the chief hurdle to climate action.

Symbiosis logo - it looks like a spindly sea creature (anenome?) with the word "symbiosis" written next to it

Symbiosis is a new grassroots organization in the United States dedicated to building direct democracy to address climate change and social inequities. As an offshoot of the Social Ecology Institute, the underlying philosophy of the movement is that the broken nature of human interaction has let to our broken environment.

In order to make a concerted effort against the established corporate and federal concentrations of power, Symbiosis is positioning itself as an umbrella organization to help coordinate action between municipalists, environmentalists, and post-capitalists across North America.

As has become increasingly apparent, single-issue action has been ineffective at moving the needle toward a climate solution. Only when we build a coalition of our allies can we challenge the status quo.

There is a congress in the works for September 2019 to bring everyone together to begin the work of building communities and systems for the post-capitalist future. For more information about Symbiosis, visit https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org/.

Disclaimer: I am involved with Symbiosis, but do not speak for them in any capacity. This is my interpretation of the group based on a short time of involvement.

The Upcycle — A Review

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The Upcycle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart is the followup to Cradle to Cradle. Written in 2013, it brings a decade’s worth of new information and experience to the concept of Cradle to Cradle design thinking.

If you’re interested in the circular economy and can only read one book – this is it. There is a short section at the front that recaps the underlying principles of Cradle to Cradle systems in case you haven’t read the first book. While Cradle to Cradle was groundbreaking for the concept that we should design human industry to be a positive good for the environment, The Upcycle contains many more specific examples of projects where the authors were able to achieve these ends.

For example, in the book there is a story of Dan Juhl who pairs farmers with investors for building renewables on their land. The investors get a guaranteed return on their investment for ten years, and the energy generation equipment reverts to the farmers after this period. More renewables end up on the grid, and families get an additional source of income by owning the means of energy production.

The physical book itself is a nice counterpoint to the design of Cradle to Cradle. While Cradle to Cradle was designed to be reusable in technical nutrient cycles, The Upcycle is designed with biodegradable inks and paper so that it can become a biological nutrient again. One of the main ideas of Cradle to Cradle design is that things should be delineated into two separate nutrient streams: biological and technical. Wood, paper, and things of this nature can be reused as they would be in nature by returning to the land while technical materials like plastics and metals should be reclaimed for infinite technical cycles. Preventing the creation of “monstrous hybrids” is an important goal of the Cradle to Cradle design process. These materials are amalgamations of material that are difficult, if not impossible to separate and reuse. This is particularly harmful if the materials in these hybrids are toxic in nature. The book quotes McDonough, “Let’s put the filters in our heads and not at the end of pipes.”

The Upcycle is a breath of fresh air. McDonough and Braungart show how we can rethink the way we design everyday objects to fit into the constant cycles of Mother Nature and end the insanity of cradle-to-grave mentality. Cradle-to-Cradle design is definitely the way we should be thinking when we design technologies and objects for our solarpunk future.

Do you use any Cradle to Cradle products in your life? What has your experience been? Let us know below!

Getting my hands dirty

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Last Saturday, we decided to get our solarpunk gardener on and planted some herbs and flowers. We’re in Zone 7 here in Charlottesville, so we’re trying some snapdragons and petunias outside and starting a kitchen herb garden as well. Later on we’ll be starting some peppers.

Getting dirty

The green germination trays were printed last year in a not-so-successful attempt at growing flowers, so hopefully we’ll have better luck this year. The white bags are wrapped around small plastic pots that go into a holder that is supposed to help the herbs not get over-watered. This is a particularly big concern here in Charlottesville as we’ve noticed everything molds quite quickly due to the humidity.

Herb packets

We had to stay away from some herbs since we have cats and not all are cat-safe. The ASPCA has a good database for plant toxicity for cats, dogs, and horses. Now that everything is planted all we have to do is wait.

Everything in its place

Do you garden? Are there any plants that you love to grow?

Solarpunk winters

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Photo by Tobias Bjørkli on Pexels.com

As we observe the winter solstice, my thoughts have turned to how solarpunks approach winter. As the days turn dark and cold, how does a society dependent on the sun continue to prosper?

Finland

If anyone knows about how to approach long nights, it’s the people who live at the poles. Finland, which was recently rated the world’s happiest country, has no shortage of darkness given it’s proximity to the Earth’s North Pole. In the northernmost parts of the country, the sun doesn’t rise for 51 days in the winter. Why are they so happy then? A stable government with minimal corruption is probably a contributing factor, along with free healthcare and college programs. In the Nature Fix, author Florence Williams suggests it’s the access to nature. Provided you don’t cut down anyone’s trees or damage their property, there’s no such thing as trespassing in Finland. Unlike in the United States where fences and no trespassing signs prohibit free passage, you can hike from one end of Finland to another without running afoul of the law. Also, the combination of low population density and relatively late urbanization, most of Finland’s population is only minutes away from a Nordic walk in the woods or one of the many wintertime diversions available to residents such as ice skating or cross country skiing. For more, check out this Buzzfeed article that is a nice summary of how Fins stay happy, no matter the weather.

Photo by kailash kumar on Pexels.com

Wool

While the vegans in the audience will groan, I feel wool is one of the best resources we have when it comes to staying warm in the wintertime. Since wool is a material that can be harvested without harming the sheep, it seems like a win-win to me. It’s important to look at how you’re sourcing the wool when you get it, but wool from a well-treated sheep will keep you warm at the expense of them getting a haircut. Is wool cheap? No. But, it mother nature has taken millions of years plus a few hundred of human intervention to develop a fabric that breathes well, is the bomb at temperature regulation, and like all natural fibers, is biodegradable. That last part is important since so much of the microplastics in the ocean are coming from washing our synthetic fabrics. REI has a great article about sustainable clothing and textile choices for more info on wool and other options to stay warm in the winter/

A house is shown with a series of underground pipes attached to the HVAC system

DX system in a house by WGisol under a CC BY-SA 4.0

Geothermal heat pumps

One way to make sure things stay toasty is with geothermal, or ground source, heat pumps. Often overlooked as a source of clean power, geothermal electricity generation isn’t something that works in all areas. Geothermal heat pumps work just about anywhere though to help keep things nice and warm inside with a minimal investiture of electrical power. In short, geothermal heat pumps replace the HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system of a building and use the Earth as a heat sink. Since the ground is roughly 18 Celsius in most places, you can cool in the summer and heat in the winter with little energy expenditure. According to Wikipedia, these systems offer a 44-75% increase in efficiency over more traditional heating systems. The US Department of Energy has a good overview of the technology.

Solar fluid

In an interesting development announced last month, scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a fluid that can store solar energy for up to 18 years. So, excess capacity in the summer could be stored into the winter from your solar array and retrieved when needed. Since the system is heat storage, it can be converted to electricity, or could be used as a means of storing summer’s warmth to heat your home in the winter. The original paper can be found here in Energy and Environmental Science.

Person wearing a black, white, and crimson cape patterned like moth wings. Cape is wider than armspan in width, makeing the wearer appear to have moth wings.

Moth Wings Cape by CostureoReal on Etsy

Lunarpunks

I would be remiss to not mention our lunarpunk cousins here when talking about the darkest time of the year. Lunarpunks are the night dwellers of solarpunk society. They are a subculture within our subculture, favoring the night. Biomimmicry of bioluminescent creatures, moth-themed cloaks, and gossamer fabrics fluttering in the night breeze are some of the aesthetic influences here. Winter would be the lunarpunk’s time to be more active, hosting all kinds of events in the cooler nights from art displays to street festivals.

Do you have any thoughts on what solarpunk winters might be like? Let us know below, or consider submitting a story to World Weaver Press’s call for stories for their Solarpunk Winters anthology which opens in January!

What is Solarpunk, anyway?

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photo of smiling woman in white dress and brown boots posing in multicolored glass house

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Pexels.com

The first thing you need to acknowledge when looking at solarpunk is that the world is on fire. The last few centuries of human development have taken a growth-at-all-costs approach to building up human society, and unfortunately, the bill is due. Solarpunk began as an attempt to imagine a brighter future wherein humans managed to transcend our current predicament and come out better for it on the other side. What began as a smattering of neat drawings and inspirational ideals is slowly coalescing into a movement to take back the Earth from the powers that would see it smolder.

Where is the punk in solarpunk? It’s in direct action to oppose ICE and police violence. It’s in the community energy coop putting solar panels on their roofs to save money. It’s the guerrilla gardeners throwing seed bombs into fenced-off abandoned properties. It’s in the schools where transgender students are welcome in the bathroom of their choice. It’s in the makerspace where people are finding ways to repurpose waste into useful and beautiful items. It’s remaking society into that hopeful future. The punk of solarpunk is in the now. The solarpunk future won’t happen without a concerted effort by a lot of people to fight the status quo and the powers keeping things that way.

Solarpunk doesn’t have one encompassing political or aesthetic vision. I think the most cohesive elements though are equity, environment, and appropriate technology. Equity is more complicated than simple equality, as it requires us to make sure everyone has what they need, which may not be the same exact thing as demanded by equality. For example, living with disabilities is more expensive and results in most disabled individuals having poor economic outcomes. While the exact method of providing an equitable society is something that will need experimentation, that goal is one of the central tenets of solarpunk.

Keeping the environment in mind as a stakeholder in all decision-making processes is another important theme in solarpunk. From the name, you can tell that solarpunk prefers a renewably-powered future, but reducing plastic waste, air and noise pollution, and waste are also environmentally-motivated goals of the solarpunk community. We’ve only got the one planet, so let’s make sure to keep Mother Earth in good shape. She doesn’t need us, but we need her desperately.

Appropriate technology is the idea that we don’t necessarily need “smart” everything in our lives. While solarpunk doesn’t eschew technology like some primitivists, solarpunk is interested in only using the appropriate level of technology for the task at hand and not making technology for technology’s sake alone.

If you’re concerned about climate change or the growing march of fascism across the globe, you might already be a solarpunk and not know it. To learn more check out the Scuttlebutt social network or look for #solarpunk on Mastadon or Tumblr. If you have any questions feel free to use the contact form on this website or comment below.

A Survey of Climate Action in the US

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antique antique globe antique shop antique store

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I recently found that the Weather Channel has a very exciting series of stories about climate change and adaptation on their website. There’s an article for each of the 50 US States talking about the challenges facing that particular area as well as innovative approaches locals have taken in adapting or mitigating some of those effects.

As a proponent of decentralization as a core tenet of a solarpunk society, I think this series does a good job of outlining ways that people can fight climate change on their own terms. I think everyone would be willing to admit that the US federal government isn’t going to be taking action anytime soon, so it’s up to us to fight climate change in our own communities and find innovative solutions to the problems brought on by the change that has already happened.

What are you doing to fight climate change in your home? Are there any awesome solutions from overseas that would be great transplants to the USA? Let us know below!

LEGO Human-powered tool station

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Technic Man pedaling his tool platform

I had some time to make a crude LEGO prototype of the human-powered tool station. I made do with meshed gears instead of pulleys since I didn’t have any rubber bands to use as a belt. Given some of the constraints of spacing with LEGO, our brave Technic Man can’t actually pedal the machine, but I think it does get the idea across more or less.

LEGO Modular Tool Station Internal Workings

Some of the internal workings of the LEGO prototype

Do you have any thoughts about the system? Are there LEGO parts that you like to use for prototyping purposes? Let us know below!

GoSun Fusion oven on Kickstarter

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Want to cook with the sun?

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GoSun has been making solar ovens for awhile and is now Kickstarting the GoSun Fusion which can use either solar power or electricity to cook a meal for up to five people. I don’t have any affiliation with GoSun, but their ovens have pretty good reviews, and I really like the idea of being able to cook with the sun both day and night.

I think this oven looks like it would be really awesome if you have an off-grid house or do a lot of campground camping where you have a base camp. It’s probably too big to use for backpacking, although it does look like GoSun has a smaller model that might work for that, the GoSun Go.

Do you have a solar cooker? Do you know of any good DIY plans that we should try out here at Solarpunk Station? Let us know below!

Seizing the means of production – What does 3D printing mean for solarpunk?

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Solarpunk Station is the proud owner of a new 3D printer! I am hoping to use it to produce useful objects as well as provide insights on how distributed manufacturing relates to solarpunk. This should be the first of many articles related to additive manufacturing.

TL;DR: 3D printers have a lot of promise to disrupt manufacturing of household goods, but don’t get one yet if you’re not ready to tinker.

Most consumer 3D printers are basically a hot glue gun that uses plastic filament instead of glue sticks. A nozzle is suspended above a platform and computer-generated files are fed to the machine where it deposits plastic layer by layer to form a 3D object. There are other types of 3D printers that use UV light and/or lasers to form objects layer by layer from vats of goo or powder, but the basic idea is the same.

The main advantage of 3D printing is how it changes people’s mindset in relation to goods. If you spend some time on Thingiverse or Youmagine you’ll see people openly sharing things they’ve designed with each other. There are also some marketplaces like Cults3D that include a section for designs for sale, but the bulk of current design work is open. We’re moving from distributed, open software development like Linux and Firefox to distributed and open development of physical items.

Pineapple-inspired bowl (orange) with green leaves surrounding the edge. Only five of the 10 leaves are finished.

The orange part of the bowl took 30 hours to print. The leaves each took about an hour, so there’s ~35 hours of print time here. Total time was over 40 hours once all 10 leaves were finished.

Remixes take the open nature of 3D printable designs to the next level. People can adapt a previous design to a different device, or take a part and make it better, stronger, or faster to print. Since so many files are open source you’re free to adapt an item to your needs. I can’t count the number of times I’ve thought that something I’d purchased was pretty cool except for one issue that I repeatedly turned over in my head. Without an easy way to make a replacement part, I was stuck with it. Now with a 3D printer, I can download a design, change anything I don’t like and upload my remix for others to find. While watching a part print can feel excruciatingly slow at times (the pineapple bowl took almost two days at 130% size), making something and being able to iterate on the design is still much faster than with most other methods.

These remixes extend to things you already own too. While I can’t print a replacement saucepan yet, I can repair or improve a lot of objects around the house. There’s a great subreddit for functional prints with lots of cool ideas, and Thingiverse has a pretty big section for replacement parts. DeskGrown is a new company that sells parts that can’t be printed for their designs and gives away the printable files for free. They have a clock and a set of headphones so far. I think we’ll see more of this hybrid model popping up since desktop 3D printers are limited to plastics at the moment.

While to some extent, 3D printing is over-hyped, I think it will be one of the critically enabling technologies for a solarpunk world. Not everything can be 3D printed, but a lot of everyday objects can be, meaning you can ship 1 kg of filament to your house and make several things for the same amount of packaging, cost, and environmental waste you would have for one item before.

The two main drawbacks of 3D printing are the learning curve and generation of plastic waste. As a beginner, I have had several failed prints. I believe the number of failed prints will go down considerably as I get more experience with the printer, but 3D printing is still not a zero waste manufacturing process. I am keeping failed prints and other scraps in a bag in hopes that I will be able to reprocess it into fresh filament in the future.

Failed cat ball toy print looks more like spaghetti...

This doesn’t look like a cat ball…

The plastic I have been printing is PLA (polylactic acid) which is a bioplastic made from various plant-based sources. It is biodegradable and can be recycled in a closed loop back to virgin material standards, making it one of the few Cradle-to-Cradle plastics available. Many other materials are available for 3D printers including ABS (often used in car parts), PET (soda/water bottle plastic), wax for metal casting molds, and TPU (flexible/rubbery plastic). With such a wide variety of materials available, it’s difficult to determine the exact environmental cost of 3D printing. If PLA were able to sate everyone’s needs, then we wouldn’t have the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but every material has it’s strengths and weaknesses, so that isn’t the case. On a bright note, PLA is one of the easier plastics to print with, so it has one of the highest adoption rates in the community.

We’re a long way away from the ease of use of the replicator in Star Trek. Using a 3D printer requires a lot of fine tuning and trial-and-error. I imagine the off-the-shelf solutions are better than kits, but 3D printers are still a large time investment. We’ll probably get to the point where you can buy one that just works, but as of now, a 3D printer requires a lot of time to get really good results.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to build your own computers or work on bicycles and really know what’s going on with the machines you’re using then I definitely recommend getting a kit. Otherwise, you’re probably better off finding someone locally with a printer on Make XYZ, Hubs, or getting a design printed straight from Thingiverse or Shapeways. In fact, you may want to reach out to local 3D printer folk even if you do want to get a printer yourself. Most people who are 3D printing are glad to share their opinions on different models as well as tips and tricks to get better results. There may even be a Meetup in your area.

3D printers will play a role in distributed manufacturing along with CNCs, laser cutters, and other machine tools. We’re a long way away from asking Alexa to make “Tea, Earl Grey, hot,” but we may get there eventually. The space has moved very quickly over the last ten years, and I expect the next ten will be equally exciting.

Do you have a 3D printer or know someone who does? Are there any solarpunk ideas that are particularly well suited to 3D printing you’d like to see us explore? Sound off below!