Tag Archives: environment

Solarpunk Spirituality: From the Individual to Community Adaptation

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by Phoebe Wagner

Note: I discuss in broad strokes how Christianity as an organized religion has been used to shape the U.S. in negative and harmful ways. This essay is not meant to dismiss Christian spirituality but to demonstrate how the organized religion has been used to harm people and shape a certain future.

As an exvangelical who grew up in a low-level cult, my relationship with spirituality remains difficult, as remains my relationship with so many things—from my gender identity to my idea of rest. Even so, like so many of the writers for this series, when I first heard of solarpunk in 2015 on Tumblr, part of the attraction was that it didn’t toss away spirituality in favor of science.

Another part of the attraction was the commitment to social justice, which I often felt was missing from the environmental texts I was reading. In those early days in 2015, it felt as if environmental issues and social justice issues were equalized under solarpunk, just as the name combines the environmental through “solar” with the radical anti-authoritarianism and anti-capitalism of -punk.

While my definition of solarpunk has evolved over my time spent with the genre, since 2018, I’ve been working off the following definition, which is explored more fully in Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures:

  • Solarpunk literature imagines new futures in the midst of and in opposition to environmental collapse, then works to create those futures.
  • Solarpunk stories must recognize the climate crisis and environmental collapse as entangled issues that include all oppressive systems.
  • There is no environmental justice without racial and decolonial justice.
  • Technology is a tool—use the right tool in the right moment.

When approaching the spiritual side of solarpunk, we must remember that anti-racism and decolonization are also a practice, active. As a white person raised in a Pentecostal Christian religion, I recognize how Christianity was and is an active part of building and supporting oppressive systems. As a child, I was taught how to be an active participant and believer in those acts of oppression, from harassing people online to attending anti-abortion events, including a protest in DC.

While my childhood is somewhat unique, the evangelical tradition of Christianity has been shaping the U.S. for well over a century (my church claimed connection to the Azusa Street Revival of 1906). While beyond the scope of this essay, people in the U.S., especially white people, need to engage with how the organized religion of Christianity has been used to shape ideas of the future. As adrienne maree brown, alongside Walidah Imarisha, has said, we are in an “imagination battle.” Therefore, brown continues in Pleasure Activism: “Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”

In the U.S., our conception of the past, present, and future has been shaped by the three Cs of Christianity, Colonialism, and Capitalism. From the very conception of solarpunk, the genre has set out to present an alternate set of imaginaries, futures, and knowledge systems. Solarpunk spirituality is, and should be, no different. In our spiritual practices, there will be easy cultural pitfalls that come from being shaped by living in the U.S.—and I imagine, elsewhere, but I’m speaking from my experience in the U.S. Two aspects that I’m always pushing back against in my solarpunk thinking are my conception of the end of the world and a green version of being holier-than-thou.

The End of the World

In 2016, I took an environmental literature course in my MFA, and the professor assigned the introduction to Matthew Gross’s book The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us about America. I never heard of it again, but one line has haunted me since then because I recognized my own pattern of thinking: “In America, everyone believes in the apocalypse. The only question is whether Jesus or global warming will get here first” (9). Had I just traded in the Book of Revelation for the IPCC report?

I was told as a young child that the world would most likely end during my lifetime, but that it would be a good thing because Jesus wouldn’t return until the world had become a better place. A similar style of apocalyptic thinking is prevalent in government and nonprofit spaces—a concept that climate change is “coming” or that the year 2050 will be a new type of 2012. The reality that climate change is impacting people here and now becomes buried under government timelines and reports. Indeed, in the part of Pennsylvania where I currently live, there is a different intensity to the impact of climate change than when I lived in Nevada and Iowa where the impacts changed people’s livelihoods or burned down their homes.

This obscuring of climate change—turning it into a future apocalypse—also helps obscure the genocides and world-destruction already committed against Native Americans and Black communities in the U.S. Science fiction and fantasy broadly have contributed to this concept of the apocalypse, as Kyle P. Whyte’s “Indigenous Science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises” demonstrates. Of course, the genre has been shifting, as shown by N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which begins with the end of the world and shows apocalypses or world-endings at varying scales from the personal to the planetary.

As a genre, solarpunk has responded to this issue by including stories set in the very near future to the far future, all of which is needed to fully imagine alternatives to not just the immediate needs but also restructuring culture.

Here’s where solarpunk spirituality can come into play. The futures and ideas of solarpunk cannot remain on the page. We all know we have outstripped warnings about climate change and environmental collapse. A solarpunk spiritual practice can help us hold the desire for the future—all the stories we are telling ourselves in solarpunk—while acting in the present. Just as the warning of early environmental literature wasn’t enough, imagining is only the first step. We’ve done the imagining. We have a variety of futures with more and more being brought into the world through literature, video games, films, TTRPGs, and more.

Now, we need to aid our communities in the instability of this moment—not just a future apocalypse that culture thinking in the U.S. wants us to focus on. Linear thinking with an apocalyptic climax is the type of storytelling that solarpunk looks to avoid because reproducing that type of thinking only supports the type of thinking that got us here in the first place. As a spiritual practice, we can hold onto these visions of the future while helping our communities adapt today.

Holier-than-thou

For years now, I’ve been calling, alongside others, for solarpunk to make the jump from literature to action, and many people have embraced that already. When making that call, I can’t help but worry that we will fall into another trap so prevalent in environmental thinking—let alone U.S. culture and spirituality. Action cannot become a something that separates us into the good solarpunks and the posers. We cannot center individual action when it comes to solarpunk making the jump off the page but rather community adaptation. One person going vegan means less than one person helping implement food insecurity fallbacks in their community.

Growing up as a white kid on food stamps in Northern Appalachia, my family desperately needed assistance from the church. While there are certainly churches that do provide for families, the church I grew up in was not one of them but was rather shaped by cultural thinking around poverty in the U.S.: if you’re poor, it’s your fault for being lazy. Or, in the case of the church, for living in sin.

I’m always fascinated when I see environmental groups use the same talking points as my abusive church. Rather than getting closer to God, it’s about doing your part to stop climate change—as if an individual can “stop” it. At my church, sinning was not tithing money; for the environmental movement, it’s not bringing reusable bags to the grocery story.

As the spiritual dimension of solarpunk continues to grow, we must be vigilant to not fall into individual actions and patting ourselves on the back for being more environmentally friendly. Rather, solarpunk spirituality can be a tool to help us connect with the rest of the living world and be healthy community members. The spiritual side cannot be entirely focused on going vegan, growing a garden, or taking long walks outside but rather can be a well to help work through climate grief, despair, and doom in our communities.

In the U.S., we worship the individual. The type of Christianity I grew up in was about the “personal” relationship with Jesus, the individual understanding of getting closer to God. A lot of environmentally friendly practices mirror this idea—the “you” developing better habits, a cleaner world, a less polluted space. Instead, solarpunk spirituality opens up a path to focus on hope for the community, that the individual practice leads toward being able to better attend to community needs.

Just like the response and adaptation to the climate crisis will vary by region, so, too, should the spiritual aspect. For me, my personal spiritual practice is focused on healing from my religious trauma. As I work on that healing, I find myself better able to be present for my community as we deal with threats against our LGBTQ+ members, as we deal with racism, as we deal with flooding and drought.

Since the early conceptions of solarpunk, the genre has accepted spirituality as a necessary part of imagining more equitable futures. As solarpunk continues to grow and that necessary spiritual aspect becomes more necessary to help us deal with climate grief and despair, we must also remember to push back against the dominant cultures that cause harm. The spiritual side of solarpunk is not only about personal development but recognizing the interconnectedness of the rest of the living world and being present in our adapting communities.

Works Cited

brown, adrienne maree. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. AK Press, 2019.

Gross, Matthew Barrett. The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us about America. Prometheus Books, 2012.

Phoebe Wagner is an author, editor, and academic writing at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate change. Their debut novel A Shot of Gin is forthcoming from Parliament House Press (2023), and their novella When We Hold Each Other Up is from Android Press (2023). She is the editor of three solarpunk anthologies, including Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk & Eco-Speculation. They blog about speculative literature at the Hugo-winning Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together. Wagner holds a PhD in literature, and she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Lycoming College in Pennsylvania. Follow them at phoebe-wagner.com.

New Visions of Science

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by Jack Waro

Here in this series about spirituality, I’m going to talk about science. That might seem an odd choice. Typically, we think of science and spirituality as opposites, at best complimentary and at worst mutually hostile enemies. Navarre’s introduction put it this way:

“Science without spirituality becomes the fuel for cold, capitalistic domination of nature, and spirituality without science can lead to superstition and bigotry.”

Given the way science works in the modern world this makes a lot of sense. I am an ecologist by training, and I’ve certainly participated in my own moments of cold capitalist science (and on the flip side I’ve also seen some fairly wacky spirituality too). Some of the commonplace ideas about science are pretty bleak: science is a tool for imperial domination, science reveals the universe to be a cold dead machine, scientists are emotionless calculators heedless of the consequences of their actions, etc, etc. Today, science is the binary opposite of the spiritual.

Here I want to suggest that this view of science might one day go away.

I want to suggest that this view has little to do with science per se, and a lot to do with culture, economics, institutions, and metaphor. We might be looking at an historical artefact of one brief moment in time.

If the role of Solarpunk is to re-imagine the world, then we need to ask: “What does science look like in that world?” I’d like to suggest that in a better world, the harsh divide between science and spirituality might soften or even disappear.

This is an enormous subject, so I’ll just share a couple of ideas as food for thought.

Two Visions of Science: an example

I have on occasion done professional looking scientific ecology things. Most people haven’t had this kind of experience, so I want to give an example of what science looks like in practice. I will describe one scene in two ways, to highlight the basic problem with how we understand science.

The basic scientific setup was this:

A forest contained a set of “permanent plots”. These are marked survey areas where every tree has an ID tag. The job of the survey team is to go in and measure every tree. The forest had dozens of these plots, set up decades ago. From all this data we can answer all sorts of questions.

Now here’s two versions what it actually feels like to do this research. Both versions are true.

Description One

I catch my breath while I can. The work is hard, all this bashing through rainforest and mud and rain. I’m exhausted. To be honest I’m stressed out too. It’s a low wage precarious job. I’ve been flown in here for this gig, and when it’s done I’ll be yanked back out and off to something else. I barely know where I am. The lead scientist has gone AWOL to another project, overworked and underfunded. The rest of the team are consultants I’ve never met, the scientific equivalent of mercenaries.

In my hands I hold a clipboard full of numbers. A team member halfway down the muddy slope shouts out codes: “KNI-EXC, 21.5! CYA-DEA, 10.1! COP-ROB, 3.3!” I look around me, up at the tawa trees, the supplejack vines, the climbing ratas and epiphytic ferns, this overflowing mass, and I ask myself, “Do I understand this place? Do I really know this forest?” I can only answer, “No. Not by doing this.”

We are reducing this abundance of green life into a statistical abstraction. Life made into numbers. Later we’ll put out some graphs, maybe someone somewhere will argue about carbon credits, and this forest will be reduced again down into the one true number to rule all numbers: money. The forest will become an economic ecosystem service, entirely interchangeable with any other lump of biomass anywhere in the world, for the right price.

Don’t get excited about science, kids. It’s just a job. Get in, get out, go home. Become a plumber, you’ll get paid better.

Description Two

The leader of this group spent seven years before he could take the robes and receive the title of Doctor, in accordance with the ancient traditions and customs of his forebears.

Each member of the team has their chosen dedication. The Doctor dedicated himself to the land and soil, to the growing of food. A young woman has dedicated herself to a single species of insect, another to endangered bats, another to the moths that eat seeds on the forest floor. For my part, I chose the subtle flows of those elemental substances of life that pass between land, ocean, and sky.

We do this for love, not money.

Each of us has spent long years in detailed study of the infinite mysteries of the universe, as consumed by nature’s secrets as much as any monk or mystic. I know the balance between the forces of Earth and Sky. The Doctor knows what makes the fields lush and green.

We are inheritors of monasteries, of the temples of the world’s first cities, of those ancient priest astronomers who told their people when to reap and when to sow. We still use their techniques on occasion. We still share their quest. We live to make sense of our world, to give our knowledge, our guidance, to our people. If they will listen.

We see visions others cannot.

As I stand in the forest I perceive the hidden mysteries of worlds hidden in the curl of a leaf. I know the cosmic stories, the unfolding, the unfathomable reaches of space and time, the forces which unfurl these myriad forms and flows in which I stand, in which I live, in which we are.

To us the rainforest is an open book.

We read.

As we move through the forest we know each species we pass. We know their ways. We take joy in each familiar friend we see. We note the welfare and the stories of the trees.

Human eyes and mortal minds are prone to deceptions. We lie. We trick ourselves. We care more for human things than the ways of trees. Therefore we do all we can to overcome ourselves.

Most would think us mad, doing what we are doing. The process is painful, as gruelling as any penance. This is our sacrifice to know the way of trees. Even with all our efforts, we will never truly know this forest.

Those depths are too deep.

For those who have been here before, the visit is a reunion, checking in on the family of green. We see new children have been born, the middle aged have gotten fatter, and drama of tree-life is continuing along. These trees will outlive us all, as we outlive ants, and each visit made these decades apart is our reminder.

I have only been here twice.

I look up at a vast kahikatea, centuries old and still young. Her top reaches up beyond the canopy. With the feeble methods we humans have available I make my best attempt to understand her life on her own terms. Around her trunk I wrap a tape measure, and yell out: “DAC-DAC, 41.6!”

Two Visions of Science: a dichotomy

Both of the above are true. The first speaks to the conditions of science in the modern world. Cold, calculating, and commercial. Science is a tool for product development, market research, and government policy.

The second speaks true to the deep social origins of what scientists are doing, and to the deep motivations in their hearts. Science reveals to us the mysteries of the universe, shaping our fundamental beliefs about who and what we are.

We have an odd dichotomy here.

Science in the modern world is simultaneously a cold materialistic tool AND a borderline religious experience.

Now, when it comes to Solarpunk, as we reach out into those possible futures and imagine new worlds, the first of these visions mostly goes away.

Science might retain some amount of coldness – it does tend towards pragmatism and abstraction over lived emotional experience. Science might still clash with spirituality – data has no pity on claims that can’t be verified. But other than that, much of what remains is transcendent.

The Machine World

Now I want to move in very different direction, but one which Solarpunk, as an artistic movement, is also well placed to address. This is a question of a bad metaphor, the vision of the universe as a machine.

This is the core teaching of science (according to the metaphor):

Existence is cold dead mechanism. Cogs and gears. Automatons and objects. An infernal contraption. Every measurement made strips away the mystery and reduces another part of the universe to mere machinery.

This metaphor turns up all over the place.

A recent example I stumbled across is the Kurzgesagt’s “You Are an Impossible Machine” video. Cells are protein robots. DNA is computer programming. You are an impossible machine. While the facts are great the metaphor is wrong, because…

YOU ARE NOT A MACHINE!

This metaphor needs to die.

Let’s explore why.

The Clockwork Universe

The idea that the universe is some kind of machine is associated with Newton, as if this metaphor is some triumphant shift away from religion to a cold rationalist science. Weirdly enough the actual history might be the exact opposite.

Newton himself probably didn’t believe this clockwork metaphor per se. Instead, the machine universe is a medieval Christian idea.

Think it through, and it makes a lot of sense. Really, this is the “Intelligent Design” argument, which persists to this day. If the world was designed by God then the universe really can be compared to a machine.

God is a clockmaker. People and animals are machines designed by God. Causal power rests ultimately with God, as it would for a machine, and God himself holds the universe together, winding the mechanism back up when it runs down. The metaphor makes perfect sense. Indeed, it’s kind of cool to think of yourself as a soul riding around in a robot suit made by God.

That’s the origin.

The machine metaphor then went on to do something very un-machine-like. It started evolving.

From a clock metaphor in which God is active, winding up the clock so it keeps going, we shifted to a metaphor of a clock as perpetual motion machine. This is the Deistic universe. God set up the gears, pressed the ON button, and now the machine just keeps running forever. Like a machine every bolt and screw can be accounted for, and once humanity completes the task of measuring every mechanism we will understand the full design of God.

Later still we dropped God himself. We had no need for that hypothesis. The universe became pure machine. But now the mechanical metaphor becomes something horrifying and monstrous.

What does it even mean to be a machine without a maker? The universe is a purposeless machine. Mere mechanism for the sake of mechanism. Stripped of God and souls, the metaphor reduces the world to mere nuts and bolts. We are impossible machines caught in the cosmic gears, being ground to dust without reason. Science reveals a universe which is cold, meaningless, and dead. Like a machine.

At least, that’s according to the metaphor.

New Metaphors for New Science

The machine metaphor makes very little sense with modern science. Sure, the human body has joints and levers, and machines can have joints and levers too, but that’s about as far as it goes.

In biology, evolution and complex systems make a mockery of any attempt to think of the world as a piece of static industrial machinery. Quantum physics and General Relativity take us about as far from clockwork as you can get.

Once we strip out this defunct machine metaphor that harsh divide between science and spirituality begins to soften. Modern science confronts us with both profound mystery and a deep interconnection with the universe. That sounds fairly spiritual to me.

As an artistic movement, Solarpunk would be well advised to look for new metaphors when talking about science and nature. So, to that aim, here is my attempt:

You are not a machine.

YOU ARE A RIVER.

The River

Rivers have been used as a metaphor for life for a long time (think “You can’t step into the same river twice” etc etc). I want to go a little deeper than the usual idea of life being like floating down a river. When I say, “You are a river”, I mean that you and a river are fundamentally in the same category of thing.

We live in a world of complex systems. Societies, economies, ecosystems, even our own bodies are complex systems. While it is possible to build complex systems (we do it all the time), the behaviour of these systems is vastly different from that of a simple mechanical clock.

So, if we want a metaphor that works, we need something which is also a complex system.

Like a river.

usgs-qTV6c2pjbBo-unsplash(1).jpg

[ credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/qTV6c2pjbBo ]

As a way to get this metaphor down into your intuitions, here is a simple exercise for people who are into that…

1) Find yourself a river. If you don’t have one, try online. Here’s one.

2) Get comfortable, and observe. (If you’ve done mindfulness meditation, bring those skills into it).

3) Watch the flow of water. Pay careful attention.

4) As you observe, let the patterns of what you are seeing get into you. A river is neither random nor an orderly mechanism. The river is a complex system.

Note things like the following:

– A standing wave that is constantly changing and yet always there.

– Repetitions in the pattern e.g. a big splash that comes after every seventh wave.

– Overlaid patterns. Maybe the wind is blowing, creating ripples across the flow. Maybe ripples bounce off one rock and intersect with ripples from another.

– Evolution over time and space. Notice how the water begins upstream, and changes speed and position as it flows. Throw a leaf into the flow and watch the twisting journey it takes.

Put all this together and you are getting an intuitive feel for how all complex systems behave.

5) Now extend your awareness beyond the river. The river is connected to the landscape, to the sky, to the sea. All these are complex systems too, forming one super-system. They share a family resemblance with the river, only in forms and on timescales of their own. The sky, the soil, the stones, the plants, the animals are all flowing like rivers in their own ways. Extend your “river-sense” up from the river and out to all the world around you. Feel it flowing as one vast river.

6) Extend this awareness to yourself. Pay attention to your own body and mind. You are also a complex system. You are a river too.

7) Extend this awareness to the invisible. Down to microscopic cells and DNA. Up to the entire planet, the Solar System, even the galaxy. All this too flows like a river.

8) Hold this awareness of yourself and the world, flowing, evolving over endless time and space.

9) Afterwards, as a bonus extra consider spending some time watching footage of Earth from space (here’s one). Patterns you saw in that river can be seen playing out over the whole surface of our world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em4QtItlW0M

This is the universe that modern science reveals, metaphorically speaking. If that’s not spiritual, I don’t know what is.

Conclusion

I’ve only scratched the surface here. Nevertheless, there’s reason to believe that our modern view of science and spirituality as being opposites is an historical artefact unique to our moment in time, rather than anything natural and enduring. Throughout history the questions, “How does the universe work?” and, “How should we live in this universe?” have almost always been united. As we re-imagine better futures, our answers may inevitably join together once more.

Jack Waro is either a climate change expert and/or hobo and/or prone to exaggeration. He can be found in the Land of the Long White Cloud, under the trees, having conversations with the fantails. For more check out Jack Waro Writes Bad Ecology.

Animism and Solarpunk

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trees on forest at daytime
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by Craig Stevenson

Have you ever had that funny feeling where you have the shape of an idea in your head? A notion, or maybe the thread of an idea. Not yet fully formed, but it’s there. You know the rough shape of it in your brain, but don’t have the words to describe it to others.

That’s how I felt for a long time around what animism is really about.

When reading articles describing it, it’s often as the belief or idea of ascribing sentience or personhood to inanimate objects. Whenever I would read that, it felt fundamentally wrong. That’s not really what it was in my head. That didn’t fit the shape and my experiences held in my brain. It’s not viewing everything as another kind of human. I don’t think trees and rocks are human minds in tree and rock suits. Rocks don’t have feelings, trees don’t get anxiety about the future. But I couldn’t put words as to why. What was the big missing description, the missing words I was needing?

The answer was given when I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The book is a dive into Kimmerer’s experiences as a member of the Potawatomi Nation in the field of biology. Comparing, contrasting, and marrying the traditional teachings and philosophy of the Potawatomi people with scientific attitudes and methods.

And an ongoing theme of the book finally put words around the idea of animism in my head I lacked: Relationships.

Animism is about Relationships.

It is about gaining the understanding that the world is built on relationships, and all other things are entities deserving of consideration and respect. They are not just objects to be used or rejected. They are not resources to be consumed without reciprocity.

And I think this is an important concept to be held within Solarpunk when we talk of building the futures we wish to see, both in fictions and in the world. It becomes a lot harder to mistreat the environment and damage it when you see it for what it really is: a web of relationships you are part of. Things are not just resources to be extracted, they are things deserving of consideration. And if you mistreat the surrounding entities, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral, you are hurting the web of relationships upon which you rely.

In Brading Sweetgrass, there is a particular chapter on the author’s difficulty trying to learn the Potawatomi language as an adult. A large difference from English is how things are not talked about or described in an object action format. Instead, much of the language is describing entities in states. The example given in the book is instead of saying “I’m going to the creek” you would say “I’m going to where the water is being the creek”.

It’s built into the language that everything is talked about as an entity in a state.

When conceptualizing a solarpunk world, be it for fiction or a future we want to see, we rarely consider how language will change to reflect changing attitudes to the world around us. In what terms will we talk about our environment, embed how we see it. How we consider it, and so how we treat it.

There are already real world examples of this mindset being used to enshrine ecological protection. Two rivers, the Mutuhekau Shipu river in Canada and the Whanganui in New Zealand, have made headlines after being granted personhood as part of efforts to protect them through legal systems. There are many other efforts like this across the globe to challenge the object and ownership model embedded in current legal systems and to introduce a rights based viewpoint of the environment being made up of entities with fundamental rights just like humans have.

Now, so far I have talked about this in terms that are relatively material, and that may surprise those of you who were here to read an essay on the spiritual side of Solarpunk.

This isn’t a contradiction of terms. For me, the spiritual dimensions of things are an emergent property of the material world. The profound sense of connectedness being an animist has brought me is deeply spiritual in nature.

Learning to perceive the connections and cycles of reciprocity between human, plant, animal, and land led to me feeling more connected to all of them in a way that is hard to articulate, and my behaviour changed along with it.

I can no longer go for a walk round my local woods without actively picking up all the litter, because after all the woods have given me, it would be rude and unneighbourly to not actively help out with the issues affecting the wood in turn.

I do wonder: if we once again started to collectively take a more animist mindset, how much would naturally change from simply how we would inherently think of how our actions affect others?

Image of a white male with pink hair and mutton chops. He has a pink flower over his left ear and a black necklace with three silver beads on it. There are trees and various other humans in the background.

Craig is a London based daydreamer who loves to speculate. His various essays and musings can be found at solarpunkdruid.com, and he has been published as part of the Almanac for the Anthropocene: A Compendium of Solarpunk Futures.

Seeds For the Swarm – A Review

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A young woman with freckled skin and red hair wearing black goggles looking up at three green cicadas with red eyes circling the book title, "Seeds for the Swarm." Glowing yellow/white particles waft upward from the bottom of the background which looks like a watercolor of red/orange evocative of fire.

Listen to this review on the If This Goes On (Don’t Panic) podcast

Seeds for the Swarm by Sim Kern takes us on a journey of the near future where warming has continued and much of the United States is now barely habitable. People from the “Dust States” try to emigrate through a tightly-controlled border to the “Lush States” or muddle through with that rugged individualism we take so much pride in here in the United States.

This feels like a very likely future with continued exploitation of oil and corporate/government collusion leading to huge sacrifice zones where people work hard in polluting industries that are choking their communities so they can put food on the table for their families. Rylla, our protagonist, wants desperately to go to college, but doesn’t have much hope of getting out of the Dust States even though she’s in the top of her nationwide virtual high school.

When she finds out the oil company in her hometown plans to destroy the watershed that provides what meager water is available to her region and is the last thing to give her hope, she gets a ride to speak to the state legislature committee in charge. Despite an impassioned speech, her entreaties fall on distracted ears beholden to corporate overlords and gadget addictions. One viral, embarrassing remix of her speech later, she gets recruited as a scholarship student at a university in the Lush States.

Starting with her interaction with the elected representatives, Rylla does a lot of growing up in the course of this book. It felt like Kern took everything I learned during the course of my twenties and made Rylla face these hard truths all in the course of a single year. During her many misadventures, I identified with Rylla’s tendency to get swept up in the ideology of the groups she would spend time with before becoming disillusioned when she found they didn’t have the answers she needed.

This future has glimmers of hope, but the carcass of our current world is still the dominant society. While there are a variety of themes explored, I think the most important is how the protagonists push against eco-fascism being the only solution to solving the climate crisis regardless of who is promoting it. I think it really fits into what Andrew Dana Hudson said when he was interviewed by Solarpunk Magazine:

a solarpunk future is one in which the climate crisis is escalating, institutions are failing, late capitalism is getting even more precarious and putrid, and while technologies of sustainability might be becoming ubiquitous, we haven’t yet managed to fully phase out the toxic old for the green new. It’s a future (slash present!!) in which we need a movement of solarpunks to shove us onto a better path

Our Shared Storm: An Interview with Andrew Dana Hudson

As someone who is an engineer, I really love the interactions between Rylla, a humanities major, and all of her engineering/scientist friends. They’re preoccupied with how to get their projects to work the way they want them to without necessarily thinking about what secondary or tertiary effects the technology might have on the world. They are often dismissive of Rylla’s legitimate concerns and only later realize that she was right in being worried. The Ian Malcolm quote from Jurassic Park comes to mind of “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

An image of Jeff Goldblum in black glasses and a leather coat with the text "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Rylla’s other main companions are her fellow humanities majors including her previous public school rival from another Dust State and her nonbinary roommate who literally smashes the patriarchy. As one might expect, it’s up to Rylla to join the forces of science and the humanities to defeat the eco-fascist Big Bad at the end of the book. I do feel like this book is a little better about explaining why the kids have to be so instrumental in saving the day compared to most other YA novels where it seems the adults just really needed to go on vacation that week.

There are plenty of mishaps, victories, death, and embarrassments to go around in this story, making it a solid entry into the YA genre. I could’ve done without the love triangle, but I know that’s a hard trope to kill. Rylla and the other characters feel like real, messy humans who are doing their best to make it in an imperfectly hopeful world.

Thanks to Stelliform Press for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

If you’d like to support the blog, please use the affiliate link to the book above, or consider supporting us on Comradery, a cooperatively-owned patronage platform.

A Failure of Imagination

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A GIF of SpongeBob waving his hands to create a rainbow and saying "Imagination."

Critics of climate action or environmental justice often resort to calling those of us wanting a solarpunk future unrealistic or dreamers. They do this while saying that a liveable climate or dignity for everyone living here can only be achieved if we find away to make it square with the current dominant economic model. I think imagination is critical if we’re to come out of the other side of the climate crisis, but I don’t think we should be letting imaginary constructs stand in the way of saving real things like the biosphere.

Despite the spurious claims of social Darwinists, human society has been devised by humans, and as Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” It isn’t set in stone. Adrienne Maree Brown has talked about how the status quo started in the imagination of someone. The economy and even money itself are fictions made manifest by collective belief. As Baratunde Thurston said, there is no inherent value to a piece of cloth with $1 inscribed upon it.

I really started thinking about this during the recent roller coaster regarding the Build Back Better bill and Inflation Reduction Act. I couldn’t grok how anyone could stand in the way of meaningful climate legislation over imaginary things like inflation and the economy. I wouldn’t say I was surprised, I just get so frustrated when people are telling me to be realistic when they’re trying to prop up a corrupt system built of smoke and mirrors as if “There Is No Alternative.” I’m not a big proponent of having a federal government, but if you do have one, then they should be addressing existential threats. This sort of nonsense would’ve annoyed me before, but, now that I have a kid, this kindled a rage for people who would purposefully endanger my child’s chances of having a liveable planet that I didn’t know was possible.

From XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/

When faced with such entrenched opponents clinging to the last vestiges of a harmful system, we could try to face them head on and tell them the error of their ways. This is my first impulse, as someone who is quick to rush in when “someone is wrong on the internet.” However, I think solarpunk gives us a better way forward.

We could keep railing against the status quo and expend our energy there, or we can work to collectively imagine a better future and do the work to make our way there. That doesn’t mean there won’t be struggles, or that we shouldn’t ever confront oppression when we see it. It does mean that burnout (and failure) will come quickly if we only ever fight against things instead of for something. We need a future we can believe in if we’re going to end the harm of our present.

I’m planning to both imagine and build a better future. I hope you’ll join me.

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Arboreality – A Review

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The book cover of Arboreality. The title is written in gold font on a hunter green background. This looks like an old leather book cover with a burnt bottom right half revealing botanical drawings and "by Rebecca Campbell" on the "first page" underneath the cover.

I wasn’t sure what to expect going into Arboreality, but Campbell really pulled off multiple perspectives in a short book, which is no small feat. I was anxious about how well head hopping across time would work without something the length of a Sandersonesque tome, but by keeping the geographic scope limited and the characters within a few degrees of separation of each other, the narrative stays tight enough to stay invested in the outcome.

This book also does a good job of walking the line between climate apocalypse and everything was fine because of some hand wavy solution. Things are pretty rough throughout the book, but it does feel like things are slowly getting better. Wildfires, future pandemics, and sea level rise are just some of the issues facing our protagonists.

What I really appreciated is that there is no one hero to save us from climate change. The characters can’t save the world on their own. What they can do is plant seeds, both literal and figurative, for the next generation. That’s what spoke to me in this book. It really brought the concept of being a good ancestor to life, something my own ancestors might have thought of as “cathedral thinking.”

At this point, a certain amount of warming is baked into the climate system and I’m not going to see things return to “normal.” If you and I each do our own part to make the world a little better than we left it though, maybe my kid will see a stable climate or the next generation after them. It really puts all the struggles we’ve faced in the climate movement into perspective and makes them feel worth fighting even though they often don’t feel like enough.

If you even have the slightest care for future generations, do yourself a favor and read this book!

Thanks to Stelliform Press for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

If you’d like to support the blog, please use the affiliate link to the book above, or consider supporting us on Comradery, a cooperatively-owned patronage platform.

Weird Fishes – A Review

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Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz was a wonderful journey that reminded me of how I felt the first time I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a kid. This book is definitely going on my recommendations list for tidalpunk literature, as it very deftly addresses climate change and its effects on the ocean without feeling preachy.

The story is an interesting take on the buddy genre, pairing a sheltered octopod scientist with an emotionally-vibrant and well-traveled mermaid. Amusing and profound interactions between the two characters help them grow as individuals while they investigate the cause and solution to slowing ocean currents.

Mariz’s prose is beautiful and evokes a true feeling of wonder and connectedness to the ocean. Clever twists on common turns of phrase remind you that the main characters aren’t human, and the interplay of the many different species of the ocean gives hints at the biodiversity teeming below the surface. There’s even a cameo by 52 Blue, the “world’s loneliest whale.”

This book helps you remember that we came from the sea and that it still exerts an emotional pull on us like the tide. One of my favorite lines from the book is “People carry the ocean inside them. On an upright fishbone spine sits the soul of an octopus.” Not every line in the book is that poetic, but I feel that encapsulates my feelings when I read this book.

While I wholeheartedly enjoyed this book, it isn’t for everyone. The book doesn’t shy away from the real world consequences of microplastics, commercial fishing, and warming oceans. Many creatures die, often in graphic, but not prolonged, ways. This book also has a content warning for sexual assault.

If you’re looking for a tidalpunk read that rekindles your love for the ocean, I can’t recommend Weird Fishes enough. If you’ve read any good tidalpunk books lately, let us know down below! I just started The Deep by Rivers Solomon and hope to report back on it soon!

Thanks to Stelliform Press for providing an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

If you’d like to support the blog, please use the affiliate link to the book above, or consider supporting us on Comradery, a cooperatively-owned patronage platform.

What is Lunarpunk?

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Lunarpunks are the night dwellers of our solarpunk futures. 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 lunarpunks’s time to be more active, hosting events in the crisp nights from art exhibits to street festivals.

Creatures of the Night

Lunarpunk focuses more on the night than solarpunk’s sunny disposition. Because of this, lunarpunk aesthetics are heavy in purples and blacks as opposed to the greens and yellows of solarpunk. Bioluminescent creatures provide inspiration for clothes that glow either under black-light or as a result of smart textiles. Lunarpunks love their fellow creatures of the night – moths, mushrooms, and bats.

Where the punk really comes in is that in a lunarpunk society, people feel safe going out at night. Social safety nets mean that people don’t have to resort to crime to get by, rape culture has been excised from the cultural consciousness, and sex work is demarginalized, voluntary, and safe. Police, prisons, and punitive justice have given way to restorative justice and a world where anyone, regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation, can feel safe walking down the street at night.

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

Biotech

Biotechnology will have a big role to play in our solarpunk future, but I especially associate lunarpunk with biotechnology. I think this might be because of the aesthetic associations with mushrooms and bioluminescence. Bioluminescent trees or algae lamps could provide electricity-free path lighting in the cities of the future, and amazing different materials are being created from mushrooms like leather, wood, paper, or even structural building materials. Hempcrete and coral-inspired biomimetic concrete are being investigated to replace the carbon-intensive traditional concrete we use for so much infrastructure today.

Magic

Maybe it’s all the purple hues or the influence of the Moon, but lunarpunk feels more magical than solarpunk to me. As solarpunk is a movement that accepts both the spiritual and the scientific, this distinction is probably due more to my own cultural biases of magic being dark and mysterious than it is to any preference for solarpunks or lunarpunks to practice magic or not. The Solarpunk Druid and Justine Norton-Kertson have said something similar though, so it seems I’m not alone. While not a large percentage of the population yet, the growing number of pagans in the world will find a home in a lunarpunk future.

Photo by brenoanp on Pexels.com

Space, the lunarpunk frontier

Space has also become tied to lunarpunk expressions of a hopeful future. One series that I’ll talk more about in a future article that embodies this is the Earthseed duology by Octavia Butler. While the events of the books are terrestrial in nature, the main character is driven to help humanity reach the stars while not neglecting the planet we call home. Lunarpunk offers an alternative to the current thrust of private, corporate space exploration making space travel only for the rich and powerful to escape the planet they’ve ruined by ignoring the toll their activities exact from the natural world.

A proposed lunarpunk flag. A crescent moon in white overlays a black half circle moon silhouette which turns into a gear. These are overlayed on top of a purple (top-left) and black (bottom-right) flag, cut through on a 45 degree angle as many anarcho-fill-in-the-blank flags are.
A proposed lunarpunk flag

Upcoming lunarpunk projects

If you want more lunarpunk, there are two upcoming projects worth checking out. Submissions are open until March 14 for the lunarpunk-themed issue of Solarpunk Magazine, and until March 31 for Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology. The Solarpunk Magazine submission window may tentatively reopen in May if they are still looking for submissions.

I’m really interested to see if there will be any stories that are both tidalpunk and lunarpunk, since the Moon’s influence on the tides makes me feel that there is a strong connection between the two subgenres.

Do you know of any other cool projects in the lunarpunk sphere right now? Let us know in the comments below, and have a great night!

Electrify by Saul Griffith – a Review

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I think at this point just about everyone knows someone who thinks climate change is a problem, but that it will be too expensive to fix, or that the solutions just aren’t viable. I think Saul Griffith’s new book, Electrify, is the perfect book for this audience.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but the blue foil shimmering on the white background of this cover certainly conjures images of the future. While tech bros promise techno-utopian carbon capture machines more efficient than trees, this book excels in rampant pragmatism. Griffith lays out a pathway to decarbonizing the United States transportation and power sectors with only currently existing technologies.

I don’t think I’m the target audience for this book, but I do think the plan to #ElectrifyEverything is a necessary, but not sufficient part of a solarpunk future. The catchphrase usually comes with some caveats, like probably not all industrial processes, and I do feel that solar thermal needs more love since a large percentage of energy use in the home is used for heating, but it’s a decent simplification for the bulk of our current fossil fuel applications.

Electrify can be criticized for not addressing climate justice beside a passing mention. We can’t afford to reinforce the racist and otherwise imbalanced power structures that originally lead to climate change during the energy transition. That said, this book isn’t designed to message an entire Green New Deal in one fell swoop. As someone who grew up listening to talk radio as a red state Republican (more on that later this year), I think Griffith does an excellent job of doing what we engineers do best – sticking to the facts.

He lays out a clear, but concise, explanation of how daunting climate change is, but then paints a solution by the numbers to how we can overcome it and be more prosperous by doing so. I’m not usually a big fan of all the militaristic language used to describe climate work, but the comparisons in this book to World War II mobilization are useful to put the scope of the issue into perspective. In short, reducing most of our emissions will cost a little less than it cost the US to fight WWII in terms of national GDP.

I think part of the reason climate inaction has been such an easy sell is because it feels too big for any one person to have any agency in the fight. Griffith points the way for how families, especially when bolstered with government-backed loans, can replace the pieces of equipment that generate the bulk of their carbon emissions – their car(s) and their appliances. This gets people in the door for the climate conversation.

A snowy field full of solar panels with a large wind turbine reaching toward the sky in the background. There are two buildings in the background, and one appears to be a silo or astronomy tower based on the hemispherical top.

I know centrism is a dirty word in solarpunk circles, but I don’t think we’re going to succeed in overcoming climate change or climate injustice if we decide that we can’t work with people who are coming from a different political background. Red states already generate the majority of the renewable power in the country, so that’s a starting point. The Republicans I know believe in fairness and justice, but the party and conservative talk show hosts have had decades to distort what those words mean in a political context. We aren’t going to overcome that conditioning overnight, but this book is a step in the right direction, even if it does just seem like neoliberal techno-utopianism at first blush. I feel there’s more going on here than that, but maybe I’m naive.

I am sending this book and my copy of Repair Revolution to my dad. He’s retired and does solar installs on the side since he has his certification as well as experience from wiring up his old and new houses for solar. He’s also a Trump supporter which led to some… strain in our relationship over the last few years. I’m hoping that this book will at least show how we have viable path forward to overcoming the worst effects of climate change without some massive government takeover of every industry, which is what many Republicans fear. Is it going to make him gung-ho about climate equity? No, but at least maybe he’ll be interested in talking about climate solutions instead of automatically shutting down the conversation. It’s not going to be an easy process to get to a solarpunk future, but we’ll get there, step by excruciating step. Electrify shows how the energy transition can at least be a relatively painless part of the process.

Is saving money and increasing our resiliency a way to bridge the political gap, or is storytelling the answer? I think it’s probably a mix, but let me know what you think below!

Disclaimer: If you order the book using the Indie Bound affiliate link above, I may receive a small commission.

Wild ideas: Ban advertising

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At its most altruistic, advertising helps people find products or services that can improve their lives. In reality, advertising generates dissatisfaction in people so they will try to fill an imagined void with the thing the advertiser is selling.

Researchers have found that the amount of money spent in a country on advertising is inversely proportional to the happiness citizens report in that same country. While dividing by zero is inappropriate, it seems that eliminating advertising is a simple way to increase the happiness of many people. I think the characters in Walkaway by Cory Doctorow said it best:

“Is there really abundance? If the whole world went walkaway tomorrow would there be enough?”
“By definition,” she said. “Because enough is whatever you make it. Maybe you want to have 30 kids. ‘Enough’ for you is more than ‘enough’ for me… Depending on how you look at it, there’ll never be enough, or there’ll always be plenty.”

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

The first step to banning ads seems to be the billboard ban. A few states in the US have such bans, and São Paolo, Brazil drew a lot of press when they instituted their “Clean City Law in 2006. Despite predictions of economic collapse brought on by the lack of outdoor advertising, citizens overwhelmingly supported the move and the change brought many previously hidden civic issues to light. Given the rollout of “smart billboards” that bring the pervasive tracking you know and love from the internet to the real world, getting rid of billboards everywhere else can’t happen soon enough.

Current advertising practices promote carbon-intensive lifestyle goods like SUVs that increase global carbon emissions. We should significantly limit, if not totally eliminate, all advertising if we want to hit the Paris Accord targets. We’ve built an economy based on growth for growth’s sake, and capitalism treats natural resources as infinite when it’s clear they aren’t. Banning advertisement is the first step in reducing consumption. Remember, it’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The recycle is last for a reason.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Pexels.com

One group that’s been working to curb advertising is Fairplay, a nonprofit that runs the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. While their efforts are focused on a specific demographic, it seems that they have been working in the space the longest. As a new parent, I’m especially interested in their work. Growing our next generation of citizens outside of the consumer mindset would be an excellent place to start banning ads.

As a small business owner, I’d love to see an end to ads. While I have run ads to drive traffic to my Etsy shops, I feel that it isn’t something I like spending time on or feel adds a lot of value to the end product. Maybe selling on Etsy isn’t the best idea since I abhor sales, but I really like making things and don’t have enough room to keep all of my projects around. While I need people to find the things I make, I don’t like hunting customers around the internet like a predatory car salesperson.

Finally, if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to install an ad-blocker and/or tracker blocker software. I use uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, and Decentraleyes on my own Firefox installation, but everyone has their own favorites. This software lets you regain a little bit of privacy as well as block a fair amount of the ad traffic directed toward your eyeballs. It’s not foolproof, but it can help you regain a small modicum of sanity in this ad-saturated world.

Do you love ads and think this is a terrible plan? Have you seen any clever ideas to circumvent ads? Let us know below.