Tag Archives: lunarpunk

Looking to the Past to Move Into the Future

man in gray tank top on a cliff. There are clouds below the outcropping
Photo by M Venter on Pexels.com

by Luca Sumitra

The exploration of ancient cultures and their wisdom can help us develop a deeper understanding of our environment and our lives. These cultures often had a close relationship with nature and understood how to manage natural resources in order to preserve them for the long term. Additionally, they grappled with the big questions of life and often developed spiritual and philosophical answers to them.

This knowledge and understanding can be used today to create a sustainable and friendly future. If we learn to treat our environment with respect and mindfulness and engage with the fundamental questions of life, we can build a harmonious relationship with our environment and initiate a positive change.

The Solarpunk/Lunarpunk movement embraces this idea and promotes renewable energy and responsible use of our resources. They strive for a harmonious coexistence of humans and nature and develop creative and innovative approaches to realize this vision.

In daily life, we can contribute practically to achieving these goals. For example, we can switch to renewable energy by obtaining our electricity from a green energy supplier or generating solar or wind energy ourselves. Also, a conscious consumption of regional and seasonal food can help to conserve our environment and strengthen the local economy.

Moreover, we can connect with nature by spending time outdoors and engaging in nature conservation projects. The contemplation of spiritual and philosophical questions can also help us better understand ourselves and our relationship to the world, and provide a foundation for a more sustainable life.

Overall, it’s about developing a holistic and respectful relationship with nature and ourselves. By combining ancient wisdom and modern approaches like the Solarpunk/Lunarpunk movement, we can create a positive future based on sustainability and community.

Here are three small practical exercises that fit with the above text and can help contribute to saving the world more relaxed:

  • Date your breath: A simple breathing exercise can help us relax and strengthen our connection to nature. Sit in a quiet place, close your eyes, and consciously inhale and exhale deeply. With each inhale, welcome in fresh and new air and with each exhale, release all the old and used-up air.
  • Sustainable consumption: Another exercise is conscious consumption. Take the time to select local and sustainable products when shopping. Avoid unnecessary plastic waste and opt for reusable alternatives. By consuming mindfully, you can help conserve the environment and strengthen the local economy.
  • Spend time in nature: Another way to connect with nature and do something good is to spend time outdoors. Go for walks, have picnics, or explore new nature reserves in your area. By spending time in nature, you can relax and strengthen your connection to nature. This is also a great opportunity to pick up the trash that you come across on your way.

A man with long brown hair and a beard. He has a silver nose ring and a small six-pointed star tattooed under his right eye.

Luca Sumitra is currently living out of his backpack traveling the world. He works as a consciousness mediator and teaches mainly at festivals and events, but also works with educational institutions, with a focus on children and young people.

Cyber-Solar-Lunar𝘗𝘶𝘯𝘬

by Ashton K. Arnoldy

As genres of speculative fiction—fiction which aims to imaginatively influence the manifestation of our collective future—solarpunk and lunarpunk hold a promise that their ancestral foil (cyberpunk) does not. Whereas cyberpunk exercises a predominately negative, or critical, purpose by presenting a dystopian future we ought to avoid realizing, solar and lunarpunk both aim to envision positive alternatives inspired by a renewed cosmic spirituality. This may seem like an idiosyncratic characterization, but in what follows I will try to make clear why the recontextualization of humanity in a meaningful cosmos is what essentially distinguishes solar and lunar from cyberpunk. And, in accord with the pluralistic ethos Navarre opened this series with, I want to acknowledge from the outset that my characterizations may not resonate with everyone—and that’s okay. While it’s true that—in relation to the Earth—the Sun and Moon communicate distinct, archetypal characteristics, it’s also true that archetypes are polysemous: they manifest themselves in a range of meanings. And yet, if we are to discern what actually is archetypally lunar or solar, we must refer to realities that are not reducible to human social construction alone. Cyberpunk also partakes of the archetypal and might arguably be seen as a contemporary form of mythology conveying the dangers of hubris (think of Prometheus or Icarus). The major difference between these ancient myths and cyberpunk, however, is that between then and now has stretched a period of radical industrialization and its corresponding ecological devastation. Human hubris is writ large in the last century’s capitalist delusion of endless extraction and technological innovation cued to selfish ends. Solar and lunarpunk speculatively intervene to renew humanity’s sense of proportion (etymologically, the word “cosmos” arises from the Pythagorean-inflected κόσμος, which once denoted the universe as a harmonic order). Such speculative interventions are crucial given how pervasive the cyberpunk imaginary is today. The oft quoted saying (attributed to both Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek)“it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”—exemplifies this pervasiveness, for cyberpunk stories are typically characterized by a form of capitalism pushed to its most inhuman extreme. We need only call to mind Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, or Akira and we can see this possible future in vivid detail:

A man in a trench coat looks into the distance in a yellow, dusty environment. The visibility is low so nothing is visible in the distance except yellow sky.
A still from one of the latest cyberpunk classics, Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

The Earth has become a wasteland; cities provide the remainder of humanity refuge from the larger swaths of the planet that are now uninhabitable zones of nuclear fallout. Megacorporations have taken over the function of the state and exercise control over the cultural sphere, ensuring citizens are kept pacified by rituals of escapism (digital, chemical, etc.). The unfeeling, yet self-indulgent elites live high above the clustered and polluted chaos of the urban population, ruling over them through an authoritarian surveillance apparatus that records everyone’s activity. Nietzsche’s Übermensch is translated into a crude form of technological “enhancement” that only wealthy individuals can afford (unless you happen to be a test-subject); radically hybridized human-cyborg forms emerge and prompt one of the major questions of science fiction: What is the human being?

A person in a red cloak and grey tank top sits on a stone chair. Their cybernetic arm pulses and then explodes in a shower of wires which attach to the chair. A person walking up to the chair seems startled by the even and the seated person covers their arm with the cloak.
From Akira (1988)

The punk in cyberpunk often manifests through unlikely protagonists who represent the last bastions of higher values by raging against the machine—against a “society” that cybernetically reproduces inhumanity like a cancer. Whether they be actual humans or synthetic imitations who choose to honor such values, these misfits work against the “high tech, low life” character of their surroundings and shine as beacons of hope for a more humane world. A consistent archetype is the anarchist hacker who deploys their skills to throw a wrench in the system or divulge emancipatory information to the public. Sadly, their struggles usually amount to little given how pervasively the cancer has metastasized. Civilization—in these stories—seems beyond saving. Rather than presenting salutary visions of collective human flourishing, the cyberpunk genre has generally served to warn us of what we could become. These warnings are still relevant given that our world has grown to resemble the cyberpunk imaginary ever-more as the years go by. The ongoing incarceration and persecution of whistleblowers like Julian Assange exemplifies the extent to which cyber rebels pose a threat to the corporation-state juggernaut. This is despicably hypocritical given that social media and search engine companies openly track all user activity that transpires through their platforms. Our daily digital habits feed machines designed to enslave our attention and, increasingly, to shape our desires in ways that perpetuate the ravenous hunger of the monster that is neoliberal capitalism. How do we escape this capture?

The artist Grimes sitting in a stone chair with a red shirt and a red banner fluttering behind.
Grimes echoing a scene from Akira in “Delete Forever” on her last album, “Miss Anthropocene” (2019)

Enter solarpunk, the great potential of which is the return of the central, though unresolvable, question raised above—“What is the human being?”—to its cosmic context. Unlike cyberpunk, which, as a genre, broods over the dangers that arise from technologies borne of human alienation, solarpunk takes its inspiration from the more-than-human world—specifically, the giver of life on Earth: the Sun. Both genres reflect the Anthropocene—the name for our current geological age (cene) during which the human species (anthropos) has become a planetary force. But because the cyberpunk imagination is (typically) constrained to a mechanical vision of the cosmos, it perpetuates the worst kind of anthropocentrism—the kind which mistakes our theoretical models for reality. This mechanistic model—ranging from quantum physics, to biology, all the way to macroscopic cosmology—is defined exclusively by the inorganic laws of nature and can thus only amount to a vision of death. The mysteries of life and human consciousness—in this imaginary—are reduced to sophisticated computational processes that will soon be both explained and rendered obsolete by the rapidly evolving machinations of artificial intelligence. According to adherents of this mythos, technoscience will one day realize its ultimate goal: material immortality.

A GIF beginning with a stream of green numbers on a black background and then moving to what appears to be the assembly of a white android around a black interior structure. A green brain being crossed by a green plane ends the image.
From Ghost in the Shell (1996)

Solarpunk arises dialectically as a healthy reaction to the death-drive made conscious by cyberpunk and responds by reinstating the primacy of Life in the rhythmic organism that is our cosmos. Mechanism is subsidiary to organism, the organic; life is not *in* molecules; rather, molecules arise from the symphonic action of the entire cosmos and this music is life. The wish of solarpunk is to let the light of this cosmic Life inspire all of science and invention. What are science and technology for if not the flourishing of humanity and the wider Earth-community on which we depend? As Matt Bluemink writes, “at its core, solarpunk is the ecological antidote to cyberpunk… [an impetus] to imagine a world where human beings live in harmony with nature, but in a way that embraces developments in modern eco-friendly technology.” To live in harmony with nature is to rediscover the spiritual symphony of our living cosmos. Apart from the more obvious association with solar-power and renewable energy, the solar in solarpunk also refers to the salvific fire of optimism. Solarpunks are punk to the extent that their willful optimism goes against the grain of today’s complacent irony, cynicism, and destructive nihilism. And, sharp contrast to the extrinsic individuality that characterizes cyberpunk societies (and today’s neoliberalism), the solarpunk ethos implies a perception of humanity as a whole—a whole organism to which we as individuals belong. As Adam Flynn writes in Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto, “Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us – i.e., extending human life at the species level, rather than individually.” The films of Hayao Miyazaki are among the major influences on the solarpunk aesthetic, and this is unsurprising given that Miyazaki’s films are saturated with an environmental ethic that flows from the Japanese Shinto tradition. Indeed, it seems that solarpunk is generally inspired by indigenous wisdom traditions to reintegrate humanity in the great web of life.

An animated image of a cow and butterflies in a field below a solar array. There are trees in the distance.
From the solarpunk-inspired short, Dear Alice (2021)

Though this characterization is by no means exhaustive, I have tried to distill what seems most essential to the spirit (or spirituality) of solarpunk: the light of optimism, the primacy of Life, and the perception of an underlying wholeness (i.e. the human species, the web of life, etc.). And—importantly—these features are not arbitrary, but issue directly from our actual experience of the genre’s namesake: Sol, the Sun. Those who have spent a substantial amount of time enduring frigid nights will know how natural it is to connect the light of optimism with the promise of sunrise. Anyone who pays attention to the flora and fauna of their local environs will know what praises Life sings to the break of dawn. And many will have heard the saying, “For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike.” We do not make these things up; we either attend to such features or blind ourselves to them. The spirituality of solarpunk consists in choosing to recognize that an essential part of our humanity is connected with the Sun, that we are partially constituted by it, and that, just as it inspired our ancestors for thousands of years, it can likewise guide our own aspirations for the Anthropocene. This light-filled renewal of cosmic spirituality is one possible future; a darker future, presented by cyberpunk, consists in the further intensification of alienated anthropocentrism and its ironic apotheosis in the subhuman automaton. We have reached a fork in the road.

Astrologically speaking, we are on the cusp of Pluto’s ingress into the sign of Aquarius (a 20 year transit in total) which many astrologers predict will usher in a form of surveillance more oppressive than we have yet to experience. Many astrologers also anticipate the boundary between machines and (some) humans to increasingly blur. The pervasiveness of the cyberpunk imaginary certainly facilitates our passive entry into this Brave New World, but have the hopeful tales and practical initiatives of solarpunk done enough to prepare us to face the panoptic beast of mass surveillance? Rachel-Rose O’Leary doesn’t think so, and in her widely circulated essay “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,” she furthers the dialectic of cyber and solar by positioning lunarpunk as a kind of higher synthesis of the two. According to O’Leary’s genealogy, lunarpunk flows from the lineage of cypherpunk—a movement of coder-activists who anticipated the coming dangers of mass surveillance already in the early 1990s. Cypherpunks—including Julian Assange—advocated for and innovated encryption techniques to protect user privacy. Unlike the anonymity enjoyed in the analog world of cash exchange, digital transactions are vulnerable to prying eyes. As Eric Hughs writes in “A Cypherpunks Manifesto,” “when my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.” It is this freedom to selectively reveal oneself that cypherpunks aim to protect. Why? As Hughs writes, “we cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak.” The parasitic collaboration between advertisers and social media companies to farm our attention is an obvious example of what happens when we allow such entities to “speak of us.” China’s inhumane, authoritarian public health measures are another example of what can happen when citizens lack the negative freedom (protection) of privacy. As early resistors to mass surveillance, cypherpunks resemble the rebellious (because humane) protagonists of cyberpunk stories. And indeed, as O’Leary characterizes the subgenre, lunarpunk continues this resistance, reminding solarpunks that utopia will only ever be elsewhere, while dystopia is nigh.

Black and white image of two round mirrors facing each other with a zoomed in eye in each. There is an animated sun near the left mirror and an animated moon near the one on the right. Text in the image says, "Lunarpunks are the solar shadow-self."
From the video essay “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,” via Rekt News (2022)

But, significantly, O’Leary isn’t writing speculative fiction, rather, she seems to be going a step further by attempting a more direct intervention into history itself, engaging in what might be called mythospeculation. But she doesn’t claim to be any kind of messiah, rather, she points to the advent of crypto as containing its own speculative, sci-fi potential. As she writes, “crypto is an extreme kind of sci-fi because as well as offering a vision of the future it also provides the tools to make that future possible.” She goes on to describe how the future of crypto is predominately envisioned through the idealism of solarpunk. Now there are many in the solarpunk movement who reject the whole world of crypto as merely a transposition of neoliberal capitalism into the digital sphere. A thread in the solarpunk subreddit titled “Crypto is not (solar)punk” provides a snapshot of the various perspectives involved in the debate. As one user writes,

“Regardless of the environmental impacts, which are sus at best, creating an unregulated currency that is already controlled by the rich and powerful and literally siphoning production and wealth out of the labor force of the country with get-rich-quick schemes, pump and dump, and pyramid schemes is not my idea of solarpunk. Currency as we know it wouldn’t even be needed in a truly post-scarcity solarpunk world. Cryptocurrency is just capitalism turned up to 11.”

With the recent downfall of FTX we know that this is indeed an accurate characterization of some developments in the world of crypto, but others argue that this just proves the true potentials of blockchain technology have yet to be tapped. Another user in the subreddit debate conveys this with respect to the capabilities of NFTs:

“an NFT is really just any data stored on a blockchain that isn’t interchangeable with the other items on it (in the way that one bitcoin can be interchanged with any other bitcoin, because they’re all the same as each other). That means that NFTs could conceivably be used not just for securely keeping track of ownership, but generally for issuing records that can’t be forged or modified, or (along with smart contracts) exchanging data between two parties when the terms of an agreement are fulfilled. We can do those things without trusting a third party – or really, trusting anything except math – and without centralizing authority in the hands of a bureaucracy which might become inefficient, abusive of its power, or corrupt. A large part of solarpunk is the smart and responsible application of technology to improve our lives, and if blockchains were applied properly, they have the potential to legitimize and strengthen the sort of bottom-up social relations that, to me, are vital to the successful implementation of solarpunk ideals.” It is presumably this capacity to cut out third parties (i.e. banks, governments, etc.) and the centralizing power such entities currently enjoy that makes crypto, as O’Leary suggests, an “extreme form of sci-fi” by providing the “tools to make that future possible.”

Blockchain technology, as this user points out, enables peer-to-peer transactions that could provide bottom-up, grassroots movements an economic alternative to the state-mediated systems currently in place. This potential of decentralization is presumably what O’Leary means when she describes crypto as an extreme form of sci-fi, one that provides a vision and the tools to realize it. Unfortunately this potential is hampered by another widely celebrated feature of the blockchain—transparency, the expectation being that public access to transactions will mitigate corruption, or at least make it easy to spot when it does take place. But if we recall the central concern of cypherpunks—privacy—then we might rightly hesitate to celebrate a technology that exposes our transactions to prying eyes. Indeed, this is O’Leary’s main concern, for while many in the Global North might look upon the insistence for privacy with suspicion, those who have faced state-sanctioned oppression know better. That O’Leary knows better becomes evident in another article in which she compares the lunarpunk insistence on encryption with the guerilla style warfare of the Irish during their recent revolutionary period:

“Fighters lacked weapons, but the people and rugged landscape protected them. The new warfare favored hit-and-run tactics and disrupting enemy intelligence. It was the dawn of modern guerrilla tactics – and it won Ireland its independence. These guerilla tactics are no longer feasible today. Modern surveillance technologies and automated weaponry have turned the world that we inhabit into a desert with no protective cover. Resistance fighters are easy targets.”

Transparency, for O’Leary, is like the first iteration of the Irish revolution—when Irish fighters tried to overcome colonial rule by occupying the most public outposts of their territory. But being so conspicuous backfired when the British army arrived and closed-in, catalyzing the recourse to guerilla tactics. Today’s mass surveillance is a similar development. Those solarpunks who, having recognized the emancipatory potential of crypto, opt to join forces with popular blockchains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, put themselves at risk when—in the near future—state regulation sweeps in and transparency backfires. O’Leary and others in the DarkFi movement refer to the latter development—state-based crypto regulation—as “the coming storm,” and position lunarpunk as a revolutionary countermeasure. As she writes, “lunarpunk is a guerrilla movement committed to establishing a digital forest in cypherspace using tools like encryption that its fighters can recede into.”

A quarter moon over an animated dancing forest. Fireflies appear in a few of the frames. Text in the image says: "Lunarpunk is more like a forest. A dense cover of encryption protects tribes and offers sanctuary for the persecuted. Wooded groves provide a crucial line of defense. Lunar landscapes are dark. They are also teeming with life."
From the video essay “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,” via Rekt News (2022)

In contrast, “by building transparent systems, the solarpunk says: I have faith that the law won’t turn against me. Its insistence on optimism prevents it from preparing for the worst case scenario.” She goes on to compare this situation with the harsh desert landscape where there is no cover, no escape from the relentless exposure of sunlight. In stride with the aforementioned astrologers who anticipate Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius to herald new depths of surveillance, lunarpunks are fostering the growth of forest-cover in cypherspace in hopes of preserving the mere possibility of freedom. O’Leary and others in the DarkFi movement refer to this anonymizing process as “going dark” and in so doing articulate a key feature of lunarpunk. Whereas some solarpunks enthused with crypto might hold out hope for transforming the current system through public projects transparently mediated through Ethereum, lunarpunk—according to O’Leary—is about seceding from the system altogether. As she writes in her conclusion to “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,”

“Lunarpunk’s believe freedom can only be found outside the logic of domination. This means lunar society must completely decouple itself from the current paradigm. As such the lunarpunk future is born from a conflict that solarpunks seek to avoid.

This solarpunk repression is its weakest point. Solarpunk cannot build the vision it projects if it has already integrated the oppression that it hopes to break away from. By favoring transparency in its systems, solarpunk is tragically engineering its fate. Surveillance – the mechanism of authoritarianism – is bound to the solarpunk destiny.

For solarpunk to succeed it must integrate the lunarpunk unconscious. The only hope for solarpunk is to go dark.”

Just as many in the solarpunk movement reject crypto altogether, many might also take issue with the claim that solarpunk has “integrated the oppression it hopes to break away from.” This may not be true of the movement broadly speaking, but it is an unfortunate fact that the greenwashing powers of capitalism have already made inroads into solarpunk aesthetically. The short film “Dear Alice,” a Miyazaki-inspired animation, is a case in point because it doubles as an advertisement for the Greek yogurt company Chobani. The product placement is truly cringe in an otherwise diverse, utopian vision of a solarpunk future. The presence of a decommodified version of the animation on YouTube and a thread discussing the advertisement on the solarpunk subreddit are enough to show that many in the movement do not wish to capitulate to the powers that be.

An animated woman in a blue shirt, red kerchief around her neck, and a tan apron sets a steaming mug of tea on the rail of a porch. There are flowers and plants hanging from the rail and in the background.
From the commodified version of Dear Alice

As O’Leary understands it, the darkness of lunarpunk refers not only to the cover of anonymity, but also the willingness to look into the dark—to accept uncomfortable truths. For lunarpunks this means embracing the fact that we are living in the midst of a dying empire—a phase of decline which typically features an intensified effort of the state to exert control over citizens—hence the unwillingness to reform. And like fungi in the midst of this decay, the lunarpunks of DarkFi are generating an anonymity-focused layer 1 (foundational) blockchain in hopes of fostering a decentralized economy that could unite a patchwork federation of anarchist communities around the globe. Herein lies another important feature of lunarpunk: the recognition that—out of death—new life can emerge. And whereas solarpunk especially emphasizes a compassionate perception of humanity as a whole (including the future of our species), lunarpunks insist on the integral role each individual plays in the moral drama of history. Up until this point a question may have been hovering in the mind of the reader: “But isn’t anonymity a potential hazard? Won’t it incentivize and facilitate criminal behavior?” Justin Murphy posed this question to O’Leary during a dialogue the two had on the zero-knowledge crypto-anarchy of DarkFi; her response conveys the spirituality that undergirds true anarchy when understood as an ethical form that arises spontaneously from the human heart when we have had the chance to grow into virtue rather than be coerced to imitate it:

“I don’t think anonymity is necessarily a catalyst for bad things, and I also have optimism and faith in people, and I don’t think we need to persecute everyone with this invasive surveillance in order to protect us. No, I believe that people can live ethically and that their ethics should come from themselves and not be imposed on them… let the people do their things, fulfill their destinies—let that arise from them organically, as it should, in the spirit of affirmation.”

By insisting on the negative freedom that cryptography provides (freedom from prying eyes and coercion), it might seem like lunarpunks prize technological fixes over the cultivation of inner freedom and virtue. But the convictions O’Leary expresses above convey the exact opposite. The negative freedom of privacy becomes necessary in our technologically mediated world so as to carve out enclaves where the positive freedom of affirmation can flourish organically. One might discern echoes of Nietzche’s yea-saying here. Cryptography can support the latter, but true virtue can only arise out of individual self-transformation. No technology—no matter how sophisticated—can achieve this for us. Such transformation is the spiritual basis of ethical anarchy. If solarpunk steers science and technology away from the alienated and hubristic ends of cyberpunk, lunarpunk rounds off by reminding us that the key to a future of mutual flourishing ultimately lies within.

An image of a silhouette of darkness and one of light standing in a black and white forest with a quarter moon in the sky above. The dark silhouette touches the light silhouette and the rest of the image fades to darkness.

Text in the image says, "For solarpunk to succeed it must embrace the lunarpunk unconscious. The only hope for solarpunk is to go dark."
From the video essay “Lunarpunk and the Dark Side of the Cycle,” via Rekt News (2022)

Heeding O’Leary’s appeal, Dr. Paul J. Dylan-Ennis imagines a harmonization of solar and lunarpunk achieved when the former integrates the latter by going dark. “Absolutely, in terms of strategy,” he writes,

“Yet, we should also demand the light, the transparent fullness of solarpunk optimism. This is how I imagine a perfect synthesis of solar- and lunarpunk. A transparent society of utopic quality (demand nothing less) protected by a vigilant darkness. Without the light what is there to protect anyway? We should never give up the sun to the state.”

Amen—we should never give up the Sun to the state, for the transparent light of surveillance is only a counterfeit of the true, life-giving light of our star. Dylan-Ennis’ vision of synthesis and O’Leary’s Jungian call for solarpunk to “integrate the lunarpunk unconscious,” are—in my perspective—contemporary intimations of the ancient Pythagorean understanding of the cosmos as a harmonic order. But this harmonic order is not something that is merely given, rather, it is something human beings must participate in if we wish to keep the music of the universal process going. The bare attempt to discern the distinct archetypal character of Sun and Moon at work in these subgenres and the relation that inheres between them is an exercise in this cosmic participation, this renewal of cosmic spirituality. If, in the constraints of this post, we take the light of optimism, the primacy of Life, and the perception of an underlying wholeness to convey the essence of solarpunk, lunarpunk bodies forth the inverse: a familiarity with darkness that wisely guides the light of optimism, a sober recognition that the mystery of Life is ineluctably bound up with the mystery of Death (including the death of empires), and—alongside the light-filled perception of wholeness—an equal respect for difference, for the multeity at work in this harmonic unity we call our cosmos. Whereas the Sun, shining on all below irrespective of differences, occupies the daytime sky alone, the Moon shares the vault of heaven with other planets and a countless host of starry worlds. Contemplating this great celestial diversity, we are filled with awe, perhaps terror—or maybe even a bit of both. Just as the Sun can shed light on what it means to be human and guide our aspirations for the future, so too can the Moon. Unless (or until!) we discover humanoid beings elsewhere in the universe, we ought to measure our essence in close connection with the planet which hosts us: Earth. We are not just on the Earth, but are brought forth through the dynamism of its being. But the Earth would not be what it is if it were not simultaneously dancing with the Sun and the Moon. The three celestial bodies constitute a whole in the form of a tri-unity, with Earth harmonizing the polar extremes of Sun and Moon. Unlike the irresolvable negation of contradiction—the stasis of binary opposition—the tri-unity is a dynamic, ever-evolving harmony that recapitulates itself at all scales throughout the cosmos. In a similar vein, BrightFlame speaks of the “nonbinary nature” of solar and lunarpunk, describing their connection “as varied and changeable, not fixed like a molecular bond,” that they “don’t just touch one another, they overlap.” Her characterization is reminiscent of how many have described the Chinese yin-yang which features an interpenetration of light and darkness, one that is more suggestive of a dynamic tri-unity than a static, binary opposition.

An animated Yin and Yang. They are circling each other at a 90˚ angle. The dots go through the hole on the other piece as it spins around.

The same intuition of threefoldness manifests itself in the Celtic triquetra. Indeed, a trinity in some shape or form shows up in the symbol systems of many ancient cultures across the globe, a fact which may be taken to suggest that the harmony of three was an obvious feature of the natural world for our ancestors. But between now and then our thinking—especially when it comes to number—has become woefully abstract. The emergence of lunarpunk in wake of solarpunk bespeaks the potential each imaginary has for overcoming this abstractness through a reattunement the meaningfulness of the more-than-human world. That this is already happening is evident in the sequence of their articulation: given that we are beings of the Earth—cradled between the weaving of Sun and Moon—it was inevitable that a genre inspired by the light of day would be followed by the darkness of night. The two constitute a polarity, a rhythm—a dynamic relationship undergirded unity (i.e. harmony). Aesthetic sensitivity to the natural world expresses itself as a creative continuation of this polar rhythm. We see this in the first characterizations of both genres, but particularly in the effort to articulate the essence of lunarpunk always in relation to solarpunk. As Justine Norton-Kertson writes, “Lunarpunk is to Solarpunk as flowers are to fungi”—a very apt transposition of this polarity, for most flowers do open to greet the daylight, whereas mushrooms tend to thrive in the damp breath of shadows.

If cyberpunk serves to warn us of the destructive potential that human hubris writ large spells for the future, solar and lunarpunk—taken together—enjoin human beings to become capable of comprehending the speaking world once more. This renewal of cosmic spirituality is what we need to offset the damage that has been and will continue to be wrought by technologies concocted by alienated anthropocentrism. Only a spirituality that flows from a recognition of our cosmic context will know how to wield the power of technology responsibly. Though we cannot separate solar and lunarpunk, we can and must distinguish them to better understand the task ahead. Sol ignites the salvific light of optimism, reattunes science and technology to the primacy of Life, and perceives the wholeness of humanity and the Earth community; Luna reminds us that we’re already in the midst of a dystopian cyberpunk story, that we can skillfully negotiate the decay of empire by receding into the dark forest of a parallel cypherspace-economy, and that this technology can help to safeguard the freedoms necessary, though not sufficient for, human actualization. Most of all, Luna reminds us that the latter—the actualization of human potential—can only be achieved at the individual level as we each work inwardly to transform ourselves into ethical beings who are capable of partaking in the spiritual anarchy of the future by striving to live up to it in the present.

A celtic knotwork combination of the Tree of Life and a Triqutra, presumably made of copper or bronze with blacked out background. The GIF distorts the image in a disturbing manner.

An AI-generated avatar of the author. The appearance is of a man with sideburns and spikey hair and traces of facial hair. He has green earings and various green, pink, and blue devices around his temples, forehead, and beneath his eyes.

Ashton K. Arnoldy is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies; his dissertation is focused on the evolution of consciousness as presented by Owen Barfield. Ashton doubles as Aʅʂσ Kɳσɯɳ Aʂ, a multimedia avatar dedicated to fostering anthropogenesis and cosmological orientation. For more, check out the multimedia lunarpunk series Lunar Return, the blog/podcast MicroKosm, and the weekly Calendar of the Soul livestream.

The Nonbinary Nature of Solarpunk/Lunarpunk

by BrightFlame

How many genres does it take to change a light bulb . . . from incandescent to LED? That is, from authoritarian, individualistic, power-over, capitalist tropes to regenerative, interconnected, just, collaborative ones. (Pardon the cliché.)

My thoughts about solarpunk and lunarpunk continue to evolve, just like the amorphous container of each vibe/genre/aesthetic/movement (abbreviated as vibe in this essay). Here are my musings of the moment (February 2023).

The permeable amorphous shape of solarpunk

In my January 2022 article Towards Solarpunk Futures, I wrote:

Jay Springett, a consultant strategist and writer, gave a very interesting presentation about solarpunk. Key takeaways for me: solarpunk is a growing container where gravity pulls some core, mutually understood concepts towards the center, and ideas around the edges are more blurred and in flux—this, by design. It’s an aesthetic of many voices; as such, solarpunks can speak only for themselves, not the movement as a whole.

Jay says in the presentation, “solarpunk asks: What if we together, collectively, create a container that can be used by anyone to place their ideas about the future inside. And what sort of stories would that container with the things it contains, create?”

I love the image Jay creates of the solarpunk container, which he deems a memetic engine that re-futures participants’ imaginations—an engine for producing ideas about the future. In other words, the container holding various inputs becomes an idea-generator, which inspires more inputs to the container and continually reshapes it. Here is my doodle of such a container.

a small yellow circle in center with yellow rays overlay concentric arches in blue, green, and mauve. Words near center: work in the commons, collaborate, decolonize. Words arrayed around: Nature, renewables, green tech, regenerate, fungi, Web of Life, connect, create, solar, mutual, algaue, wind, spirit, dream.

Though the container is more a shapeshifting amoeba than round, and its edges are permeable so ideas flow in and out. Note that the ideas in my graphic are examples to show the form, not an attempt to capture the state of solarpunk or the ideas drifting around the container at the moment.

A hand-drawn free-form shape with four asymmetrical lobes is outlined in dashed orange line. Within it, all asymmetrical and random: wavy green blotches, wavy blue lines, small mauve peanut shapes, a magenta free-form shape with yellow circles within.

In his essay “Solarpunk: A Container for More Fertile Futures,” Jay says “solarpunk is defined by the ideas it produces, not by the container itself.” Yet to me, it’s both the mechanics of the container—a shapeshifting, dynamic engine—plus the generated ideas, which become fuel for more ideas.

How does lunarpunk fit?

In early 2022, I wrote that lunarpunk is the way in which we understand the Earth as sacred—how this turns into a lifestyle and a spiritual form. And that lunarpunk expresses its magical and spiritual side more readily than solarpunk.

I also created this graphic early last year:

Word map showing a description of lunarpunk in an artful way. Text: illumaties the silvery shadows of solarpunk; adds nonlinear, intuitive ways of thiking and feeling; is magical; speaks truth in non-Western science ways of knowing; crates paths to a just, regenerative wolrd and bright futures; cneters environmental justice, lifts all forms of fustice and their intersectionality; decenters humans in the web of life and illumaties relationships, communication, web-weaving among all beings; holds the reality of different realms & communication across realms.

As I write this essay nearly a year later, the above no longer adequately captures lunarpunk.

How they combine in me

I jumped into solarpunk several years back because the vibe describes my path and my life’s work. I write, teach, create, and act for justice and a regenerative world. Thus, solarpunk.

Yet, I also make magic for justice and a regenerative world. As a Witch, I sense and shape energy. I talk with nonhumans like trees and mycorrhizae. I explore the Web of Life. Much of my teaching and writing helps humans feel their connection with the Earth and develop de-centered relationships with Earth kin. I lift different ways of knowing. So, lunarpunk.

Perhaps solarpunk is my activist side and lunarpunk is my magical side and my connection with the Web of Life.

But I don’t like binaries.

The alchemy of solarpunk and lunarpunk

Solarpunk and lunarpunk, to me, are not a binary and not opposites. Besides, binary thinking is a characteristic of authoritarianism, white supremacy, and religious dogma: it doesn’t fit with a solarpunk or lunarpunk vibe. We stay clear of binaries in my spiritual tradition (the Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft), recognizing that there are at least three options or paths in any situation.

two of the hand-drawn amoeba at right angles and overlapped about 30 percent

In any event, I would argue solarpunk and lunarpunk are not separable. Yet I hesitate writing inseparable, which brings to mind an image of two atoms linked in a static way to form a molecule (like CO, carbon monoxide). Since lunarpunk and solarpunk are amorphous, their connection is varied and changeable, not fixed like a molecular bond.

Furthermore, solarpunk and lunarpunk don’t just touch one another, they overlap. But to what extent? Does it depend on the context, the particular example?

Or is lunarpunk totally within solarpunk like a starfish in a tidal pool? Perhaps like mitochondria within a cell, lunarpunk energizes solarpunk. Or is it the reverse, and solarpunk is subsumed in lunarpunk like humans are part of Nature.

Does the vibe change more to lunarpunk or more to solarpunk depending on what is highlighted in the amorphous shape?

the hand-drawn amoeba with yellow highlighting a circular area towards its top
the hand-drawn amoeba with yellow highlighting a circluar area towards its bottom.

Perhaps lunarpunk and solarpunk totally overlap, neither a subset of the other.

Then what about as an art aesthetic, you might ask. Some say that solarpunk displays vivid and bright colors like in daylight, and lunarpunk displays shadow and bioluminescence like nighttime and underwater. To me, these highlight different areas of the form like my spotlit amoeba doodles, above. The aesthetics are connected—we can’t have shadow without light or brightness without dimness.

As a genre, lunarpunk might be an apt term for stories that tend towards fantasy. Yet is any literary work lunarpunk without being solarpunk? What of a story with no technology, yet all about creating just and regenerative culture? To me, that is still solarpunk highlighting a particular part of the amoebic container.

When I include communication between humans and non-human Earth kin, I’m not writing the fantastical, I’m writing of different ways of knowing. When I write of sensing and shaping energy—universal life force that flows through all creatures of Earth—it’s not fantasy. (See my stories “Myco Macro” and “Maybe We Are All Witches” as examples.) My manuscript about a coven thwarting those who harm the Web of Life contains the kind of magic and workings we Reclaiming Witches practice, including working in the astral realm. All of these works might be called lunarpunk. And they are also solarpunk.

What to call the combined vibes

I feel that solarpunk and lunarpunk are not two different vibes—they are one. For example, non-Western/non-dominant ways of knowing are as integral to solarpunk as lunarpunk. Solarpunk is enlivened by the sacred, by spirituality, not separate from it. Lunarpunk is as much about creating a just, regenerative, bright future as solarpunk. As much about cooperative, mutual, fossil-free societies as solarpunk. Interdependence and communication among the Web of Life are central to both.

I admit: I cringe when folx call solarpunk and lunarpunk opposites. I think this is because I want a vibrant, dynamic container. One that is the most pluralistic and feeds the “uncommons,” as Navarre described in his introduction to this blog series.

Just as mycorrhizae and trees combine as a regenerative forest, lunarpunk and solarpunk form a whole. Take either away and you destroy the forest.

If we erect borders in the forest to define lunarpunk versus solarpunk, the forest is less interconnected and dynamic, less able to thrive. Yet, at any given moment we interact with a different part of the forest, thus changing how we express the vibe.

If we separate lunarpunk from the amorphous, pluralistic solarpunk memetic engine, the container becomes less rich, the engine has less fuel.

What would I call lunarpunk and solarpunk combined? Perhaps just solarpunk.

How many genres does it take to change that lightbulb?

One amorphous, evolving genre or vibe.


photo of BrightFlame

BrightFlame (she/they) writes, teaches, and makes magic in service to a just, regenerating world. Her short- and long-form speculative fiction tend towards solarpunk/lunarpunk, including in Solarpunk Magazine Issue 6, in Bioluminescent (Android Press, January 2023), and in a forthcoming solarpunk anthology. She’s known for her teaching in the worldwide pagan community and is affiliated with a sustainability education center at Columbia University that features her workshops and nonfiction. She lives on Lenape territory (Turtle Island) with a human, a forest, a labyrinth, hawks, bees, ponds, turtles, monarda, fox, fungi, rocks, and many other nonhumans. Find her writing and doodles at http://brightflame.com, @BrtFlame on Twitter (if it’s still there), and @BrightFlame@wandering.shop.

Solarpunk Spirituality – An Introduction

green aurora lights on the right hand side of the image are opposite a full moon on the left. The foreground is a sandy beach with some scrubby brush and what looks to be a town glows orange at the base of a mountain across the water.
Photo by stein egil liland on Pexels.com

We’ve talked about solarpunk, lunarpunk, and tidalpunk a great deal here, and one question I hear repeated is whether we need three different subgenres or if there are sharp distinctions between them at all. For me, solarpunk, lunarpunk, and tidalpunk each embody the same values of ecology and equity while expressing them in their own way. They are parts of an ecosystem and reliant on each other.

When I found solarpunk, I loved how the movement embraced both the scientific and the spiritual. Neither one was superior. They both informed the other to come to a greater understanding of the world around us and how to make it a better place. Science without spirituality* becomes the fuel for cold, capitalistic domination of nature, and spirituality without science can lead to superstition and bigotry. When we combine both, we get something that’s better than the sum of its parts.

Lunarpunk foregrounds spirituality and the inner work we do to build a better world. Solarpunk focuses on the application of societal arrangements and appropriate technology to approach the climate crisis. Tidalpunk reminds us that while we might inhabit every corner of the land, three quarters of the Earth’s surface is simultaneously alien and the home we left behind.

Because one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia, solarpunk is sometimes described as optopia: “the best possible place we can create given the circumstances.” One way we do this is by working together to cover for each other’s weaknesses and to enhance each other’s strengths. Pluralism, or everyone having their own perspective respected even when in contradiction, is something I feel is critical for solarpunks. Marisol de la Cadena goes further with the concept of uncommons, wherein “participant entities may become into commonality without becoming the same.”

In the spirit of uncommons, this year we’ll have several contributors presenting their own experiences with solarpunk/lunarpunk and the spiritual. As we present this series, keep in mind that we will not be encompassing all possible ways of how spirituality interacts with solarpunk, lunarpunk, and tidalpunk, but rather our own small facets of a greater whole. 


* I’m defining spirituality here as all the squishy and difficult to define things that make us human. This includes the paths followed by atheists, pagans, Abrahamists, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and everybody else.

What is Lunarpunk?

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!

Why Solarpunk Matters

A flag with split diagonally between green on the upper left and black on the lower right. An 8-rayed sun symbol is overlayed at the center with a black upper left and green lower right.
One of many solarpunk flags

As we enter a new decade, it can be hard to remain upbeat about the future. While I previously addressed some of the things I think define solarpunk, I think the most crucial piece is hope. I won’t get into the distinctions between hopepunk, solarpunk, and their related subgenres (tidalpunk, lunarpunk, etc.), but suffice it to say, in the face of the acceleration of the climate crisis, the pandemic, and decades of dystopian stories in fiction, it’s time for some positive possible futures.

Dystopias have their place in fiction warning against the perils of certain trends in society or potentially dangerous technologies. They can be great foils to techno-optimism, but when all you get are dystopias, it can become difficult to imagine your way out of a crisis. This is no more apparent than what is happening with the current climate crisis.

After decades of dismissal or denial, people are waking up to the fact that the carbon has hit the fan and we don’t have a lot of time left to act if we want to avoid the worst effects of global warming. We’re at a decision point, and after only hearing depressing news from the media and watching movies based on dystopian futures like the Hunger Games or Handmaid’s Tale, it’s no wonder that many are ready to just give up trying to fight what feels like an inexorable foe.

Now, more than ever, we need stories that paint a positive future. People have been bludgeoned to numbness by threats of rising sea levels, increasingly unpredictable weather, and the extinction of many of the other species on the planet. We need to show people that there is hope for the future and that we can still beat this thing. Is it too late for some species? Yes. We’re not going to come out of this unscathed, but if we don’t start acting now we might not come out of the other side at all.

Positive news about efforts in various parts of the world that are actually moving the needle on carbon emissions and other environmental issues is critical. Stories that show how the future could be so much better with clean energy and equitable distribution of materials is a much easier sell than saying certain behaviors or items should be banned. “Theft of Enjoyment” featured as the boogeyman when Republicans incorrectly claimed that the Green New Deal would make hamburgers illegal. As icky as advertising can be, only fitness companies make money by telling people what they shouldn’t have. Showing how much better our possible futures could be will have people running toward something instead of fighting tooth and nail to preserve what they already have, even if it isn’t good for them.

Cover of the Sunvault solarpunk anthology. The full title says SUNVAULT: Stories of solarpunk and eco-speculation and it is set on a colorful picture of a city with a river and lots of vegetation.
Sunvault – A solarpunk anthology

As the near future foil to cyberpunk, solarpunk is here to show us the world we want to have, not the one we’re afraid is coming. Does that mean that solarpunk is free of conflict or struggle? No. Solarpunk isn’t a perfect world, but it is a better, more equitable one. Solarpunk is giving people something worth fighting for which is much more powerful than asking for people to fight against something. In the face of the climate emergency, it can be easy to get overwhelmed, but solarpunk is what keeps me from giving up in the face of imposing odds. As Miguel de Cervantes said, “Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

How do you maintain your mental health in the face of climate catastrophe? Has solarpunk helped you weather the storm to your psyche as it has me? Let us know below.


What I’ve Been Reading – Summer 2020

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Hey all, just thought I’d do a quick post about some of the books I read this summer since we’re just passing the Fall Equinox. Today, I’m partway through Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction from Arizona State University. At this point I’ve read several different explicitly solarpunk anthologies, and I think the main difference from cli-fi (climate science fiction) is that solarpunk takes an optimistic tact. This anthology seems like a mixed bag of optimistic and dystopian visions of the future. I think it’s good to keep in mind that things could go badly, but I find I’m dwelling in negative outcomes enough to really want a whole lot of that in my fiction.

Some of the other books I finished recently were Rewiring America by Saul Griffith, Sam Calisch, and Laura Fraser, Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, and Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson.

I reviewed Rewiring America on the blog, if you want a more in-depth look at it. In short, it’s a detailed plan on how to decarbonize the vast majority of the US economy by 2035. I think it would make a good subset of the Green New Deal, if we ever get one, but it largely sidesteps issues of environmental justice and corporate concentration in favor of being politically palatable.

I’m hoping to write a piece about Walkaway soon, but I think the most succinct way to describe it is as Atlas Shrugged but written by someone who has discovered that capitalism and state-based communism are both bad news. Shrugging and going walkaway both are in response to a government and society that are hostile to the protagonists, leaving them the option to opt out of the default society. For those of you who have read Atlas Shrugged, there is no 100 page philosophical speech or significant narrative left turn in the back third of Walkaway. The time jumps between sections of the book were queued well, so I wasn’t left confused like I have been in some books that used this technique.

Altered Traits was recommended to me since I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to build a habit of meditating. It details the scientific research into meditation and the effects it has on the brain. As someone with a scientific background, it’s always nice to see that there are measurable data to back up the anecdotal evidence that a particular thing is beneficial. Biological systems tend to be messy, so there are bigger error bars than you might see in physics, but the trends back up the general consensus that more meditative practice means more mental health benefits. Some of the effects even start kicking in pretty early for some practices. The book did a great job of describing how different types of meditation exercise different parts of your brain, so now I have a better idea of what kind of meditation to do if I want to boost concentration or combat negative feelings associated with depression. If you are interested in meditation or neurology, I’d definitely recommend giving it a read.

On the audiobook front, I have been relistening to The Stormlight Archive books by Brandon Sanderson. The fourth book in the series, Rhythm of War is coming out in November, so it’s a good time to catch up on what’s happened so far. These books are epic fantasy, so the first three clock in at 42, 48, and 55 hours of audio! I also was listening along with the Year of Dresden reread this year, and the newest book, Battle Ground, just came out on Tuesday! The Dresden Files is urban fantasy if you haven’t run across it before, so it’s a little lighter fare than the doorstoppers Sanderson writes. If you’re looking for a noire-esque wizard detective trying to get by in the modern world, you should give them a try!

If you want to get a free audiobook, I did recently get a referral code for Libro.fm, which is an audiobook merchant that works with local bookstores so they aren’t cut out of the audiobook market like they are with Audible. If you want to support Cory Doctorow’s work to fight DRM and Audible’s overwhelming market power in the audiobook industry, I suggest you checkout the Kickstarter for his upcoming book, Attack Surface. The Kickstarter ends on Thursday, October 8, 2020 at midnight.

What have you been reading/listening to lately? Anything that seemed particularly solarpunk, or just some good old fashioned escapism?


FYI – There are some affiliate links in the article there, so I may get a small referral fee if you purchase something through them.

Radrunner Plus First Impressions

As you may have noticed, I’m a big fan of bikes. That said, I haven’t ridden much in recent years, which has been a bit of a bummer and something I’ve been intending to change.

Due to an unexpected windfall earlier this year, I was finally able to buy an ebike, and gave a quick set of first impressions in an attempt at video for Solarpunk Station. You can check it out here on Diode Zone.

Let me know what you think about doing more videos in the future!

More on malls

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Bellevue Square Mall courtesy of Debs (ò‿ó)♪

I’ve written previously about how malls could provide the bones of solarpunk co-housing, and Grist recently produced a video about how some communities, most notably Seattle, are re-purposing their old malls as community hubs, as they were originally intended. Ellen Dunham-Jones from the Georgia Institute of Technology gave a more in-depth look at retrofitting malls in her 2010 TED Talk and in this interview with WIRED. As malls everywhere experience hard times due to the “retail apocalypse,” is this our chance to reorient these monuments to capitalism into something more community-minded?

FashionSquare

An old map of Fashion Square Mall

Here in Charlottesville, Fashion Square Mall has been emptying out like so many others. Sears left in March 2019 and nothing has come to replace it. Instead of letting it sit vacant, you could retrofit apartments in the main store and put a makerspace in the old auto shop. I couldn’t find a square footage estimate of the store, but if we assume it’s around 50,000 square feet (~4600 square meters) and 10,000 square feet are set aside for the makerspace and community areas, it seems reasonable that you could still fit 50 to 60 apartments in the 40,000 square feet remaining.  With a mix of sizes from micro-apartments to three bedrooms, you could make some decently affordable housing for single people, families, and elders.

With the old store now affordably housing 100 or more people, people could start new businesses in empty store fronts like a food co-op or local restaurant. As the actual people in the mall slowly take over from the fleeing corporate interests, perhaps enough capital could be raised to purchase the mall from its current owners and turn it into a collectively-owned property.

Fashion Square Mall on the map

Fashion Square Mall on the map

Further development could include depaving some of the parking lots, adding rooftop solar panels, and building more housing in the former parking areas. Since a solarpunk future has a reduced dependence on personal automobiles, an improved frequency of bus service to the mall as well as improving connections to the local Rivanna Trail system would be critical. A car sharing station could round out the transportation options for our little collective.

None of these changes are particularly earth-shattering on their own, but each little adjustment to bad zoning and land use decisions inherited from the last century gets us a step further on the road to a sustainable future.

Is there a property in your area that could be turned to more positive uses? Let us know below!

 

Good news for tidalpunks

humpback whale in ocean

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!