Tag Archives: lunarpunk

A Survey of Climate Action in the US

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antique antique globe antique shop antique store

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

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

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

Unformation

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analysis blackboard board bubble

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Like many people, I worry about how much time I spend consuming information: social media, news, TV, video games, etc. I don’t think any of these are bad in their own right, but the trouble is flooding my puny human brain with far more data than it evolved to take in.

So much of our economy is based on consuming things, and that makes it hard to create or to just be. As someone who was called a “walking encyclopedia” as a kid, I naturally want to intake as much information as I possibly can. It’s hard to slow down and absorb everything when I have a fire hose of knowledge a mouse click away.

nature red forest leaves

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I’ve been reading The Nature Fix and think that getting back outside might be where I can find the unformation I need to process the world around me. It’s hard to disconnect from the info tap, but I am going to try to get away a little more so I can give my brain some time to breathe.

What do you do to disconnect and reorient your mind?

Designing money for a solarpunk society

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Money is a social construct, but it is a very useful means of exchange between parties without the need of troublesome conversion rates like how many chickens a smartphone costs. One of the best things about social constructs is that they are mutable. Despite the fact that the government would like you to believe that the money they issue is the only way to exchange goods and services, the rise of cryptocurrencies has shown that the true power of money rests with the people. In fact, trust of the public is the #1 reason government-issued currencies work at all. While a government can debase it’s money through overprinting and other abuses, the fact is that money doesn’t work unless everyone believes in its value.

four assorted cryptocurrency coins

Photo by Worldspectrum on Pexels.com

Hypothetical cryptocurrency

Let’s say I’m in charge of a small municipality. While I think people should be able to earn more money if they make awesome contributions to society through some sort of market, I don’t think they should do that at the expense of people dying in the streets or because they can’t pay for medicine. How do I design my money to have the appropriate incentives to make sure everyone is taken care of?

One option is Universal Basic Income (UBI), so let’s bake that in from the beginning. We’ll need to generate the money for the UBI somehow, and the land value tax or the Fair Tax are the top two candidates for simple and fair taxation. Since I also want to disincentive sprawl, we’ll go with the land value tax in this example. In short, the land value tax charges someone a tax based on the amount of land they own. I’ve seen this likened to a rent paid to The People if one assumes all land belongs to the citizens of a given region and that private use is a lease of that land from the true owners.

When someone pays their land tax it goes in a big piggy bank along with all the other landholders. Then, every month each citizen gets a UBI check deposited into their personal account to pay bills, get food, and buy whatever other things they need.

Globle

I’m not affiliated with Globle, but they have an interesting approach to the incentives issue of the current corporate capitalism system we have. Their approach combines UBI, venture capital, and Kickstarter into a sort of corporations by the people model. As a holder of Globle cryptocurrency, people can vote on what companies and/or products they want to see in the market. Then, based on how those companies perform, part of the company’s profits go to the investors and part goes back into a UBI fund for everyone. It’s hard to say how it will play out, but I do think it’s a novel approach to funding UBI that would also help companies and people work together better since their well-beings are more intrinsically intertwined.

What sort of incentives do you think would bring us closer to a solarpunk society? Let us know in the comments below.

LEGO Human-powered tool station

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LEGO Modular Tool Station

Technic Man pedaling his tool platform

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

LEGO Modular Tool Station Internal Workings

Some of the internal workings of the LEGO prototype

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

Solarpunk: A decentralized society

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 “Ginko tree” by tree-species via a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license

Decentralization

One of the most important things for solarpunk society is decentralization. Most major complaints about society can be traced to over-centralization of power. In the United States, I’m feeling especially conscious of how our country was founded on the belief that power should be distributed among the people, not concentrated into the hands of the elite.

To continue this dream of protecting people’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the best protection against overly-powerful central governments and corporations is decentralization. Recent developments in decentralization include blockchain, mesh networks, platform cooperatives, decentralized social media, and the growth of grassroots democracy.

Blockchain

Blockchain has opened up the door for decentralization of many different services. The most obvious example is cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, but other projects include data storage (FileCoin, Storj), computer processing time (Golem), genetic data management (Nebula), and global UBI. If you’re interested in learning more about blockchain, check out this Blockchain 101 episode of Unchained with Laura Shin.

Mesh Networks

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NetworkTopology-Mesh by Foobaz

Mesh networks work by connecting people to each other in a non-hierarchical way. Mesh networks are more robust since they are not dependent on a single central device such as a cell tower to connect all of the devices in the network. This allows for increased redundancy during natural disasters as well as communications in areas that don’t have any infrastructure like National Parks or developing countries. Current implementations include the mesh network going up in Detroit, Serval and GoTenna for cell phones, and the Althea Mesh for building decentralized ISPs.

Platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives are what the sharing economy was supposed to be before Uber and AirBNB ate everything. Governed by the actual service providers (hosts, drivers, etc.) the rules and profits are determined more equitably. The P2P Foundation and the New School’s Platform Cooperativism are good starting points for more information. If you prefer audio, Team Human has episodes with both Stacco Troncoso of the P2P foundation and Juho Makkonen of Sharetribe. Robin Chase’s Peers INC is a great book on the power of platform cooperatives.

If you are ready to start you own platform cooperative, Sharetribe makes an open source platform designed to help get things up and running. Forbes and Yes! Magazine have both covered platform cooperatives and Shareable covers them along with the more traditional “sharing economy” companies. Some platform cooperatives in the wild include Open Bazaar (shopping/commerce), LibreTaxi (transportation), Stocksy (stock photos), and your local credit unions. More services can be found at the Platform Cooperativism Directory.

Decentralized Social media

If you’re concerned about how Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies handle your data, Scuttlebutt and Mastodon are two options that are not controlled by any one entity. Their user bases are much smaller at the moment, but it costs nothing to join the party. In The Mesh, a decentralization news site, has more here.

Grassroots democracy

Grassroots democracy is a group of political ideologies based on the idea that decision making should be left as local as possible since the people impacted by policies should be the ones who vote on their implementation. Subsidiarity, which is practiced by the European Union, is one example wherein the EU may only pass laws when an issue comes up that can’t be adequately addressed by separate legislation in its member countries. ROAR Magazine, a great resource for grassroots democracy news, has an excellent piece about how municipalism empowers women and others typically left out of the political process.

What do you think? Is centralization the enemy of democracy and free agency? Leave your thoughts below!