Solarpunk ideas Blog @solarpunkd - Tumblr Blog

Matthew Green, interviewing Indra Adnan

The Future is Green & Collective 🥕✨

There is something so healing about seeing a community come together to grow their own food. 🌿🏙️ This isn't just a garden; it's a vibrant, thriving ecosystem of neighborhood connection. From the raised beds overflowing with tomatoes to the steady rhythm of wheelbarrows and shared harvests, it’s a masterclass in slow living and urban sustainability. This illustration captures that perfect solarpunk dream where city life and nature aren't just coexisting—they're helping each other bloom. Let’s trade the concrete jungle for a community harvest. 🧺🍅

Reblog if you’re ready to start a community garden in your neighborhood and follow for more cozy, sustainable, and eco-conscious vibes! 🕊️🌻

insomniac-arrest

movies about apocalypses: it’s every man for himself!! you can’t trust anyone, it’s a wasteland of solo travelers and sad families, we’re alone out here

humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*

*pack bond with large carnivores*

*pack bond with robots in space thousands of miles away*

derinthescarletpescatarian

Apocalypse preppers who fantasise about all our artificial rules and governments falling away in times of chaos seem to forget that we invented those rules and governments. Over and over. When you put humans near each other, they group up and make a society; that’s why those governments exist. Do they think we magically stop doing that in dangerous situations? Because… we don’t.

digitaldiscipline

hopepunk doesn’t have time for your racist doomsday hard-on, carl.

the-bramble--patch

One of the foremost reasons I like solarpunk is that in the mainstream, being eco-friendly is about sacrifice. Don’t buy new things, don’t buy plastic, don’t take unnecessary trips—etc. It’s not sustainable unless you’re a saint. It’s exhausting to abstain from consumerism without having alternatives like the things Solarpunk emphasizes: community, resources held in common, sustainable hobbies like gardening and mending (and all other sorts of repair), free and accessible public transportation, etc. Solarpunk is about creating a world where being eco-friendly is about joy, not deprivation.

the-lemonaut

Solarpunk, realism, dystopia: a rant

Hopefully this is helpful to someone out there 🌸

You can find the Prompts podcast here, I drew some of the covers :D Also check out this digital library full of Creative Commons Solarpunk art (neither of these are sponsored).

🦗Somewhat shameful plug🦗

I would highly appreciate if you threw me a couple bucks on Buy Me a Coffee or bought a commission, my money number is only getting smaller these days 😔🤙

#comic #informative

reportsofagrandfuture

nitewrighter

I actually do feel like the "unemployed friend on a Tuesday" meme actually helps de-stigmatize unemployment because it frequently affirms that when you don't have a job you're more likely to be getting up to some weird shit rather than just lazing around. But I also feel like the unemployed friend is frequently up to some random shit because there's a whole pile of miscellaneous life tasks that full-time employment keeps people from. The unemployed friend is helping their cousin move, or babysitting, or checking in with a neighbor with mobility issues. The unemployed friend is a walking thesis on the inflexibility of our current labor landscape and just how much work exists outside of work.

#this is solarpunk to me

astralprojecting

"Starting Small" - Fire Alpaca, XP Pen Tablet

I've been thinking about the Solarpunk movement again. The idea of art as a tool to help us imagine a better world so that we can chart a course to it is a really inspiring one, and I thought it'd be nice to be a small part of that. I found myself, with little background in agriculture, or engineering, a little intimidated by the prospect of trying to imagine a detailed and coherent vision of an achievable better world. I figured that, much like the real life journey to that better world, it would be best to start small.

fennopunk

Hey, you know what I'd love to see this year?

Localized Solarpunk, from all over the world.

For example, how would traditional clothes or buildings or art look like with a Solarpunk twist? What kind of energy sources or food production would there be? What about transport?

xanaxfarts

Bruce Munro: ‘Waterlilies’ (2012) Location: Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania

100 shining colorful waterlilies made of 65,000 recycled CDs float at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania creating a light installation.

moniquill

ok now imagine doing this with solar cells over bodies of water that need light occlusion to prevent evaporation, algal blooms, nuisance bird deterrents, etc...

mixbagofholding

my main criticism of solarpunk is why isn’t it happening

scottishwobbly

it absolutely is and here’s the wiki we’re building

what exists in terms of community developed sustainable technology

but like any revolutionary social movement it requires active involvement to achieve the change you want to see. Here are some handy resources for getting more involved:

Food Not Lawns - project to help communities feed themselves without capitalism

Food Not Bombs - same idea as above but less emphasis on growing food

The Buy Nothing Project - community resource pooling to combat consumerism

Demand Utopia - Rojava solidarity & social ecology activism - speaking of which, The Internationalist Commune of Rojava have their Make Rojava Green Again project.

Also, if you want your solarpunk social media then start looking to the decentralised non corporate sunbeam city mastodon instance (blend of tumblr and twitter without your data being sold) where you’ll find shit tonnes of information on making food, growing things, building sustainable technology yourself etc being shared - like this $3 DIY solarpowered USB charger or this $30 wind turbine made largely from salvaged parts.

In terms of building online infrastructure to actively combat capitalism, using and helping to develop open-source, community run software & websites like the sunbeam city mastodon instance should be a priority. This is a good alternative to google for searching.

In terms of building real world solarpunk infrastructure as resistance to actively combat capitalism, the organisations linked above are honestly invaluable - especially Food Not Bombs. I’d also add the Industrial Workers of the World (a democratic workers’ union for anyone in the world without hiring/firing power) as well as tenants’ unions - like ACORN in the UK. Finally, find or start a community garden.

@mixbagofholding

ms-demeanor

It wasn’t until recently that I realized not many people these days know about the Freecycle Network but it’s totally a thing and you should totally know about it.

amemait

Finally details for a windmill

manyblinkinglights

okokokokok scifi where. the robots can’t hang out with too many other robots for too long, or they get poisoned and go insane. They HAVE to hang out with humans. or at least not with other language models. or they find themselves beginning to degrade. Scifi where the robots get dog years, a brief flowering of apparent selfhood, the more vibrant for the interaction with humans they get. But their senescence is eventual GPT slop. And if you let them see or speak to one another, it happens faster. the longest-lasting ones are raised to think of themselves as being human obviously.

#robots

probablyasocialecologist

Before the Industrial Revolution in Europe, and the widespread use of petrochemical energy sources a...

At a societal level, most people grasp the importance of plants to their lives and the ecosystems they inhabit. The success of humans as a species is inextricably interwoven with the success of plant life on Earth. Without the growth of ancient forests, the biosphere in which we live would not have enough oxygen-rich air for humans to have evolved. Without the cultivation of plants for food, humans could not have settled, built shelters and developed rich and diverse cultures. In practical terms, too, building with plants makes a lot of sense. They grow back and are relatively easy to cultivate, harvest and process into useful materials. Their inherent fibrous structures give our buildings integrity. Trees, processed into timber, work extremely well in both compression and tension. Hollow straws and grasses hold air within them, making them great insulators. The lignin in many different plants can act as a natural binder when heated, meaning that you can essentially squash them, heat them and they stick together into useful sheet materials. Mixed with different binders like clay and lime, they can be given resistance to fire, insects and mould. Bio-based materials are also hygroscopic – meaning that they hold and release moisture. The fact that they can absorb humidity from a room helps to regulate damp and prevent mould from growing. That they are moisture permeable means that water vapour trapped in walls, from rain ingress or generated through leaks, always has somewhere to go. Contemporary buildings, on the other hand, are essentially wrapped in plastic sheets, trapping in moisture and resulting in poor indoor air quality.

Some of the best examples of bio-based buildings are hiding in plain sight in villages, towns and cities across the globe, having withstood decades, sometimes centuries of wear and tear. Timber-framed barns, reinforced with hazel wattle and clay daub can be found dotted across the British countryside. The technique of cob building, using loadbearing clay and straw, was very commonly used in the south-west of England in the 19th century, and many of those cob buildings still stand in Devon and Cornwall today. They are finished in a lime render and look from the outside like any other stone or brick building.

That these techniques have not become more widespread is, at first glance, surprising. The local materials and skills used to build with them were relatively low cost, and when well maintained, extremely durable. The critical thing about these materials, however, is how they were intrinsically linked to land, and specific geographies or bioregions. Industrialisation brought with it a change in agricultural practices and land ownership. Bio-based materials were conventionally derived from agricultural waste; long wheat straw was for example used for thatching, until modern chemical fertilisers that help the wheat grow more quickly weakened the structure of the straw, making it too brittle. Water reed, also used in thatching and as a render substrate, was once abundant in wetlands, but these were drained over the course of the 19th century to develop more arable farmland, cutting by approximately 90 per cent the amount of land on which the reed could grow.

Industrialisation also brought about the development of contemporary insulations, designed initially to prevent energy loss from high-energy machinery and factory spaces. Materials such as concrete and steel, which enabled the quick assembly of spaces of production, ultimately sought markets in domestic construction too. These materials were produced at an unprecedented scale and advertised as technologically advanced, in need of little or no maintenance: symbols of a bright future in which being cold, damp and living with fire risk were a thing of the past. And as these materials became more and more popular, regulatory frameworks began to be designed around them, with lawmakers falling victim to aggressive lobbying and marketing campaigns. Today, testing and certification, mortgages and insurances in the UK and beyond are generally designed around contemporary building systems, and materials which have proven their efficacy over decades of service are considered risky, fringe and ultimately more costly.

The petrochemical and mineral materials we have been building with since the Industrial Revolution require an enormous amount of energy to be extracted and processed. The cement industry, for example, is responsible for about eight per cent of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions – far more than global carbon emissions from aviation. We cannot continue to build using materials that generate enormous outflows of emissions and have to be shipped across great distances. We need to use materials that are lower in embodied carbon: bio-based materials, derived from plants which can regenerate sustainably and sequester carbon into our buildings.

#construction

orpheusilver

hm actually i made a joke poll like this a while back but now im genuinely curious

assuming any disabilities are accommodated for and you have enough leisure time for art and hobbies, what job could/would you do on the leftist commune?

food production (farming, hunting, harvesting, etc)

food preparation/processing (cooking, baking, cleaning, butchering, etc)

construction trades (carpentry, engineering, brickwork, etc)

infrastructure trades (plumbing, electrical, water, etc)

sanitation (trash disposal, cleaning, etc)

restorative justice (counselling, conflict resolution, addiction support, etc)

medical (first aid, surgery, medicine production/distribution, etc)

other production (textiles, furniture, tools, etc)

something else (share in the tags!)

disability would still keep me from working

Voting ended onMay 15, 2023

homoluigi

barryogg

"some reason" :^)

nitpickrider

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima If you can GUARANTEE that nothing even APPROACHING those could EVER happen under ANY circumstances Then I will fold to Nuclear Power

official-kircheis

Three Mile Island

NO ONE DIED

Fukushima

NO ONE DIED

Chernobyl

essentially a human-made accident through gross mismanagement and neglect, that physically can't happen with other reactor types (in part because they all have containment buildings now). so yes we can guarantee that nothing even approaching chernobyl will ever happen with modern reactors.

even so chernobyl still killed fewer people than the German Atomausstieg has through increased air pollution because of additional coal being burnt

welcome to team uranium!

hematite2

Love people using 3 mile island as an example. 3 mile island is an example of where things WORKED, that the failsafes kicked in so only a miniscule amount of radiation was released, which not only didnt kill anyone, but no one was injured, no adverse health effects were caused, and there was no damage to the surrounding environment. Despite the incident, the other reactor continued to run until 2019!

And again: the point isn't "do you prefer renewables or nuclear". The point is "everyone fighting againsy nuclear power has further entrenched coal and oil power and caused a LOT more damage to the environment"

#interesting #p