Solarpunk Action Week 2020 -- Round 2!
Hey there, space cadets! Last month’s Solarpunk Action Week took off like a barn fire and exceeded Solarpunk Action Week 2019 by easily a factor of 10, with tons of people getting food planted, learning new skills, building things, reducing waste, spreading information, taking direct action, and getting their neighborhoods and workplaces organized. So we’ll be doing a followup to coincide with springtime in parts of the southern hemisphere! Mark those calendars for September 20th-26th!
Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and wild, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world — but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not warnings. Solutions to live comfortably without fossil fuels, to equitably manage scarcity and share abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share. At once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, and an achievable lifestyle.”
And what is Solarpunk Action Week?
Solarpunk Action Week is a week dedicated to taking radical environmentalist and anticapitalist action to make the world a better place. Previous Action Weeks have seen people starting gardens, learning new skills, making and repairing things, reducing waste, spreading information, getting involved in community organizing.
All you have to do participate is begin or continue with an environmentalist, anticapitalist project and talk about it in the #SolarpunkActionWeek tag; it’ll get a lot of signal boosts to connect with other people around the world doing the same.
The previous Solarpunk Action Week saw a lot of individual actions, and those were incredible to witness, but we’re at our most powerful when we come together, so your homework for the next 5 months between now and the end of September is: Get organized! If we were able to do so much as individuals back in March, just imagine what you could get done rolling into Solarpunk Action Week with a crew ready to go.
If you’re new to organizing, here are some great places to get started:
The Industrial Workers of the World (which has that good good Environmental Unionist Caucus)
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
Can’t find anything in your area? Start something yourself!
Got 1 or 2 friends? You can start an affinity group
Guide to small-town organizing
7 steps to starting a Food Not Bombs group
Wet’suwet’en supporter toolkit
And I’m sure people will link to all sorts of other great projects and resources in the rebagels, so keep an eye on the notes!
So many things! You can check out the #SolarpunkActionWeek tag to see what others have done in the past for inspiration. The two dinguses organizing these events have got resource tags full of just so many things you might could do and how to get started on them, here and here respectively. And here are some other fun ideas:
Learn how to become a street medic
Learn how to repair clothes
Regrow food plants from kitchen scraps
Recycle scrap fabric into yarn
20 plants to grow indoors
Make your apartment more energy efficient
Build a beautiful and functional vertical garden out of your literal garbage
Other gardening resources
How to make or repair anything
How to organize your community and workplace
Get out there and invent the future, space cadets, because we have a world to win. I know y’all are gonna make me proud; y’all always do.
If you want to keep up with/support the mods between Action Weeks, here’s our info:
Pops: Mastodon, tumblr (resources tag), ko-fi
Natalie: Mastodon, tumblr (resources tag), cashapp $NatalieIronside
