AttemptingSustainability

Here’s the Standing Rock Syllabus: 

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/

Allyship and Solidarity Guidelines of Unsettling America:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/allyship/

Towards Decolonization and Settler Responsibility:

https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing/

Sample Syllabi of the DEcolonization Resource Collection:

https://nationalhistorycenter.org/decolonization-resource-collection-sample-syllabi/

Further Readings:

https://decolonization.wordpress.com/decolonization-readings/

I love solarpunk. I love the idea of being agressively, radically positive. I love the earth. I want to see it thrive. I love that people get together to fight and create positive change for the environment.

But yall are really botching this.

Any “solarpunk” community ive been in online is rife with academia, elitism, and disregard for poor people. Its making the movement stale and sick.

Posting academic articles isnt solarpunk. Partificating over words and “should-we-could-we” isnt solarpunk. Defending shit people because they wrote some half decent academia isnt solarpunk.

Solarpunk is throwing wildflower seeds on your neighbors monoculture lawn. Its reduce/reuse/recycle. Its grafting food tree stems onto the trees in your neighborhood. Its planting food in the median. Its planting food in parks. Its climbing up trees and joining protests to stop pipelines.

We should glorify stuff like this!!! Encourage action!! Solarpunk is about making the world a better place, goddamn what the people say.

The appeal of those green cityscapes in the pretty pictures isn’t just that they’re hi-tech and clean, it’s that they sprout from a society that values compassion, the environment, and human lives more than it values profit. We need to build that society first, and we need to build it from the ground up with what we have available

It’s not ‘polyester’ it’s plastic

It’s not ‘vegan leather’ it’s plastic

Its not ‘faux fur’ it’s plastic

Plastic is a pollutant and causes far more damage to the environment both now and in the future than leather or wool.

For example, if we’re going to end reliance on factory farming, it would really help for more people to learn to garden and grow food. Same for other hands-on skills like cooking, crafts, home repair, tech repair, etc. Even small things like using re-usable water bottles and bags or thrifting/swapping items to cut down on waste would be regular features of a post-capitalist society, so making them more widely practiced now is a great thing. 

It’s easy to free up your cache and delete cookies. The option is immediately viewable in settings instead of hidden away in the alcoves of who knows where.

Unless you favorite a page, it automatically clears it after 7 days, which is awesome if you hate clearing tabs like I do.

They plant trees everywhere.

Ecosia updates you on their progress- not with annoying update notifications, but with a button you can click as you type up your search if you’re curious.

The tree count is shown just beneath the search bar.

It is an app too and only takes up 18.2 MB. That’s the equivalent of nine live pictures on your phone.

You can view your own tree count. Mine’s 2,475 trees. I have had the app for six months. Do you know how much acreage that is? It’s a heckin’ ton of acres.

Here’s @dduane​’s first take on it and the finished product. We’ve made even more photogenic batches since.

Kneading is easy as well; either let your machine do it, or if you don’t want to or don’t have one, get hands-on. It’s like mixing two colours of Plasticine to make a third. Flatten, stretch, fold, half-turn, repeat - it takes about 10 minutes - until the gloopy conglomeration of flour, yeast, salt and water that clings to your hands at the beginning, becomes a compact ball that doesn’t stick to things and feels silky-smooth.

Here’s what before and after look like.

My Mum used to say that if you were feeling out of sorts with someone, it was good to make bread because you could transfer your annoyance into kneading the dough REALLY WELL, and both you and the bread would be better for it.

Then you put it into a bowl, cover it with cling-film and let it rise until it doubles in size, turn it out and “knock it back” (more kneading, until it’s getting back to the size it started, this means there won’t be huge “is something living in here?” holes in the bread), put it into your loaf-tin or whatever - we’ve used a regular oblong tin, a rectangular Pullman tin with a lid, a small glass casserole, an earthenware chicken roaster…

You can even use a clean terracotta flowerpot.

Let the dough rise again until it’s high enough to look like an unbaked but otherwise real loaf, then pop it in the preheated oven. On average we give ours 180°C / 355°F for 45-50 minutes. YM (and oven) MV.

Here’s some of our bread…

Here’s our default bread recipe - it takes about 3-4 hours from flour jar to cutting board depending on climate (warmer is faster) most of which is rise time and baking; hands-on mixing, kneading and knocking-back is about 20 minutes, tops, and less if using a mixer.

Here ( or indeed any of the other pics) is the finished product. This one was given an egg-wash to make it look glossy and keep the poppy-seeds in place; mostly we don’t bother with that or the slash down the middle, but all the extras were intentional as a “ready for my close-up” glamour shot.

I think any shop would be happy to have something this good-looking on their shelf. We’re happy to have it on our table.

Even if your first attempts don’t work out quite as well as you hope, you can always make something like this…

Like a microscope and centrifuge made of paper that cost less than a dollar together, and a non-electric sun tracker for solar panels that costs about 1/30 what a commercial sun tracker does

🌿With No Windows:🌿

There are some plants that can tolerate extremely low light, probably because they evolved in jungles and dense forests. Try out a pothos or a spider plant as beginner house plants. They key is following a watering schedule for each plant.

If you can get one, a growing light will allow you to grow some vegetables or herbs. Growing lights are expensive, but the rest of the settup can be pretty dang cheap. A 5 gallon bucket and some PVC pipe or pieces of wood screwed together to hang the light off of should do it to get started.

Also don’t forget to make sure YOU have enough light to thrive. I recommend having at least two light sources, one of them with a daylight bulb, and another with a warmer toned bulb. Some fairy lights too can make an entire room feel much better to be in, even if they’re from the dollar store.

🌿With One Window:🌿

Growing some food just got much easier! Make sure you’re using that window for edible plants. Even if your window doesn’t get much direct sunlight, that’s okay! Your plants will just grow a little slower than they might in a sunnier window, but that’s okay!

Get lots of house plants. Having some natural light in your room opens a lot of options about what can survive there. Have fun experimenting!

🌿With Two or More Windows:🌿

Sometimes the best window for growing what you want to use in the kitchen isn’t the kitchen window. It’s worth it to go to the other room for your ingredients because they’ll grow much better.

Here are 5 ways I came up with to begin reaching for a solarpunk lifestyle while living in an apartment-style living space where you may not have a yard or permission to make changes to the property. Help me out by adding on more ideas!

1. Plants! I’m talking plants that clean the air such as peace lilies as well as growing your own herbs and/or veggies. If you have a window, even a tiny one without a sill, you can easily grow a simple herb garden.

2. Recycle everything! It’s not just your plastics, but make sure your toilet paper rolls are going to recycling, your boxes, your paper waste. Take the extra effort to find a recycling plant near you if one isn’t provided by your living accommodations.

3. Reduce your waste! Solarpunk is all about sustainability, and plastic water bottles are not sustainable. Begin to accumulate multi-use items such as washcloths rather than paper towels, a reusable water bottle, cloth grocery bags, etc.

4. Solar power! Maybe you aren’t able to use solar power for all your electrics, but there are great desk lights, phone chargers, and other great devices you can begin accumulating.

Nor are we gonna hit some magical point where using clean energy and reducing waste are suddenly the cheapest or most profitable option and so all the world’s big companies fall over each other to switch over. That has never been the case and never will be - the “free market” isn’t going to save us.