is_solarpunk()

Solarpunk is at its core about promoting the idea that a anti-hierarchical, post-capitalist, post-scarcity world is possible, instead of giving into the lie perpetuated by capitalism that it is not and that capitalism is the best we could ever have.

If anything the general issue with Solarpunk fiction right now is that too much of it is too urban, which is tied to the issue that... we need rural areas for food. Not all food can be cultivated in food forests and vertical farms. We need still rural areas and grain fields.

See, every time you harvest something, you take the nutrients in that item away from the soil, and they go somewhere else. When I put a banana peel in my compost bin, I think (a little gleefully) about how I've just added an exotic, different profile of nutrients to my own property--but I also think about that distant banana plantation that lost tons of nutrients per year to US grocery stores, and I wonder what they replaced those nutrients with.

The farmer across my field grows corn, which gets harvested for feed. Corn is a nitrogen-hungry crop. Every year, that corn sucks up nutrients, which get harvested and shipped away. The farmer, being a conventional farmer, mostly replaces those with a conventional fertilizer. Nitrogen is often applied to fields in the form of ammonia fertilizer, which is made via a process that binds nitrogen in the air with hydrogen from natural gas. This feels like a vast resource, but of course we know it's not inexhaustible and not without cost.

Ideally, said farmer does soil tests and applies a carefully considered amount of ammonia. It is taken up by the growing plants and relatively little is lost. Possibly (often), though, some of the ammonia is leached out via rain and ends up in waterways, where it causes plant overgrowth and algal blooms, which harm the waterways in several ways, and turn those nutrients from a resource into a contaminant.

Meanwhile, the corn is also uptaking a variety of other nutrients from the soil which the commercial fertilizer is NOT replacing. Year by year, those nutrients get shipped off to distant feedlots and depleted in the soil. Eventually, those nutrients are gone from my neighbor's field and, quite possibly, languishing in a manure lagoon somewhere in, say, Indiana, where one can only hope it's properly treated and made into compost. But, you know. Not necessarily.

When I buy compost at the store, it's usually based in either cow manure or "forest products". Hopefully, depending on brand, those forest products MIGHT be collected municipal yard waste. Which is pretty good. Those suburbanites don't want their leaves, I do, win/win.

Except that because those suburbanites raked their yard waste, they now need at some point to fertilize their trees, shrubs, and turf grass. Meanwhile, they've eliminated habitat for the many insects that use leaf litter to either overwinter or reproduce. They may not be counting the costs, but the costs don't stop existing.

The ebb and flow of nutrients is something that, in the current system, goes utterly unregarded by most of the people taking part in the process. Even gardeners bring nutrients onto their soils mostly without thinking about the places those nutrients came from. I think in a sustainable world, that needs to change.

not to mention even grasses differ widely in their nutrient content and presumably, taste different to grass eaters

one of my agriculture professors is an expert in cattle digestion and he said something one time about mother cows teaching calves how to graze...like the calf being able to learn from the mother how to graze has impacts on their eating habits and thus their health. I'll have to ask him about it sometime...

Isn't a cow a decent substitute for a bison? well, no, not at all. bison and cattle are different species and have very different grazing habits. and yes we could try grazing with goats for ecosystem restoration but keep in mind that goats: are low browsers rather than grazers, are not heavy and don't churn up the ground as much, and have dry, compact manure.

Farmer family friend says that goats can get bloat if they eat food with too high a moisture content, this makes me worry about using goats to control kudzu because kudzu seems to have a lot of moisture in it.

likewise sheep and horses are going to do different things entirely to the plant community

so maybe ideally you would want to have a patchwork quilt of Horse, Goat, Sheep, Cow pastures because each one will have a different plant community. assuming you can prevent disease transmission...

I have concluded before that the ideal mowing pattern for a grassland restoration, if grazing animals or fire is not available, would be to just arbitrarily meander about the field until you've cut about 2/3 of the surface area, then next time arbitrarily meander about the field again, until it's all a bunch of random strips and patches that were mowed different amounts of time ago

Even when managing a "natural" prairie you still mow in straight orderly lines...and mow until all surface area is treated uniformly...why?

Since, you know, herbivores don't generally arrive in one day out of the year, eat everything down to a uniform height, and disappear for the rest of the year (all without pooping at all)

I would like to interest you all once again in this article, which makes a compelling argument that the "natural enemy" of kudzu in its natural habitat is...humans.

Kudzu has been grown intentionally as a crop and extensively used in its native range for at least 6,000 years.

And then they also complain about how there are SOOOOO many leaves and also SOOOOO many sweetgum balls and SOOOOO many fallen branches and twigs.

And I'm like...hey guys...there is a very easy solution to this problem here. Why can you not see it?

Joan Becker (b.1948)

Lichen hairpin made of broken glass found around my city, enamel, copper, and nickel silver :)

I would never dismiss someone’s phobia. I know what kind of hell on earth that shit is. And I don’t mock people for being scared of wasps or bees because some people have allergies that can kill them and it’s kinda dumb to be rude to someone who is afraid of something that might kill them. But it’s done people such a disservice that culture tells people it’s reasonable to be afraid of all bugs and that most bugs will hurt you or your house or your pets.

I see so many comments and tags on posts about nature saying things like “I would love to spend time outside but I can’t handle being around bugs” as if it’s normal! If you can’t sit on grass or go on a hike because of your fear of bugs, that’s like…clinically significant highly disabling stuff. It’s locking you away from so many experiences.

Fears like this often get reinforced by witnessing other people’s responses to a stimulus. We are social creatures and if you watch the people around you show disgust and fear in response to bugs, you will learn to respond that way too. If you hear on the internet and TV and elsewhere that most bugs are dangerous and want to hurt you or will give you diseases, it will be reinforced even more.

The fact is, bugs are just guys. We depend on them for almost every part of our lives. Our planet is teeming with so many wondrous life forms, and many of them are insects. They come in every color and every form of iridescence, they glow and sparkle and they are fuzzy and striped and spotted. They are not “gross” or dirty.

Insects worldwide are now dropping in number, and it could mean disaster for us and every life form on earth. Most flowering plants (80% or so) have a symbiotic partnership with insects where they are dependent on insect pollination to fertilize their flowers. Wasps, bees, flies, butterflies, and even ants and beetles are all important pollinators, and each plant’s flowers are designed to be pollinated by a different group of insects. Without these insects, the majority of flowering plant species would not be able to exist. They would go extinct. That includes most of the plants we eat. No wasps, bees, flies and other pollinators= no apples, no berries, no peaches, no plums, no anything. That’s a simplified summary but it expresses just how important they are.

A big reason for it is the use of insecticides that are highly toxic to a wide variety of non-target insects. For instance, carbaryl, typically known as Sevin in the US, was for a long time sold in every garden center in a powdery dust form, to put on garden plants that had holes in their leaves.

Carbaryl dust is incredibly toxic to bees and can be picked up by them in the same way as pollen, and in that way it can be carried back to the hive and kill the whole hive.

Many of these insecticides are also highly dangerous to humans, and using them in and around your home exposes you to poisonous and/or potentially cancer-causing substances. The residues of these insecticides linger basically forever inside homes. There have been studies done that found insecticides that have been banned for a long time still lingering in people’s carpets and floors.

So it’s not good that so many people are terrified of insects. And the best antidote is to learn. Learn about bugs and their diversity and unique beauty and intelligence. If videos are no good, look at books with pictures; if you don’t want to look at pictures, books without pictures or podcasts might help. Maybe start with bugs that seem less frightening and move on to learning about others from there.

Learn about their ways and behaviors and how they are similar to animals you are more familiar with, such as birds or cats. Learn the ways in which they are similar to you—you will find that you share many important qualities, like “enjoy fruit” and “would defend friends and family.” Join bug identification groups online. Learn from people who keep bugs as pets.

Another illustration for the Solarpunk Prompts podcast :] Probably one of my most detailed drawings...ever. Turned out quite nice

this got me scampering off on a tangent about desertification, which led me to a lot of papers talking about how there is no coherent definition of what desertification even is ("What is desertification? We can't even agree and we're the authors of this paper!") and then continuing to talk about how it's important to reverse desertification despite the lack of clarity on whether this is a good idea.

It's really striking how so many papers treat deserts like they aren't even ecosystems in their own right, just land that isn't being as productive as it "should" be.

Then there's this paper which is a quintessential example of "angry scientists who are DONE with your shit" It seems to be machine translated a la Google Translate-esque automation, but it's good and the pictures speak for themselves. basically there was a large scale effort to "reverse deforestation" in the Gobi Desert by planting shrubs, and this was subsidized by policies meant to promote "greening" for broad scale environmental improvement. Here's the summary of how that backfired

According to our survey, personnel who specifically plant trees and engage in afforestation are businessmen, farmers, or others, with most of them being businessmen from abroad, and only a few being local people. All the personnel are more concerned about the subsidies than greening and planting trees itself. According to the policy, they will receive majority of the subsidy if the planted trees live for three years, irrespective of whether the trees survive after that. Therefore, to guarantee the survival of the planted trees for three years, they even use water tankers to carry water to the trees from a great distance. However, after three years, the people stop watering the trees planted in the Gobi region, thereby leading to the death of trees after a few years as they cannot survive only on natural precipitation and groundwater. In pursuit of maximum profits, these businessmen will pursue larger areas for planting trees, which will cause further damage to the ecological environment in the Gobi region

What else is there to say

furthermore, the planting disturbed the natural soil layers and disrupted the "black vegetation" (I'm guessing this is translated from a term that refers to the gravel layer in combination with the biocrusts holding it in place- I want to learn more about biocrusts they're so cool) which caused dust and sand underneath to become airborne.

I found many more papers that are disappointingly uncritical of the afforestation in deserts thing even though they try to take an ecological outlook, like this one, which acknowledges it takes extensive inputs from other places to maintain the trees (if you have to add 5% wood chips to the sand to improve it, wouldn't that necessity significantly offset the increase in tree biomass and the benefit in increase productivity on site, since the wood chips come from trees???) and that past efforts to plant forests on desert lands have gone poorly.

From multiple papers I'm starting to piece together why there has been so much data tentatively suggesting success in desert afforestation even though it seems to not do much good in the long term: the young trees can sometimes draw sufficient water from underground when they're little, but actually the region is fundamentally incapable of supporting the water requirements of a more mature tree. So the trees grow roots down into the deep soil layers, suck the deep soil layers dry, and die, leaving the land drier than it was to begin with.

Well, that's unfair, many are learning, but there is so much unknown! My plant sciences textbook mentioned that 40% of all carbon emissions from fossil fuels just...disappear into the ecosystems, and what's more, we don't fully know where they're going.

Everyone knows that carbon goes in the trees. We're pretty sure some of it goes in the ocean. Wetlands producing peat also are taking up a lot of the carbon. Most of it is in the living tissue of organisms and will get released again when they die, but some of it goes into more permanent storage. I wonder how we are calculating the global carbon cycle, because it seems like all the time I hear about a new way of carbon storage in an ecosystem that was previously considered negligible.

For example: Deserts! This paper, very recent so I don't know how reliable it is, says that desert soils contain high amounts of inorganic carbon, and that desert plants help its formation.

A Better World is Possible.

Solarpunk City for Andrewism's Solarpunk Collaboration. This is my dream for South Africa. A post-capitalist society that exists at peace with the natural world.

Akhavan House/ Kashan/ Iran

FINALLY, IT TOOK FOREVER TO FINISH THIS!!  This piece was based off of the Hakka village, Lai Chi Wo, located in Hong Kong and is known for its sustainability and protection of its mangrove forests.

The method is swiss darning :) here's my zine if you wanna learn how to do it.

Raised intersections! These are intersections where the road gently rises to the level of the sidewalk, acting as slight speed bumps for cars and eliminating the need for going up and down ramps with mobility aids or carts

Level train platforms and user operated bus ramps! Ramps operated by external buttons and level platforms make it so that wheelchair and walker users don’t need to speak to a driver to access transit

Moped cars/micro cars! Miniature cars often used by people who can’t use bikes. Many of them are so small that they fit in bike lanes

Frequent bench placement! A walkable street is one with places to rest.

Air conditioned bus stops! In places where it often gets super hot frequent bus stop placement combined with air conditioning can make transit safer and more accessible to more people

Cargo bikes! Who needs a car when you can haul your stuff and/or dogs around in a bike?

Sunflowers - Suzuki Kiitsu

Japanese, 1796-1858

Hey y'all! Here's something for Solarpunk Aesthetic Week!

Solarpunk's aesthetics have its roots in the art nouveau movement, but if you look at pieces of art nouveau artwork, well, you see a whole lot of skinny white people. Not that there's anything wrong with being either skinny or white! I'm both! It's just, we need some more diversity in the landscape, eh?

So take a summery, art nouveau-inspired piece of a character inspired by my own girlfriend :)

Yes, I know it's rather messy! But honestly, I think that's okay. Art doesn't need to be perfect, and I like that! What matters is that you have fun and feel content.

So here's a reminder to any other artists and writers out there stressing about your work, for Solarpunk Aesthetic Week or anything else- Relax. Creativity is about you and about what you love and what you enjoy. If you're not enjoying it anymore, post and move on.