your friendly solarpunk possum

BUT

We now have a date for the 7th Solarpunk Aesthetic Week! It's 27th of July to 2th of August, so... Next week.

Feel free to share anything you do to the tag #solarpunk aesthetic week, or submit it to the blog!

As a recap: What is Solarpunk Aesthetic Week? It's what happens when Fenno didn't take their ADHD meds and Solarpunk Aesthetic Week (SAesW) is a biannual week-long celebration of the aesthetics around the Solarpunk genre and movement! As Solarpunks, we look forward to a hopeful future, and this event is meant for all of us to take part in visualizing that future and working towards creating it step by step! So let’s get creative, get our hands dirty, and tell our stories together!

I've not stepped in the berry garden for 5 days.

Like, if 30% of people stopped working entirely, and the other people just did half the amount of work they do now, everyone would still be fed, dressed, housed, nursed etc. We would be fine.

So far I've noticed spiders really like making webs between them, and the birds like standing on them to hunt bugs in the garden. They're not the sturdiest on their own but once they're tied together & have plants on those ties they stand pretty firm

And an immediate benefit I was hoping for has paid off: the ability to easily drape a shade cloth over the beds for me and (if I can find some actually meant for plants) the beds on these 90F+ days

When this happens, it becomes increasingly clear that the only real purpose of Doomerism is to allow the person espousing it to let themselves off the hook for doing anything to help improve the world around them.

It's just laziness masquerading as enlightenment. If there's no hope, then you can feel morally validated and justified in fucking off and not doing anything.

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

For context, my mom is the one who taught me to forage, and it was and is just part of life. She regularly added foraged foods to our everyday meals. I knew how to identify huckleberry before I learned the alphabet. Foraging was just another part of feeding ourselves, along with gardening, raising chickens, and going to the store. And the firmest rule was that you didn't eat a plant unless you were willing to bet your life on it being what you thought it was.

So to watch my coworker see a berry, say 'strawberry!' and then pick it and have it three quarters of the way to his mouth before I could point out that it was actually an unripe blackberry...

Well, it was a striking moment. Because while that particular mix up would not actually hurt you, the lack of paying attention it takes to mistake an unripe blackberry for a strawberry and the lack of caution it takes to put a plant that you've hardly looked at into your mouth- no wonder some people think bittersweet nightshade is a look alike to red huckleberry!

And it explains a lot about how secretive most people are about their foraging spots. If you don't care enough about your own health and well-being to actually look at the plant you're eating, how could I trust you to care for the health and well-being of the plants you want to forage and the ecosystems you want to forage from? I want my foraging spots to be better off for my interactions with them. I want to be able to go back to the same spots year after year and decade after decade and see the native plants thriving, the invasive species losing ground, and the biodiversity increasing.

Last year I had the honor to draw a banner for Aron Schaub's personal website!

It it inspired by hydroponic systems and the general solarpunk vibe. 🌞🌱🌻

I don't want a printing subscription, or a typing subscription. Hell, I'll go find an old typewriter before I buy into that sell. I'll even learn to make ink and paper.

I don't want to "subscribe and save" to something. I don't want everything to automatically renew. I most certainly do not want to give an AI assistant access to ANYTHING of mine (including my thoughts, questions, or ideas), but especially not to my bank account.

I don't want glasses that tell me what things are, I'd rather ask someone who knows. I don't want a robot to summarize the key points of my group chat, I want to talk to my friends and family for myself.

I want picnics in the park, phones put away in bags and not thought about unless they're actually needed. I want water fights in summer, not water shortages to feed the machine. I want a colorful house, not a smart one. I want care, not convenience.

If one day Microsoft locks me out of my laptop because I refuse to pay for a subscription, I'll go to the library and check out a few books to figure out how to reprogram it. I'll learn fucking Linux, if I have to. Hell, I'm considering learning it now, with the way the world's going.

I'm obsessed with gardening systems that utilize rainwater without the use of barrels or cisterns. My ultimate fav is using bioswales to catch and filter stormwater on the street.

Fun addition: Dams that utilize trees to catch dirt/ stop erosion, and prevent disaster that can come from broken dams.

SUSTAINABLE URBAN DRAINAGE! SUDS!

We need more of them, in the right places!

Also, using these to reduce stormwater loads in storm events, particularly in places with combined stormwater and sewage systems, could/would be helpful at reducing river discharges of raw sewage. (If climate change is factored in at system level cos more rain in less time needs to be accouted for at rhe large scale designs...)

It's not just for women. It's literally just a different form of labor. It's important.

It's mending not only your own clothes, but the clothes of your friends, family, and community members who do not have the ability to mend themselves. It's knitting or crocheting practical items like gloves, hats, socks, and scarves and gifting them to those who need them directly or donating them to a local org who gets them out into the community. It's making blankets out of old tshirts and wash rags out of the scraps. It's offering to watch your friend's kid for an hour or two so they can get some rest. If you have a living situation where you have access to land it's growing a garden and sharing the crop. It's making a hotdish for a friend or neighbor when they're not doing well. It's going over and doing dishes for someone who is struggling.