Solarpunk ideas Blog

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. 🧺🍅

humans irl: *pack bond with strangers*

*pack bond with large carnivores*

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

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🦗

"Starting Small" - Fire Alpaca, XP Pen Tablet

Localized Solarpunk, from all over the world.

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

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.

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.

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

The World Of Becca Blake

How good to rise in sunlight,

in the prodigal smell of biscuits -

eggs and sausage on the grill.

The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open

to a blank page.

— Rita Dove, Dawn Revisited

Envision Our Energizing-Vibrant Renewable Future Now